Imagine with me to a time in the not-so-distant future where humanity has established colonies on Mars, Earth’s moon, and even more celestial bodies in our solar system, or perhaps even beyond our solar system.
We live in an age where science and technology are evolving and changing at unprecedented rates. It’s no longer a giant of leap of the imagination to think about colonies in other parts of our solar system anymore.
With the future expansion of our species away from Earth, how will commerce and wealth be tracked and managed? Most, if not all, of our current systems for commerce and wealth rely on physical objects – whether that is paper fiat money or gold and silver. These work well when there is a feasible way of moving them around for purchase, sales, exchange, etc. However, this system will no longer be feasible once there is a need to conduct commerce between planets.
With our current technology for space travel, it takes an estimated six months to travel between Earth and Mars. Imagine a commerce transaction that would take six months to complete or a payroll transaction for workers on one planet who would be waiting for their payroll to arrive from the other planet. These scenarios would present major challenges for our current commerce systems.
In this future reality, the increasing demand for digital currency starts to become more apparent. Our current online banking and other commerce services run on servers that are controlled by banks and other entities and are therefore centralized in nature. This works okay when the geographic area being serviced is limited to a single planet, but how well does that model scale as we start colonizing more and more planets? A quick comparison with decentralized commerce systems (i.e., cryptocurrencies) immediately showcases advantages of decentralized blockchain technology.
Obviously, humanity has some time to sort out how these technologies will work and to continue to improve on them and perfect them. The idea of interplanetary colonization is still a little way in the future, and to some people the idea of it probably still sounds farfetched. I would challenge you though to look at some of the science fiction entertainment of from nearly 60 years ago. Star Trek, for example, was entertaining when it was released and the technology that was showcased was hard to fathom as ever being reality, and yet today a lot of that technology is commonly found in nearly every household as everyday items (tablets, computers that we can verbally interact with, etc.).
Space colonization will be here before we know it and with it will come many new challenges. I believe cryptocurrencies will be a major player in the commerce of the future.