Innate Value Must Determine Worth -- Making Digital Asessts Tangible

We must change the way we determine worth.

I'll start with an analogy, because we all relate to those much better than reality.

Its like receiving a priceless gemstone necklace when you are too young to remember receiving it. Great-great-grandma gave it to you on her deathbed when you were barely old enough to say your own name. Your grandmother and mother are of course outraged, but they keep the trinket safe and when you turn 16 they pull it out for prom, and place it upon your neck like you are a long lost princess. You know its special only because you can see how much it means to your mother. You assume it's of sentimental value, and wear it out of respect. It is beautiful, but it is also not quite in style.

At the dance most of your peers take no notice of this dazzling heirloom emerald upon your neck, but then a teacher-chaperone you've never met sees it.

"Where did you get that?" They ask as they study your necklace.

"It was a gift," you say, because you aren't sure what else to say.

"Do you know how rare that is? How valuable?"

"I've never known its worth," you say. "It was a gift from my great-grandmother. I barely remember her."

Of course you don't know its worth--your 16 for fuck's sake. But now you are hyper-aware that someone else sees something in it, and become overwhelmed with fear about this mysterious thing you inherited. Do you continue to let its worth shine? Or do you stash it away and keep it safe from prying eyes?

In my life, I've been cursed with the gift of perception. I received this invaluable ability by being born and raised into a tumultuous, albeit intellectually curious, yet quite redneck, family. From a young age I was taught that worth was not expressed in material possessions, but in your ability to see and hold truth.

For the longest time I thought I was gifted with the ability to write things in an elegant way. But unfortunately it is something much worse than that. I can see things as they are and simultaneously see them as they could be. The curse of potentiality. We live in a world of layered illusions, and most of us have accepted those illusions on a subconscious level so deeply that to even speak of these things is a life altering experience for most of us.

Once upon a time, humanity lived on this planet without money as an intermediary. We directly exchanged goods and services with each other without a fiat middle man. Of course money came about as a value holder, a thing that could be a substitute for an item of physical worth. This usually came about because someone that held significant amount of assets needed a way to symbolize those assets in order to trade across distances. A man with a large herd of cattle that wanted to exchange a part of his heard for a sailing vessel across a mountain range couldn't exactly move his cattle that distance so easily. So instead he'd "sell" his cattle to the "bank", which would then give him a "fair amount" of currency (gold/silver/etc) as a more convenient and transportable symbol of the cattle so that man could travel over the mountains to the port to buy his ship.

Now, we live in a world where our exchanges of value aren't so simple. There are many layers between an employee and their wage, and the rate at which they are paid and the things they can buy with it aren't so straight forward either. Now, the things we buy are generally produced somewhere distant, or in other countries where labor prices are cheaper, and the goods aren't as durable. We no longer pay our money to a merchant directly, but to a company that employs thousands of people beyond the physical product they create. Even the milk we buy comes from many different cows that are owned by many different farms beneath one big umbrella company. That gallon of milk may contain the casein fluids of hundreds of different cows!

Now, that's not to say that this is a bad thing, its just a thing that we must come to terms with as modern humans...that is that we no longer directly exchange our value for someone else's, we are exchanging our value into a fiat currency that is used as leverage by large corporations to become ever bigger.

With the invention of social media, the illusions of the world are being eroded. Essentially we have exchanged environmental integrity and the continuity of life for mass-produced materialism, greed, and the destruction of our planet. While our species has always been a violent one, we now have turned our violence directly towards our very life force -- we are pillaging our planet in exchange for fiat currency and a bleak future. The things we value are not the things that will ensure our species continued homeostasis with the rest of the planet.

What is worth saving?

What is the value of ecological continuity?

What type of currency is needed to ensure a stable future for all?

We are depressed and sick and devoid of meaning. We have no grounded moral foundations to hold us, to strengthen us. Religions have failed, governments have failed, even the atheists are quite unsure how to reconcile this merciless capitalistic nihilism. 

We have lost our connection to our beginnings. We forget that the matter that we are made of is the matter of a living breathing planet. We wonder why we are getting cancers and diabetes and heart disease at alarming rates when it is clear that this is simply because we are poisoning Mothership Earth and the tit from which we drink is giving us the disease that we have given Her.

We must shift our Perceptions. We must see things without dollar signs and profits margins. That is not to say that value must be returned to a form of absolute intrinsic worth, but we need to weigh our decisions more carefully-- and this is especially true for the people that have the power concentrated in their hands and can effect the lives of millions with their decisions.

 We must attend to this planet with care and respect and awe, as the lives we live are directly hitched to this living place. That is not to say that capitalism must perish, but it must shift towards a different perception of worth. Rather than worth being explicit (USD is the world's reserve currency because we say so), value is implicitly derived from moral and ecological integrity.

Does this decision cause more harm than good? Will clear cutting a forest to put up overpriced apartments be a long term good decision? Or should the trees be integrated into the human habitat creation? These decisions can be actively weighed, managed, and the decision makers can be held accountable when ecological integrity data is directly tied to monetary systems.

Below, I outline a hypothetical example of such a revamped monetary system. One that uses a tangible asset as the value holder, while the blockchain transactions create a type of publicly viewable integrity. Tangibility coupled with accountability is how the currencies of the future will work.

 With advancements in AI and digital assets, we can leverage these new systems to create an Integrity Exchange. An example is this: a local wildlife sanctuary has monitoring equipment installed. This equipment is used to track a simple metric -- songbird melodies. The recordings are then analyzed by an AI system, and a cryptocurrency Birdsong, is created that is connected to this melody. The equipment monitors the songs of these forest birds, and a live feed of the songs is attached to the coin. As the diversity and robustness of the songs increases (more species of birds begin to consistently populate the sanctuary), the "value" of the coin increases. The coin is directly connected to environmental integrity. This type of attaching a physical asset (wildlife) to a digital asset (cryptocurrency) creates an indirect form of investment in ecological re-invigoration. The Birdsong itself has inherent value, and the coin is an expression of this.