will there be money in the future?

[preyer]

well? if not actual money, electronic transfers? what would the economy be more based on, goods or services? what would be the monetary standard between intergalactic people? will the people of the world carry around little cash cards that interface with cash-transfer machines? how would the ability to track transfers in a cashless society affect the crime rate?

are there any practical benefits for the average joe to keep cold hard cash? will joe be just as happy to have a bar code tattooed on his arm? (i ask these things because i think there may be potential stories in them, or at least being able to add detail to our fictional worlds :).)

[alanna]

oh i hope not. i don't like the way society is so centered around money. i would rather be that crackpot in the woods who grows her own food and is totally self-sufficient who comes in to town every year to get her rickety blue pickup a tuneup which she barters for with homemade crafts. that could be just me though.

honestly- i think everything will be electronic. I'm seeing fast lane passes at the grocery store sort of thing. i'm not liking it. i'm imagining what bank robbery would be like- "oh i hijacked the codes of the CEO of the company into the main database and downloaded a million dollars." i'm imagining people printing money from their home comp. like movie tickets. and if you go REALLY far into the future, i'm guessing retinal scans for credit card purchases. this is contradictory. hope it gives you some ideas though!

[Vomaxx]

Unless the future is a post-nuclear war scenario in which mankind has reverted to barter, there will surely be a medium of exchange. It's just possible that it will all be kept track of electronically and physical money will vanish, I would guess. We never actually see most of our money today.

[katiemac]

You know, I've wondered this myself. I wouldn't be surprised if we turn entirely electronic when it comes to funds. Once everyone becomes credit accessible, then there's no need for cash.

My part-time job in high school was a place couldn't accept credit cards. You should have seen some of these people's reactions. Rage is putting it nicely.

[SeanDSchaffer]

You know? It's funny: I used to hear preachers who specialized in Prophecy always bring that up. They'd say money would no longer be needed because of the electronics we have now.

I can see stuff like that happening in the future of our world; not immediately because there's still so much unreliability in our electronic devices and electrical systems. But I see it as a real possibility. I mean I remember a time when a credit card purchase at the local Sears was slow, but now it can be faster and more efficient than paying with cash.

I think it's a real possibility, having a cashless society sometime in the future.

:idea:

[preyer]

i remember one of my first jobs. it was in a bookstore and we did credit card purchases with the old sliding thing and carbon paper. we had little books we had to look the card numbers up in to verify they card's authenticity. this was long before our drivers licenses had magnetic strips and holographic imaging.

isn't a cashless society a sign of the apocolypse?

i think we'll see a lot more fingerprinting before we see retina scans. i just feel there may be an epidemic of eye problems with constant eye scans for buying every little item. i'd hate to go blind because i bought a milky way, lol. you're right, though, there won't probably be many actual hold-ups. still, if you're paranoid like me, you hardly trust in any electronic security measure indefinately. i've actually seen firsthand what happens when someone steals your identity: my father-in-law had his stolen by his own con-artist cousin. we called the FBI and they said, get this, 'we don't handle those cases. you have to call the CIA.' ?!?!?!?! so, we called the CIfrigginA and they said they usually don't get involved unless there's more than $200,000 in theft, and my f-n-law was 'only' taken for just over a hundred grand.

this scares me. what if my paltry bank account is wiped clean tomorrow? i'm very much just out of luck. might as well not even bother contacting the authorities, they're utterly worthless. as an aside, i believe one of the next big things will be companies who only do computer detective work. let's face it, you're probably just as likely to catch a husband cheating via his computer as you are following him around for a week. some people you'd have to do that, but most people will leave some kind of electronic trail once electronic transfers overwhelm actual cash transactions.

some security camera systems now have an online feature where you can monitor the activity on your website. so, basically, if i know someone was using a stolen credit card at x-store and an exact time, with the proper credentials i should be able to identify the thief from my chair and a few keystrokes (talking the near-future here). right now it's very common to receive a ticket in the mail along with a photo of you cruising through a red light. funny to note that they'll come after you like you were charles manson for their $88, but for a hundred thousand dollar crime (which, as usual, the victim has to prove before a detective even gives it serious consideration, at least around here), the authorities don't want to touch, especially if the thief is a true criminal in every sense, dangerous and cunning. nope, gotta put the squeeze on the otherwise law-abiding citizen.

oops, sorry, kinda slid into a rant. just irks me and is why i've absolutely no faith in our justice system outside flat-out murder, which is one of the few crimes worthy of their attention. maybe i should have said that guy tried to have sex with my 11 year old niece, *then* they'd be all over him (which would be ironic considering my sister-in-law is doing nothing but subconsciously teaching her daughter how to be a whore like herself. hm, maybe that's a point best left for the 'law' thread, eh?)

