Blur thinking about the future of money and payments, kilowat-hour as new money and how it can affect ILP Routing.

One of the reasons money do exists is that exchange of goods many times was slow (just one of the reasons).

I think that due to the natural evolution of technology, we are becomming more and more dependent of electricity and its power supply, that is nothing more than another good merchants can "play with". Transport, industry, software, internet, services, blockchains, IA, robots, ... *all of them require more and more electricity and less and less of "anything else"*.
In less than a century the skills humans have developed to profit from electricity is changing everything.

The courious thing about this, is that *electricity can be faster to move than money*, so it could be the case that in a future electricity can compete side-by-side with "money". It has also some of the goods of blockchain. It's difficult to tamper it. Nobody can fake a 1Gigawatt power supply, since as in the block-chain case, you need a too much energy to cheat the others.

Energy also as some other "goodies". It's price is very stable respect to its local fiat-money in dolars and euros, since it's production indirectly depends on many other variables and even state-funded infraestructures.

I'm thinking that anyone could be more interested in a future in buying electricity "assets" than fiat-currencies, crypto-currencies, gold, coal, crude-oil or anything else, because is *electricity is becoming a warrant*, event from a very basic survival point of view ( http://fareastgizmos.com/led/new-led-farm-capable-harvesting-1-5-times-vegetable-unveiled-injapan.php ).

It could be the case than more and more companies accept "electricity assets" (or any other siminal finalcial "stuff") as a valid payment methods. The kilowat-hour can become a more real thing than a dolar paper. Also people can be more and more interested in producing its own electricity that will even make the price more stable and, contrary to the blockchain, that electricity will not be wasted in "just mining" but used for non-financial purposes (and people outside the speculative market of financial crypto-currencies will really appreciate).

What this all has to do with Interledger?

I think that if the future move in this way, peers who want to send a transfer, let's say, in dolars from US to Pesos in Mexico, can be more and more biased to use electricity as stable exchange. This could affect the algorithms used for routing. For example, to search for a route it will be sensible to search for a route like:

  dolar <-> kilowat-hour in US <-> kilowat-hour in Mexico <-> Mexican Peso

since it's to be expected that kilowat-hour in different countries will converge.

In this way *routing will be lead by the assets in the midst*, with electricity as flagship and connectors trying to find the faster/sorter path to a kilowat-hour highway, then fallback to anything else.


Regards,

Enrique



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