You’ll never convince me to put my wealth in paper and tokens. Nope, paper is too risky a thing to trust. Instead, I propose we use something that is commonly available and needed by everyone - food! Now, you can’t go paying people with raw steak and veggies, it would go bad too soon and become worthless. So we use live food instead! That’s right, we’d all be like “I need two chickens worth of gasoline, please!” and “You want 100 cows for that house? No way, man. I’ll give you 80 cows, one sheep, 14 chickens and not a creature more!”
A secondary benefit of this plan is something I like to call “interest”. All those chickens you got in your yard are gonna be laying eggs all the time, cows are gonna give milk, and sheep are gonna give wool. It’s like your current wealth is constantly creating new wealth for you and you don’t have to do a thing! Pretty interesting, right? Even beyond simple interest, there is another way for your wealth to work for you - babies! That’s right, two of your cows fall in love and get all jiggy and BOOM soon you got another cow in the stable! For free! Since this requires at least 2 of the same type animals to work, I call it “compound interest”. The more animal pairs you have, the quicker your wealth can grow. Do the math and you’ll soon discover the “magic” of compund interest. I suppose you’re gonna convince your “central authority” to give you extra tokens for the privilege of holding your paper. Fat chance.
Another drawback of paper is that any clod with a color printer can copy all the paper he wants. People will quickly grow to disstrust all paper and your “token ring” economy will crumble. My plan is foolproof in this regard. I mean, who’s gonna clone a sheep?
As a cashier, err, creditcardier, I forsee a few other problems with this vision.
There would be old people who would take for friggin ever to count the blasted tokens. There would be assholes paying for large totals entirely with tokens. There would be other assholes paying for small totals with large notes, emptying the drawer containing the notes and tokens, making it extremely difficult to make change for the other customers. This system would also be somewhat unsanitary. Also, it would put store employees in danger of being robbed.
However, it might be nice to have a big, thick wad of these notes, to carry around in your pocket (or bra), take out and count, wave in people’s faces, and the like. Send me some example notes to try out, and I’ll make up my mind.
I foresee a serious problem here. Although it would be possible to have this paper exchange annotated with numbers and directly traceable to the owner, the time necessary to keep this information on file is out of proportion with the time to be saved by using this paper. In short, there are diminishing returns to tracing the ownership of all but the larger denominations of this paper. This would make this paper anonymous, for all intents and purposes.
The large amount of anonymous capital would lead to unscrupulous people trying to secure this paper for themselves by whatever means necessary. It is possible that they may even take advantage of their constitutional right to bear arms by using said arms for this purpose (please bear with me, we are examining all ramifications, however hypothetical). Once they are in possession of this anonymous paper, it will be difficult or impossible to trace this act back to them.
More than that, it will put a whole class of pimply faced adolescent hacker identity thieves out of business, and they are fueling the economy these days.
Indeed, the anonymity would be a concern. Why, one could forsee a future where one could use this paper for anything! People could exchange tokens for illicit substances to alter their perceptions, and no one would be able to trace it! You could walk up to just some random person in the street and exchange anything at all for such untraceable papers and tokens.
One would assume, however, that paper would be preferable to tokens for the majority of disreputable transactions. Paper can be rolled into tubes, stuffed into garment strings, and thrown quietly onto pillows in an attempt to exit unnoticed.
It would be fairly easy to integrate this with the electronic age too. Almost everyone has a computer and printer. I envision a system where people can just log into their bank account and then print out the"paper" that they need for the day or week. That way it is ready to be used for these quick and informal transactions. The paper could be customized with pictures that the person prefers like maybe a caricature of him or herself. I suppose we could also have little metal stamping machines connected via a USB cable to “print out” the tokens too.
Another advantage is that people could just e-mail you money too. It could be like an adobe file of their money that the recipient just prints and uses.
People that receive these as payment will have to scan them so that they can be deposited into their account and then they just shred them.
Don’t you see? You implement this system and people will be printing out papers by the ream, effectively making themselves richer. The papers would flood the market and become worthless. No, we would have to restrict printing of these to some central authority. Naturally, some people will try to print their own papers anyway, so the central authority would have to put some design on the papers to make it hard to duplicate - the faces of famous actors, perhaps? Or, even better, Jackson Pollock paintings.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go print out some … uh … recipes! Yeah, that’s it. Recipes.
Brainstorming here. Think about all the great people in our history that we should be honoring. So here’s a thought - when we print up these papers and tokens, it shouldn’t cost anything more to put a picture of some famous historical figure, for example a dead president, on them.
Sure it’ll work. Set up a pay website with lesbian cow porn and you’ll soon make enough to buy another cow. Then, when you get that three way action going, you’ll be rolling in the tokens.
Surely you know, sir, that I was using the term “cow” in its colloquial sense. I assure you that I have never made the mistake of milking a bull.
Or that. Yes, perhaps that is what I meant after all. Send me a chicken once a month and I’ll keep your inbox full of cows in compromising positions. BovineSublime.com. BeefEaters.net. HeiferHeaven.org. Let’s see you do that with your paper and tokens!
It seems to me that keeping all these papers would get confusing and messy – possibly leading to the loss or miscounting of the papers.
What we need here is some sort of portable case or portfolio in which we can carry the papers. Since it would need to be small enough to fit into a pocket or purse, we could only make it about half the length of the papers, and would have to fold the papers to fit.
Eventually, of course, these “paperfolds” would be made in a variety of styles to suit the users’ tastes. Perhaps we could make them from the hide of all the excess cows that will be produced under Doctor Jones’ scenario.
Forget about these papers and tokens as currency… think of them as art!
If they have all these anti-easy-copying features and Famous People and what not on them, they will beocme valuable in and of themselves! You’ll get hordes of ‘paper-spotters’ and ‘token-spotters’ looking for all the rare ones, the ones where King Floyd the XIIIII was killed by a rampaging rabbit three days into his reign and they only made a few with his picture on them. People will bid up the price for the rare ones and the poor sod who trades one for whatever value is on it will get screwed. And where’s all that extra value going to come from anyways? Out of thin air?
Speculators. Bah.
Although I suppose that’s a good reason to restrict the artwork to safely-dead people. Or trees. Or something.
Bank cards, paper, tokens… the commno problem with these things is that they can be lost, or stolen. What we need is a means of transaction that can be attached to the people themselves.
I propose that our top scientists work to develope some kind of non-toxic method of stamping the population so their purchasing limits can be modified with each transaction. Perhaps some bacterial culture that would merge with their DNA, so as to make each label unique and non-transferrable.
It could be called…
Wait for it…
The Mark of the Yeast!
(PQ is immediately buried in an onslaught of rotting vegetables.)
I want to be a late-night toker. Not just a midnight toker, but one who will work the whole night time. I bet that there aren’t many would-be tokers who want to work all night long, so I’ll even be able to charge a surcharge for being a toker available at odd hours.
