Is currency doomed?

There are pretty clear definitions of currency. But I'd like to break it down to its core. Because if we understand really what it is, we can define what makes the ultimate currency, but also, more importantly, what the future holds for currency.To understand currency we need only ask why. Why do we need currency? Simply, it gives me the ability to transfer ownership from one asset to another, quickly, seamlessly and with the option of divisibility.Think about the act of being paid a salary. You work for a company, hopefully providing value, for which you accrue remuneration - an asset.You do this to buy food, send your kid to school and buy a home. You could grow your food, teach your kid and make your own bricks and cement to build your own house. But this is inefficient, so we work where we can create better value and outsource our ultimate needs. Being paid a salary is disconnected for what your objectives are, but because of money we can connect them.We could ask our employer to pay us in food, schooling and in housing, but that's inefficient and probably much harder to adjust month to month according to the specific needs. Again, the reason why we have money is because we need to transfer our ownership of work to a grocery, school and builder easily with them accepting it just in the same way you accept it, with the freedom to adjust that spend as you feel necessary and to have immediacy of receiving and converting.Currency is simply the universally accepted medium between swapping out assets, instead of bartering. So really the benefit comes down to efficiency, how easily can I transfer between two assets, knowing that it'll be accepted at the same value for which I received it.This means that any loss of that value along the way is inefficient for what my ultimate goal is - that goal has nothing to do with the money itself but rather assets at either end and having a 1:1 conversion for them. Fungibility comes down to the need for this goal of 1:1 transfer between people who value assets differently because of their unique needs - currency unifies value. Any friction is therefore suboptimal to achieve actually what we require out of currency.Time wastage, devaluation through inflation, costs and fees, and also more broadly speaking an economic burdnen on 3rd parties, is friction. Although neither of these are deal breakers - because even dollars incur bank charges, devalue over time and can take time to receive and send, yet we still use dollars - we should certainly strive to have the most frictionless currency to benefit the end user the most.Cryptocurrency, in the purest sense of the word currency, should strive to be the most frictionless form of value transfer on the blockchain. It should allow me to buy and sell assets at no additional cost to me, to the economy or to the environment. The more fluid and more liquid this is, the closer it comes to providing this ultimate need.But the final reality really, because of this very dissection of why we need currency, I conclude that because of Blockchain currency is ultimately doomed. And let me clearly state that this probably won't even happen in my lifetime. But certainly currencies, of all forms, will not survive when Blockchain matures. Why? Because it will give me to the ability to do those asset transfers instantly and divisibly, without the intermediary. The fractional ownership that Blockchain can assign to anything is the key that unlocks this.At the end of the month when I am to be paid my salary, I could select to get remunerated in bread tokens, school tokens and house tokens, at what ever ratio I need at the time with no inconvenience to my employer. I can be paid in stocks and bonds if I want to leave my asset in something that will (most likely) increase in value over time. Blockchain will eventually make all these value transfers between all assets so seamless and divisible, there will be no need for an intermediary currency.So yes, the hype is correct that banks in a traditional sense are doomed - but ultimately, so is currency itself.

Submitted November 23, 2019 at 11:17AM