Money as Memory = Blockchain as Memory
@Karov has a common saying which I agree with. He states: "Money is Mnemonics". It's a form of memory. Fair enough because in the journal of economic theory a paper by Kocherlakota pretty much makes this exact same statement. Money is really just a means of storing numbers to quantify who owes what. In the memory storage we call money we have the function of "credit" and of "debit". To credit is to "insert" and to debit is to "delete". A database essentially requires create, read, update and delete which are essentially the four basic functions of all persistent storage. Money is simply memory as ram is to a computer.
The next question arrives which is if money is memory then what is the computer? And this is perhaps where we can refine how we think about the word "economy". An economy can do what is known as "social computations". What function does an economy serve? Is it merely a satisfaction generation algorithm?
In one of my blog posts I even called society a computer: "If Society is a Computer, what is the Social Operating System?". In a technological context we can think of a blockchain as a data structure which provides for the memory capacity of a social network.
Memory is not enough
And if memory is not enough then money is not enough. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin give us money (memory) but do not even do this well due to issues with scaling. Assuming cryptocurrency does scale then we still only have memory which simply isn't good enough. In computing terms it is akin to having only the RAM/Persistent Storage and while this may be all we need for basic functions of external memory (think of Memex) it is not going to be enough for a full fledged exocortex (external mind). A mind is more than simply having the ability to store but it also involves having the ability to to compute. Blockchain by itself does not compute and transactions by themselves are not going to be enough unless we can apply logical operations.
The debate between @Karov and I
The debate between myself and him is based on what the nature of computation is. When I say memory is not enough I mean it in the context of going far beyond money. I mean it in the context of building a decentralized computer in the sense that humans and machines combine to produce a global mind of sorts. We can call this global mind an exocortex or we can simply call it "society" but it's essentially a means of thinking and problem solving by leveraging external resources. Memex was mentioned because it highlighted the possibilities in the original breakthrough essay As We May Think. From here we get to the Ray Kurzweil talks on Exocortex, Singularity, etc.
References
Kocherlakota, N. R. (1998). Money is memory. journal of economic theory, 81(2), 232-251.
- Tauchain: The Social Dispersed Computer introduced as a Social Network?
- If Society is a Computer, what is the Social Operating System?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_computing
- https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delete