Digital economy: Show me the money

I bought a car recently without having to touch a single baht of “real” cash. The “reservation” deposit was an ATM transfer to the salesman's account. The downpayment was a cashier check “bought” at a bank counter through my bank book. All of you must have gone through the same, but it still feels weird, though. I drove a brand-new Mazda sedan out of the showroom after some computerized buttons had been pushed. How amazing, or effective, or vulnerable the whole process is. Or the entire concept of money, for that matter.

Money doesn't “change hands” any more. It's numbers going down in some books and up in others. In an American series, The Good Wife, there is this one scene where someone wanted to pay for something in a big amount of cash and the cash wasn't to be accepted. The receiver demanded a cashier check. The person making the payment wondered out loud why one would want a piece of paper more than real money.

In The Wolf of Wall Street, there's a tell-tale dialogue showing how casual, or twisted, the definition of “wealth” has become. A senior broker said the following to our hero, which may make you want to withdraw all your money from investment funds: “So, you've got a client who brought stock at eight, and it now sits at sixteen, and he's all (beep) happy, he wants to cash it and liquidate and take his (beep) money and run home. You don't let him do that cause that would make it real.”

All the wolves do is give you another brilliant idea so you re-invest. And you keep doing it again and again and again, partly because you are addicted and partly because you think you're rich, which you are, on paper. The wolves take the hard cash and live like kings. You are happy seeing your numbers going up in your books.

The world has come a long way since the ancestors of our ancestors traded pigs for ducks, or rugs for some chinas. Money was invented because pig owners may not need ducks right away. Somewhere along the road, the concept of saving money earned from sale of pigs so that ducks or rugs or chinas can be bought later morphed into betting the money on how rugs that you don't bother to buy will find buyers on the other side of the world.

And through it all, real money has kept disappearing into nowhere. There is a lot more “money” now than at any point in history, but we may be seeing a lot less money now than at any point in history as well. It's too cynical to call what's happening a make-believe system, so an “edge-of-a-slippery-slope” system, maybe?

They talk about gold reserves, something they claim can prevent digital numbers representing wealth from being cooked up and growing out of control. I have a bad feeling that if everyone in this world lay their digital wealth on the table and match it with the existing gold, we will need a lot more gold that will never come.

You may say “It's about credits, you fool.” That's fair. I wouldn't carry Bt7 million in hard cash around looking for a condo. You can't pay for a Boeing in banknotes. The question is, are we giving too much credit to the term “credit”? Make no mistake. “Digital economy” is great. But if you are a world-class hacker, you must be saying the same thing, too.

Yet hackers may be the least of our concern. My point is “printing money out of thin air” will or can become something primeval. Digital economy makes everybody's life, not just hackers', a lot more convenient. Will corporate fraud be easier? Will countries lying about their economic healths become more common and harder to prove?

We heard stories about folks who put cash in pots or jars and buried them on the backyards. We laughed. Well, at least they knew exactly where their money was and could actually “see” it when they wanted to. Most of us trust numbers that people we don't know, have interests of their own and rely on somebody else who rely on somebody else who rely on somebody else, tell us.

They say evil's greatest trick is convince the world it doesn't exist. But if money is evil, that wisdom  surely has to be reversed. Evil's (money's) greatest trick, now it appears, must be it has managed to make the world rest assured that it exists.