Fortunately deaths are only a fraction of the accidents though, and it's not even necessarily the kind of accident that bothers insurance companies the most as long as the driver only kills himself.
You know what else entitles you to two tons of lumber? Cash in the amount of two tons of lumber. That transaction even goes into a database for the business reporting.
That relies on a third party to maintain the value of the currency. Maybe I'd prefer to minimise my dependence on third parties. The crypto ecosystem makes it much easier to trade six cows for two tons of lumber and offload all of the exchange risk to speculators. It still can't enforce the physical exchange of goods, but it can atomically negotiate a swap from anything to anything through as many intermediaries as required. With a suitable transaction fee — which may come out of the transaction inputs.
A cryptocurrency system can negotiate that my six cow NFTs (which are not jpegs, I guarantee they are exchangeable for cows) for two Ethereum, of which 0.05 is taken as a fee and 1.95 flows on to Uniswap to buy Home Depot coin which buys two tonnes of lumber at a specific location and time. Except oh dear — Home Depot only trades on Polygon. Well then my 1.95 ether is bridged to Polygon where my 1.94 wrapped ether is traded for 9999999 POL and then for Home Depot coins. Or I buy wrapped Home Depot coins atomically on Ethereum and then unwrap them back to Polygon.
Crucially it all happens automatically.
That infra doesn't exist since cows and lumber aren't being traded on a blockchain, but it's the kind of thing that could be enabled.
Since I only hold ETH, WETH and POL during the transaction, their absolute value doesn't matter.
You just replaced one currency with at least three and who knows whether it's a company-store type situation or rugpull where suddenly the currency has zero value.
CDs were around $16 in 2000, which is equivalent to around $30 today, which is around 2.3 times what a Spotify premium subscription costs for one person.
Equivalently, a Spotify premium subscription in 2000 would be a little under $7.
I guarantee that if you asked young adults in 2000 if they would be interested in a subscription that lets them listen to nearly everything available on CD, at any time, as often as they wished, for $7/month they would have been ecstatic.
Same for DVDs, which were typically in the $20-25 range for new releases in 2000. They would not have been quite as happy as they would have been with Spotify because of the way video is split among several streaming services, but it would still be seen as a tremendous improvement.
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