Bernard Lietaer - The Future of Money - Full Book

paper that stated where the metal was kept. The sentence 'I will pay the bearer the sum of one Pound Sterling' which adorns the Pound bill is still a reminder of the weight and silver content of the metal currency. The next step in the disappearing act is already well under way. The vast majority of our paper money has further dematerialized into binary bits in computers belonging to our bankers, brokers, or other financial institutions, and there is serious talk that all of it may soon join the virtual world. Should we wait until the last paper bill has disappeared into a cyber-purse to wake up to the true non-material nature of money?

A working definition of money Our working definition of money can now be very straightforward: Money is an agreement, within a community, to use something as a means of payment.

Each one of these terms is essential in this definition. Seen as an agreement, money has much in common with other social contracts, such as political parties, nationality or marriage. These constructs are real, even if they exist only in people's minds. The money agreement can be attained formally or informally, freely or coerced, consciously or unconsciously. Later in this chapter, you will learn about the terms of our contemporary money agreement.

Money as an agreement is always valid only within a given community. Some currencies are operational only among a small group of friends (like tokens used in card games), for certain time periods (like the cigarette medium of exchange among frontline soldiers during World War II), or among the citizens of one particular nation (like most 'normal' national currencies today). Such a community can be the entire global community (as is the case of the