In Gold We Trust? The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty (Kindle Single)

"To cure its addiction to debts, the United States has to re-establish the common sense principle that one should live within its means."

spending by America's Federal Government (adding in state and local governments significantly increased the total) was around 24% of national income whilst tax revenues were 15% of national income. That left a near-record peacetime budget deficit to be financed by borrowing of 9% of GDP.

Social websites such as Second Life and even Facebook have experimented with creating their own currencies. But the most interesting innovation so far has been the launch in 2009 of bitcoin, a digital currency with an encrypted soundness algorithm designed to allow the supply of bitcoin to grow in a way that is mathematically inflation-proof.

A different version of dollar collapse, described by analyst and trader Jim Rickards in his book, Currency Wars, comes complete with deliberately wicked foreigners.

when there is a mixture of 'good' coins with high silver content and 'bad' coins that have been clipped or debased circulating, the public will hoard the valuable good ones and pass on the bad ones to others.

With early investments in social media companies such as Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and Zynga, Fred Wilson has become one of the world's most watched angel investors. And one of the opportunities he is watching most attentively is the emerging industry of digital money.

Carrying bulky bags of barley when on a shopping trip is not very practical. Moreover, barley is perishable, so not a good store of value over long periods of time. That is why, around 5,000 years ago in present-day Iraq, some forgotten financial innovator came up with the brilliant idea of expressing a fixed weight of barley, 11 grams, in terms of

Silver money can claim a 5,000-year history. Gold money did not make its first appearance until two millennia later around 550 BC when, according to Herodotus, the Ancient Greek 'father of history', the King of Lydia (in modern day Turkey) started minting coins made of it.

Maybe innovators in the private sector will produce some entirely new form of money that is not dependent on government at all.