I kept trying long and hard to think outside the box for this assignment. I looked at
and thought I'd try that, but I wanted to come up with an original idea.
In my quest to find the answer, I looked up the definition of currency, and I found these nuggets:
Economics Dictionary:currency
Any form of money in actual use as a medium of exchange.
And then Wikipedia had this to say:
Deposit money and currency are money in the sense that both are acceptable as a means of exchange, but money need not necessarily be currency.
Historically, money in the form of currency has predominated. Usually (gold or silver) coins of intrinsic value commensurate with the monetary unit (commodity money), have been the norm. By contrast, modern currency, as fiat money, is intrinsically worthless. The prevalence of one type of currency over another in commodity money systems has arisen, usually when a government designates through decrees, that only particular monetary units shall be accepted in payment for taxes.
What does this all mean? Well, it means currency is not necessarily money and money is not necessarily currency. It is just the value we place on it, and that is why barter and other forms of exchange can be just acceptable and why market speculation causes nothing but market crashes. It is betting on a self-imposed delusion of value.
And that's when it hit me. I was trying to think outside the box when that box was, in fact, nonexistent. Money as we know it today is nothing but an idea with an imposed trade value. And then I realized that, for week and a half now, I have been trading on the real currency of EVOKE: ideas.
Mark's idea is great, no question about it, but the true $Ev is far from an imaginary online coin. It is each and every post, and the ideas we have exchanged on this site.
Can we truly place a value on ideas? Of course we can, Bill Gates became a billionaire by envisioning a graphic user interface. Larry Page and Sergey Brin became rich by thinking an easy to use page to wade through millions of pages would be something people needed. Every millionaire begins with an idea, from the benign and helpful to the downright abusive and evil. But an idea nonetheless.
I have no doubt in my mind that some will arise from EVOKE, and it will be because of the currency we are trading in this site. One idea will spawn the next, and even one person's bad idea can be another's breakthrough.
Ideas and invention have been the true currency of humanity since the dawn of time, from the first hominid who figured out fire to the new web entrepreneurs, and this is not a fact that is discussed enough.
So I propose to all of you today to use your minds as currency. To know that feedback can be your payment and that both criticism and praise will be your exchange rate. I want to challenge all to be as wealthy as you can, not in an imaginary and ultimately valueless piece of metal or paper, but on what our race has truly traded for hundreds of thousands of years.
Let us start using the original and forgotten currency of humanity again. It has a lot more value than you think.
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