Negroponte on the Future of Money...P2P2P

Information Week is running a 25 Years feature, that includes an article by Bill Gates 'The Enduring Magic Of Software' and a typically whacky piece (via Techdirt) by Nicholas Negroponte 'Peer-To-Peer Payoff':

"Without question, the generation of kids born a quarter of a century hence will have totally different views about some of the most basic tenets of society, from love and family to business and pleasure. Of these basic elements, I have chosen to focus on one: money. How will transactions change over the next 25 years? Perhaps surprisingly...

...most stunning change will be peer-to-peer, and peer-to-peer-to-peer- ... transaction of goods and services. If you fish and want your teeth cleaned, you need to find a dentist who needs fish, which is so unlikely that money works much better. But if a chauffeur wanted fish and the dentist wanted a driver, the loop is closed. While this is nearly impossible to do in the physical world, it's trivial in cyberspace. Add the fact that some goods and services themselves can be in digital form, and it gets easier and more likely."

I confess to being a fan of Negroponte especially his early Wired writings...he either gets things wildly wrong (see his 1993 'Debunking Bandwidth: From Shop Talk to Small Talk' & 1996 'The Future of Books'), wonderfully right (1995 'Electronic Word of Mouth'), or just the plain wacky (1995 Wearable Computing).