What Will Money Look Like in 50 Years?

There's an interesting article from BreakerMag that outlines the two major ways innovation is made.

  • Tweaks to Existing Products

  • Entirely New Products

The entirely new product is where services like Uber & Airbnb fall in to. Uber founders could just as easily have approached a local cab company with an app design but instead elected to create their own unique service.

The question is now, when will money have this "Uber" moment? When will someone totally revamp how we pay for goods and services? So far we've seen periodic tweaks: Online banking, Apps like Venmo and Square, etc. Cryptocurrencies are looking to change that although I don't believe they will ever reach the point of outpacing traditional currencies.

I post this question to you guys, how do you envision paying for your morning coffee in 50 years?

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I don't think money will change all that much, but as far as paying for coffee I think the natural progression will be like the amazon store- you just walk in and get it without messing with a POS device. The phone-tap is already out there to make people more comfortable with it, but honestly why doesn't your phone just establish a wifi/bluetooth connection with the store? They're already recording you as you're in there so why not just use a verbal confirmation of the price to establish the contractual requirements?

 

My only apprehension in believing that POS systems will become antiquated is that it's likely a fairly complex/costly systems integration process that mom & pop's probably won't want to be bothered with or simply won't be able to afford. I'm speculating and would be curious to know if it truly would be a major barrier for widespread uptake, but fully believe that POS will be a thing of the past amongst higher revenue grossing retailers (i.e., Walmart, Starbucks, Target, etc.)

 

I like the idea of never actually interacting with a physical device. I definitely agree that the future holds some sort of automatic identification/payment as commonplace. I think your concern about the mom and pop adoption shouldn't be a huge issue, they might be a bit slower to react but if the technology's there, and it gets cheaper over time, I think we'd see it in a lot more places.

 

Money in 50 years will be completely digital, and if it has any physical representation, will be the hardware wallet on which you store your digital currency. I’d imagine that, by then, hardware wallets might be reduced in size, and sleeker, and what not, but identical in purpose as a current Ledger Nano S.

In 50 years, every retail coffee establishment like Starbucks will have standard RFID technology in place. You walk in, grab your coffee, and walk out, and an unidentifiable microchip on the coffee cup will broadcast a transaction from your cryptocurrency wallet, which, like I said, large franchises will already have in place, so you will likely already have your wallet linked to the platform by then. It’ll be even easier than Apple Pay — no need to take out your phone at all.

 

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