A long time ago, someone created money. We don’t know who it was, but it’s easy to assume someone else took credit for it.

It was a good idea at the time, and it made a lot people very happy. No longer did one have to try and trade chickens for shoes and cows for tax advice, we had a common medium of exchange. Besides, that fish for soup guy was a jerk and a bit off.

So it was that human life flourished. And we created things. And we created social constructs. And people did stuff that others found worthy of study. And governments rose and laws sprang to life as information superhighways beeped and booped.

And all that time we kept on using the same money, in the same way, the Romans did. The same basic system developed by the Phoenicians, refined by the Dutch. The “ledger”. Debits and credits. Always debits and credits.

Some time in the 20th Century, people invented machines that count. I know, not that big a deal. You can count, I can count. Not that special.

My current home computer can compute the SHA-256 algorithm about…34,570,000 times per second. Can you do that?

Probably not.

Yet…for some reason…we, as humans, as Americans in the 21st Century, pay nearly 16 cents out of every dollar we spend, to other humans to move our own money around. To count it. As a “convenience”.

We are told that a savings accounts that pays 1% is a good idea when we balance our economy at 2-3% inflation rate (when we can control it).

Here’s the things y’all….[dramatic pause, intense blue eyes stare into your soul]

We don’t need to do that any more. We don’t need banks. We don’t need dollars. We can trade chicken tokens for shoe tokens for cow tokens for tax tokens for investment tokens for college tokens for internet bandwidth tokens…and they all have they own rules. Rules that can’t be changed without votes.

Votes that can’t be made without keys. Keys that can’t be forged. Chains that can’t be broken. Immutable ledgers, forged in bits of consensus.

A human financial structure built on the ability we’ve given our computers to count for us, so we don’t have to pay humans to do it. We can do it…but we are wildly inefficient at it. 16%/yr inefficient.

It’s time to let the computers compute.

16%. Every year. That’s what we pay humans to do it. I’ll bet, if we negotiate real hard, we can get the computers to do it for just about the cost of the electricity it takes to run them (and it’ll cost a point or two for the humans to keep the computers oiled and electricity running).

Computers like electricity, and they love following rules. They don’t negotiate with humans very well. The people that currently run our financial networks…not so much on all counts.

Think about it. Get used to the idea. Get in on it. You don’t need a bank. You just need a real wallet.

The Singularity was so last year. This is the future.