What is the money of the future? My nine-year-old son thinks it will be Robux. For those of you trapped in the human museum known as adulthood, Robux is the currency used by players of Roblox computer games. If I offer Thomas grimy dollar bills for household chores, he shows an almost complete lack of interest and motivation. But if I offer him Robux, it’s a different story.
The current exchange rate is around 80 to the dollar. So, in order to incentivize my son to do the dishes, I need to go online and buy 2,000 Robux for $24.99. This I do by entering my credit card details on a website, an act of self-exposure that never fails to make me feel sick. However, the dishes get cleaned and, later, my son blows some of his Robux on a cool new outfit and a pair of wings for his avatar, earning the admiration of his friends.
Robux is just one of the new forms of money that exist in the parallel world of online gaming. If your kids play Fortnite, then you’ve probably had to buy them V-Bucks (short for VinderBucks). And gamer money is, in turn, just a subset of the myriad means of payment that now exist on the internet.
Writers of science fiction got many things right about the future, from pandemics to flying cars to artificial intelligence. None, so far as I know, got the future of money exactly right. In William Gibson’s seminal Neuromancer (1984), paper money (the “new yen” or N¥) has survived but is used only for illicit transactions. In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), hyperinflation has ravaged the value of the dollar so much that, in Compton, California, “Street people push … wheelbarrows piled high with dripping clots of million- and billion-dollar bills that they have raked up out of storm sewers.” A trillion-dollar bill is known colloquially as an “Ed Meese.” A quadrillion is a “Gipper.” (Only we Boomers now get the allusions to the former attorney general and the president he served in the 1980s.) In other dystopian futures, readily available commodities such as bullets or bottle caps serve as makeshift money, rather like cigarettes in occupied Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War II. My favorite imagined currency are the “merits” in the British TV show Black Mirror, which have to be earned by pedaling on exercise bikes.
If some other author predicted the future of money accurately, I missed it. Unfortunately, this lack of foresight now seems also to afflict U.S. policymakers, leaving the world’s financial hegemon vulnerable to a potentially fatal challenge. Not only are the American monetary authorities underestimating the threat posed to dollar dominance by China’s pioneering combination of digital currency and electronic payments. They are also treating the blockchain-based financial innovations that offer the best alternative to China’s e-yuan like gatecrashers at their own exclusive party.
****
Let’s begin with the future of money that no one foresaw.
In 2008, in a wonkish paper that bore no relation to any sci-fi, the enigmatic Satoshi Nakamoto launched Bitcoin, “a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash” that allows “online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.” In essence, Bitcoin is a public ledger shared by an acephalous (leaderless) network of computers. To pay with bitcoins, you send a signed message transferring ownership to a receiver’s public key. Transactions are grouped together and added to the ledger in blocks, and every node in the network has an entire copy of this blockchain at all times. A node can add a block to the chain (and receive a bitcoin reward) only by solving a cryptographic puzzle chosen by the Bitcoin protocol, which consumes processing power.
Nodes that have solved the cryptographic puzzle—“miners”—are rewarded not only with transaction fees, but also with more bitcoins. This reward will get cut in half every four years until the total number of bitcoins reaches 21 million, after which no new Bitcoins will be created. As I argued here last November, there were good reasons why Bitcoin left gold for dead as the pandemic was wreaking havoc last year. Scarcely over a year ago, when just about every financial asset sold off as the full magnitude of the pandemic sank in, the dollar price of a Bitcoin fell to $3,858. As I write, the price is $58,746.
The reasons for Bitcoin’s success are that it is sovereign (no one controls it, not the “whales” who own a lot, and not the miners who mine a lot), scarce (that 21 million number is final), and—above all—smart. With every day that the system works—not being hacked, not crashing—the predictions that it would prove to be a “shitcoin” look dumber, and the pressure on people to affirm their smartness by owning bitcoins grows stronger. Last year, a bunch of tech companies, including Square, PayPal and Tesla, bought a pile. Several legendary investors—Paul Tudor Jones, Stan Druckenmiller, Bill Miller—came out as long Bitcoin. Perhaps most importantly, Bitcoin began to be treated like a legitimate part of the financial system. BNY Mellon now handles Bitcoin. So does Mastercard. There are now well functioning Bitcoin futures and options markets. This kind of adoption and integration is what has driven the price upward—a process that has much further to run. My $75,000 target price back in 2018 (assuming that every millionaire would one day want 1% of his or her portfolio in XBT) now looks a bit conservative.