The Internet might be more than a new kind of marketplace and a new medium for exchanging money as we know it. If Bernard Lietaer and others are right, the Internet might lead to a radical change in the nature of money. Lietaer, Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Resources at the University of California at Berkeley, was a central banker and currency manager in Belgium, with twenty five years of working with governments and banks. These efforts predate the Internet, but Litaer sees the Net as a vehicle for accelerating the changes that he and others have been foreseeing for years.
Money is an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange.
The agreement can be conscious or unconscious, coerced or free. Most of us don t consciously choose our money. We have an opportunity to change that. The Internet is a space where that is possible to do. I expect a flourishing of money systems in the coming years.