A monetary system without money?

Listening to METADREAMER talk about value in a post scarcity society got me thinking. If money is just a means of transferring between things of value, can we design a monetary system without money?

Lets make a small example:

“A customer goes into a supermarket and buys 1kg of potatoes. Later the supermarket gets a delivery for 1kg to replenish what they sold”

In this example there are two transactions. First the customer pays the supermarket then the supermarket pays for the delivery. Using money this would look like:

Each transaction exchanges goods and services for money. It is a simple system that we are used to, but there are some risks with it.

• Inflation — Most money lose value over time. If other parts of the economy goes bad that will effect the value of out money.
• Price — If the price of potatoes increases after the customer buys them the store might not have enough funds to replenish their stokes.

Can we design a system where these risks are mitigated? Instead of paying with money we pay with what the other parties need. The most common such system is a barter system, where we pay with goods and services.

For the supermarket to be able to sell potatoes to the customer, they need to know that they will be able to replenish their potatoes, as well as make some profits. Lets invent a delivery protocol where the customer can buy a future delivery of potatoes and give to the supermarket in exchange for the potatoes they want to buy.

For this to work we need a way to tokenize the future potato delivery so that the customer can give it to the store in exchange for potatoes. We do this with the POT token. Using POT a store can tokenize future deliveries. It could work like this:

1. The store puts a POT option for a delivery of 10kg of potatoes. They also specify the profits that they want and any security guarantees that they want to see they delivery firm taking.
2. A delivery firm sees the POT option and decides that they could deliver those 10kgs of potatoes if needed. They then mint 10 nPOT buy locking in the stores profits and makes them available for purchase.
3. The customer buys 1 nPOT from the delivery firm and exchanges it for potatoes. This is all automated by the users wallet, all they need to think about is what they want to pay with, a routing algorithm takes care of the rest.
4. At the end of the day the store burns their nPOT signaling that they would like that delivery. Whey they burn it they get the profits locked in by the delivery firm

We have made a system that looks more complex but is more declarative. The parties are always stating their needs instead of their wants. But the main benefit of such a system is what METADREAMER stated, we have limited the risk to our economy as a whole, there is no centralized good, (money) that imposes a risk on the rest of the system.

Thank you for making it this far. If you think the ideas above are wack please leave a comment!