THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

2020: Complementary currencies represent 20% of total domestic
trade in the most advanced countries.
There are of course countries around the world which have
forcefully maintained the monopoly of national currencies, and
turned their back to the new possibilities offered by the Money Wave
and the cyber economy, The results of this are similar to what
happened to countries - like China - that chose to block the
development of railways during the early Industrial Revolution.
They delayed the Industrial Revolution by almost a century, but at
great cost to their population and their influence in the world. They
became the 'Less Developed Countries' (LDCs) of the 20th century.
Today, people are similarly choosing who will become the
'Information Deprived Countries' (IDCs) of the 21st century.
Knowing the monetary system, which would best support
Sustainable Abundance, we can now fully understand what was
underlying the vignettes of 'The Four Seasons of 2020' (Chapter 1), as
well as tile four scenarios (Chapter 4). Both will now be briefly
revisited.
The Four Seasons of 2020 revisited
This book started with a description of a Time-Compacting
Machine and Four vignettes, which captured the possibilities, offered
by Sustainable Abundance in people's lives by the year 2020. They
were synthesised as in Figure 9-10.
At that time, I acknowledged that some of these stories may have
appeared as 'magic', unreal fairy tales for adults. By now, the
monetary technologies, which underlie each one of these ‘magic’
stories, have been demystified.