What do we know so far about the future of money? Unfortunately, almost none. With this insight, journalist Friedman Brenes begins presenting his book, “The Magic of the Future Money,” which he published. In recent centuries, the monetary system has hardly changed—at least for consumers: a government institution puts into circulation a currency that can be exchanged for goods and used to pay taxes. The fact that much of this is now possible electronically does not change the basic principle.
With the advent of the first cryptocurrency “Bitcoin” in 2009, an entirely new type of money was created that was no longer controlled by a central authority. “Thinking about money and its future is suddenly exciting,” Brenes writes. Bitcoin is one way the payment method of the future could look like – but what other scenarios are there? In order to collect creative ideas, Brenneis launched a competition in 2020: from the 290 entries received, he chose the 30 most interesting short stories, which can now be read in “Magic Future Money” – well worth a read.
From creepy horror stories to coveted utopias
The stories range from a dark dystopia straight out of a Philip K. have to look very realistic scenarios. The cancer cells described by science fiction author Carsten Schmidt, which are transplanted into living bodies so they can perform complex calculations, certainly fall into the former category. Or author Fabian Henry’s vision, born in 1993, in which people are forced to sell their limbs. On the other hand, the stories in which water, as a scarce commodity, suddenly becomes currency seem more realistic, as described by the foreign language teacher Lilias Monroe, or that the form of money known to us is replaced by energy, which can be generated by doing exercises on the treadmill, for example. The last idea came from an author using the pseudonym Juliette S. Francis
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