An economy is when a group of individuals decide to interact in some sort of transaction during a specific time. At least this is how many people view the definition of an economy. Typically, these economies will exchange services and goods using a form of currency that is unique to the area. In ancient times the form of currency was some valuable good such as salt, silver, or gold.
You can trace currencies back to when ancient civilizations started to rise up on this Earth. The Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Syrians, and many others had some form of coins and other currencies to exchange for food, shelter, weapons, and other valuables.
Today, we are in a global economy and currencies are exchanged on the open market in real time in microseconds. It is a far contrast to what was in place thousands of years ago. Right now, many economies outsource their labor to other countries to produce goods they need to sell on their shores. This has caused a boom in the international trade and has allowed peace to thrive for far longer if this weren’t in place.
Currently, the global economy is transacted through U.S. Dollars and as such about 95% of the world’s transactions go through U.S. central banks. It is this ability of the United States to cause havoc in the world and allows the U.S. to have some weight to the sanctions it places on other countries.
Some have said the wars in the future will be economic and fought through cyberspace. The economy of the world is rapidly becoming vulnerable to various instabilities such as distributed denial of service attacks and various hacks performed by countries and organized crime syndicates throughout the world. These vulnerabilities make transactions in this new economy difficult to maintain and more stable and reliable currencies may have to be put into place.
Rumors of various countries going back to a gold standard are rampant these days. Clearly, there is some desire for nations to do this as it would solidify their currencies in the world economy and perhaps even break the United States dollar’s dominance. The ramifications of this change are yet to become apparent and it is uncertain if this would be a positive change or not, after all the status quo has been working for at least five decades or more.
How we may define an economy in the future may be far different than we do today. History has shown how rapidly the human population can expand and evolve our governments and economies worldwide. The emergence of crypto currencies is another aspect that has shown to be of some interest in the world. The evolution of bitcoin and its variants are a popular alternative to transacting in the economy as opposed to just using a countries currency that has been a standard for a couple centuries or more.
Clearly, there are many forces at play with the global economy. There are many players in this game and it is difficult to determine who will become the ultimate winner. Most of the front runners turned out to be in a bubble that burst, like that dot com, and after that many directory websites backed by venture capital firms, etc. These days they are getting more popular in Ireland for example, where you can search for any typ of doctor from dentist in Dublin to any other doctor in any other major city in Ireland. The best bet than would be to invest in a solid currency alternative that is recognized worldwide.