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Loyalty to Our Currencies
Constructing our economic realities
By Win Mekhaaphirak, OmiseGO Business Development Manager
 As the Business Development Manager at OmiseGO, I’m responsible for generating business from identified opportunities and implementing growth strategies to create value for shareholders. Before OmiseGO, I worked in the finance industry and it enabled me to see great potential in leveraging technology to improve financial inclusion globally.
OmiseGO is on a mission to reshape our economic realities by enabling people to securely access financial services, invest, exchange and spend digital assets anytime, anywhere through the OmiseGO platform. In order for me to create solutions pragmatically, to reach this goal of financial inclusion, I have to understand how facets of the financial industry have developed. In finance something that has always intrigued me is how humans developed systems of trade over time. Looking into the history of mankind’s economic activity we can see that our current centralized and trusted institutions all developed from realities and truths that we created collectively, but really have no bearing in the natural world.
Constructing Our Economic Realities
One of the most awe-inspiring human traits is the ability to imagine, to create new and fictional realities. As long as everybody believes in this same fiction, everyone obeys and follows the same rules and norms. Within the realms of economics and finance, this is manifested through the representation of value, including tokens, paper money, and gold bars. A one hundred Thai banknote is intrinsically valueless, but owing to supply and demand mechanics along with government decree that the banknote is legal tender, we attribute value to it.
However, money hasn’t always existed in the form of paper, coins, or gold bars. Way back in the ninth millennium BCE in ancient Egypt and sixth millennium BCE in Mesopotamia, money or any type of medium of exchange has yet to exist. Barter was the go-to method, where people directly exchanged one good–often livestock or produce– for another. One of the biggest issues related to this method was the double coincidence of wants problem, where A must have what B wants and B must have what A wants. For instance, if A has six dozen eggs and B has one cow and both agree on the terms, barter can take place. But what happens when B doesn’t want eggs or only has one cow and can’t take apart his cow? The inability to subdivide certain goods, lack of a double coincidence of wants, and a lack of a standard unit of account are serious challenges and limitations posed by barter.
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