Does The Future Of Money Lie In P2P?

The media has been all over “crypto-currency” of late. What many amateur investors fail to understand is that the digital currency has a purely speculative value: a peer-to-peer monitored economy which seemingly has few real-world applications – unlike, say, the commodities market, where an investor is buying a quantity of something tangible i.e gold or silver.

So far, one of the best utilities I have come across is the peer-2-peer sharing of processing space. To give an example, if you have some spare storage space on your computer (hard-drive), you can “rent” it out to digital storage/data mining companies. Thus you are effectively renting out space, just like Airbnb! In the latter case, you are renting out physical space (a spare bedroom), whereas in the P2P data mining example, you are allowing a private company to use up your spare processing power. You are “renting” it out to them for a price.

The Money Of The Future, Right Now

For those who are new to this, “digital currency” or cryptocurrency is an encrypted string of data, which has a monetary value derived from its use as a medium of exchange and as a store of value. This is why you will often read or hear the word “token” used to describe the denominations of crypto-currencies. These tokens are based on “blockchain” technology, which provides the building builds of the transparent and democratic ledger.

Despite the aforementioned lack of tangibility, it has practical use-value outside of high-finance, technical data mining and investments. The model of encrypted P2P exchange can be applied to different business/service applications including a digital ledger of invoices and accounts receivable for businesses and the self-employed; the anonymous purchase of goods online; tracking attempted corruption within commercial enterprises and charitable organisations, such as fund leaks – due to the accountability that comes with the “transparency” of the shared ledger; and, perhaps most surprising, it can be used in the fight against electoral fraud. One non-for-profit tech startup that offers “governance for a post-nation-state world”, Democracy Earth, developed an app that combines traditional voting due diligence with the decentralized, peer-to-peer “ledger” of transactions, which is provided by the very same blockchain technology used for crypto-currencies.

The Future Is Written In Code

One wonders just what entrepreneurs in the world right now are dreaming of using this blockchain technology for in the future. Only time will tell, but whatever commercial, charitable, and political applications these sorts of transparent peer-2-peer lending and encrypted data systems are used for, we can be sure that the future will be “written in code”.

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