It is still relevant though, as I will set out to show below. My first attempt at owning and running my own shop was at 25 years young, it was a second hand hi-fi shop, selling middle to top tier equipment to people with the most discerning ear. The likes of Naim, Merdian, Linn, Quad etc were my staple diet of products, all selling for many hundreds if not thousands of pounds gbp per single item, not per system. To own this shop and fill it full of gear took more money than I had, so get the extra funding required a loan from the then "princes trust" and to get that required doing a 1 year business study course, that I passed after 6 months at night school. The reason I am telling you that part, is it leads onto the next part, after getting the extra funding, I was also contractually obliged to open a business bank account, which I did.

Now with this bank account came rather high charges, I was charged every time I put money in the bank, every time I took it out, and for every cheque I wrote or standing order I paid, it ran into thousands of $'s per year. I enquired about a card machine to accept payments in the shop, and was met with even more charges again, roughly 6% of every sale went to the card machine middle man plus I even had to either buy or rent the card machine. Now remember this is pre internet, so that card machine also had to have a dedicated extra telephone line, again adding even more cost.

I had a desktop computer on my desk, it was running dos 3.1 or 3.2 I do not remember now, it had around 1 meg of memory, a scsi drive around a massive 250mb and a processor from the stone age. This machine eventually made me close this shop, I will expand on that later.

Makro and other suppliers all liked card payments, so buying stock, even if it was just reels of wiring took charges from my bank account as a lot of suppliers also gave a month long credit line, to be paid by direct debit.
Now where I am going with this, is all the above could or would be defunct and banished to history if we can get the blockchain technology implemented into all shops and suppliers, to do this though will require some sort of peg to fiat, until fiat is dead and buried, I know that sentence will be hugely unpopular, though in reality if I am going to be that shop owner, and sell a thousand $ worth of speakers via say btc, then go to replace them, and by the time I get to my supplier that btc is worth only $650 I am not going to risk it, and neither is any other business for now.

I am looking at this from the point of view as me still being that young guy in the shop today, and what I would or would not do, and that is how I have set out the above text, now I suppose I am asking you, the future of society, what are "your" solutions going to be, regards this complex problem? How will you peg this to take away the risk factor? If you pegged sbd say, would that make it viable to compete in a world wide market? maybe there is not enough sbd and maybe there never will be, though as this is just a start point, I thought it worth at least a mention.

When I shut the doors on that shop that I loved so much, it was because of all of the charges above, and a landlord that wanted more rent every 6 months, even though we were contracted differently. The computer was also largely to blame, I had picked it up from some auction place in town, it was ex office and a business machine, I first took the lid off and opened it up on day? yep day 1, and worked out what was doing what inside, I then noticed a shop spring up in the middle of Birmingham selling new and used computer parts, I only noticed it due to the queue outside being a thousand people long, all clutching old ram, and old drives of various disguises.

By the time I managed to get served in the shop, I was asked what computer I owned and what spec, I had it all in my memory and blurted the lot out from scsi drive to memory and beyond, (even had a floppy drive) I was shocked to find out every part of my computer could be upgraded, and more to the point, every week, from drives to ram, everything changed week to week. And that is where the thought was born to close down the hi-fi shop and sell computer parts instead.

I started building computers from home eventually and supplied them to friends and friends of friends, shops and even strangers in pubs, I cut out all the middlemen and all the fees also.

I know for a fact there are some brilliant minds on here, both young and old, and to the young especially, you have the world in your grasp, you can change it, you are going to need to stay one step ahead of the banks though, and implement a stable pegged crypto of one sort or another, to get away from these fraudsters who print fiat.

Images CC0 pixabay.
No animals were injured in the making of this article.
This is for amusement only and not financial advice.
Consult a doctor if you invest in any funny money I tell you to.