A few years back I was waiting a table at a restaurant here in Oslo. I believe it was a Tuesday. One of the guests was an older gentleman from Germany that had a meal and knocked down a couple of drinks before asking for his bill, with the intention of heading back to his hotel after cashing himself out. I brought a payment-terminal to his table and he presented his card.
"Oh, sorry sir, we don't take American Express here I am afraid, do you have any other card?", I said. Perhaps a little confused, he started fishing in his pocket and found some notes, which he inspected before he handed them over to me with a smile.
"Terribly sorry, sir. These are Euro's and Norway is not part of the European union, so we cant accept these".
It was in that moment this poor guy realized an important lesson about money that sadly not enough people get familiar with: Your money is only worth something if we can agree that it is worth something. If he had a VISA card we didn't need to agree that the money was good or not - Two banks would've handled that transaction for us, confirming that there was something of value to exchange from one account to the other.
I ended up taking his Euro after some thinking, at a somewhat bad exchange rate (for him) and adding a hefty tip to myself, as compensation for the time it would take for me to go and turn it into Norwegian money and for any exchange costs I'd have to shell out for in the process.
" Your true wealth is your time and freedom. Money is just a tool for trading your time. It’s a container to store your economic energy until you’re ready to deploy it. " - Mike Maloney
The more layers you add to a monetary system, the easier it is to lose sight of why it is a thing in the first place. I am as guilty as charged when it comes to #cryptocurrency : Blinded by the "investment" and not focused enough on the usage, because its the usage that is going to be the key moving forward if we want to break the bonds of centralized currency. Its also necessary to look towards how the alt-coins that is platform bound can have uses outside their specific platform. We truly live in exciting times when it comes to challenging the former monopoly on money-printing. Where do you believe we are headed?
I'm looking forward to one day hear from a waiter: "Sorry sir, we only accept Steemit here, do you have any of those?".
- Alex Utopium, Word Constructor at Utopium.blog