Bob is a normal, average, everyday person that everyone seems to know and like. Deciding that he needs to stop by the grocery store on his way home after a rough day at the office only to pick up a few items, Bob grabs a few more items than he expected, as he always seems to do. While making his way to the cashier, Bob does a mental scan for to see if there is more cash in his pockets. Remembering that his efforts are futile, Bob stops his search: Cash money has ceased to exist. The world of the future calls for a more efficient economy: One that works on your schedule, by your rules. You are glad when you are paying for your items, because all you do is electronically transfer the necessary credits from your account to the grocery store. This transfer of credits ensures that a person does not need to hunt for cash. In the near future this will be a very plausible scenario, as economic systems move into existing in a purely electronic form. The effect of converting the current classic economy into an all-digital economy will increase the amount of funds in the system. Based on a general understanding of the mechanics of economics, this will have significant impacts on the efficiency of monetary transactions, unification of different economies, and ultimately streamline the spending habits of businesses and consumers worldwide.
Economics, in simplest form, is the “study of how people use their scarce resources to satisfy their unlimited wants,” (McEachern, 2). Resources are those things that go into producing or buying something. These include labor (the work put into it), land (someplace to do it), or time (arguably the most scarce resource of all). The ability of combining these resources and get an end product to the consumer has been what has kept modern-day society buoyant since the Industrial Revolution. This transformation in the way that countries produce goods and sell them to the consumer was felt worldwide between the years of 1760 and 1860, with the more intuitive societies feeling the full impact of the revolution (among them England and the United States). Even today, the rest of the world classifies countries on a first, second, or third –world basis. Although the global economy progressed in quantum leaps throughout the last 250 years, it was not until just before the turn of the millennium that the economy was once greatly altered.
The Internet Revolution started to transform the economy in the latter half of the Twentieth Century with the concept of the electronic data interchange entwined into the backbones of most businesses. This eventually warranted the introduction of the World Wide Web to the masses around 1990 when a group of physicists developed a graphic user interface that would have a profound impact on the masses. The group of physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics center, had the foresight that would bring the Internet to the masses and change people’s quality of life and the way everyone purchases goods and services. The Industrial Revolution changed the way we did business by streamlining many of the classic economic principles around the world—paper money, demand and supply, centralized economies; this new Internet Revolution would further streamline these principles of economics by preparing for the e-Economy.
One principle behind paying bills is the act of not paying them until shortly before they are due, otherwise known as the present value of a dollar concept. This model states that a dollar today is worth more than that same dollar tomorrow, dictated by inflation—“a persistent increase in the level of consumer prices or a persistent decline in the purchasing power of money, caused by an increase in available currency and credit beyond the proportion of available goods and services” (Dictionary.com). The problem with tangible money is finding the balance between “available currency” (aggregate money supply) and “available goods and services” (aggregate product supply), and therefore, increasing the effects that inflation will have on the economy. Inflation is the real purchasing power of an individual or a business to purchase a good or a service: A dollar today is worth more today than it will be tomorrow.
An inefficiency of coinage lies in the time it takes for the markets to catch up with centralized economic policy. One of the major factors in how well a nation’s economy does is the rules and regulations put onto it by the governing body at the time. In a centralized economy the government closely monitors and regulates monetary flow. If the economy is decentralized, local or regionalized markets impact monetary flow more than any governing entity. In the
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