what scares me about these types of criminals is that right now no one other than the banks actively pursue any of these small 'thefts,' and then it's usually just to recoup their losses through insurance (that's my understanding, at least). is it going to get any better in the future? even if i could prove someone's guilt, what's the sentence going to be since guns aren't involved? i imagine that once the prisons start filling up with criminals with arms as thick as my wrist, it's going to get more and more lenient. and at some point when all you can use is a computer to function financially, forbidding them to use a computer as punishment would be like saying they could no longer spend money. even now, the amount of information i can pay for for anyone here is amazing, and i'm completely computer ignorant. if you ponder it, it's pretty scary.

but good sci-fi fodder. :)

[MadScientistMatt]

Interesting question! There are two futures I could see where there is no money. One is the typical post-nuclear dystophia where civilization has collapsed. But give the survivors enough time to establish new societies and you'd probably see money start to re-appear somehow. Probably with gold for starters.

Then there's a "The Commies won!" future where Marx's words, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" have been made into reality. The usual way of doing this is a dystophian future with a centrally planned economy where They control everything. Instead of goods going to anyone who could afford them, the distribution system might work somewhat like this:

Dear Citizen Smith,

We at the Ministry of Allocation offer our congratulations on the birth of your new daughter. As a Class Q2 citizen, you are now entitled to ten sets of baby clothing per year. In addition, your family's rations have been increased by ten pounds of Class A food, five pounds of Class B food...

I suppose someone may be able to work out a less totalitarian and disturbing version of this. But the only cases I can see this working would be in small cases, maybe an isolated and self-sufficient commune or a spaceship run by military discipline on a long voyage through uninhabited space.

Any other sort of society is likely to need some sort of money, even if it doesn't necessarily use cash. For a high tech solution to replace cash completely, it would have to be just as easy to use as one person handing another person a twenty. The plain simplicity of cash is its biggest advantage - you don't need expensive equipment to give or receive it, or any complications. Any other device I could see would be more complicated, at least for one partner to the transaction. Methods like fingerprint scans linked to bank accounts are likely to have their uses in the future, but I don't see them becoming the only way to do business.

[DaveKuzminski]

If you haven't tried it lately, try spending a night at a hotel and asking to prepay in cash. They go absolutely crazy because it's unheard of. They're worried that you might use their phone or pay-TV service and still owe them when you check out.

Worse yet, I had to tell one that they couldn't refuse payment in cash because the law states that US currency is good for all debts public and private, at least in the US which was where this occurred.

Yes, I have several credit cards, but I dislike using those. That's why my house is paid for, my car is paid for, and I don't owe any money on credit cards. When I do, I pay it off upon receiving the first statement.

However, even Communist countries have to rely upon currency because it's portable. In fact, almost all countries have discovered that currency is necessary unless they want to go back to bartering which is downright hard to tax. Also, people like the convenience of being able to use the currency they receive in exchange for their products or labor in order to purchase other products or services at a later time and place instead of right then and there. So, I don't think we'll see currency or the idea of it totally disappear. It might form the foundation for a credit system, but I think remnants of it will still remain available. In fact, it makes a good safety net for a credit system in a crisis or major disaster.

[clintl]

Money will probably always be around. The form that it takes will probably change, but the form is nothing more than an agreed-upon representation of value. As long as it is widely accepted, the form is irrelevant. It could be paper, metal, electrons, or (as the Native Americans of California used) seashells.

[SeanDSchaffer]

I posted previously about this, but thought I'd weigh in again if I might -- I have another scenario that I hear people talking about who are into what preyer called 'signs of the apocalypse' and stuff like that.

I just remembered, as you guys were talking about making virtual money (If I may use that term) portable, that some Christian prophecy teachers talk about a microchip small enough to be injected into the palm of a hand or into a forehead, on which all a person's financial information could be stored. Many of these people believe this to be the infamous 'mark of the beast' people have been afraid of for a couple thousand years now.

Now whether I as an individual believe this scenario may come true or no in the future, is quite irrelevant; but much like preyer said in another place, it does 'make good sci-fi fodder.'

:idea:

[TJ-Wizard]

In my opinion, there will always be some regions less civilized, some regions primitive enough to use old-fashioned monetary systems. Even if our civilization keep developing, what isn't certain itself, it's possible that we conquer another planets before the cash-free economy will be everywhere on our one.

And IF we conquer another planets, who the first emigrants will be? Probably those, who would feel unhappy in over-organized society on their home Earth. Who would be fed up with registered money transfers and other limitations of privacy.

So the society they will build may be quite different from what we usually imagine in our visions of future.