The dismal science has, momentarily, become a little less lugubrious thanks to a lively discourse as to whether the sarkari digital rupee is in any way related to the non-sarkari (some may say anti-sarkari) forms of lucre: cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, litecoin and ethereum. The digital rupee, and other government-backed e-currencies, as well as cryptocurrencies, obviate the need for physical pelf by way of banknotes and specie, and are meant to make commercial transactions easier and faster, in an evolutionary process which will eventually lead to the monetary utopia of a cashless world.
Government currencies, or fiat currencies may be likened to PSUs, or Public Sector Undertakings, while cryptos could be compared with PSOs, or Private Sector Overtakings, which seek to bypass all regulatory mechanisms except those of the free market. But both instruments of exchange are based on a confidence trick, in which we are all complicit – that is, crypto, or secret, to the point which make the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece look like a user-friendly, manual for a DIY assembly kit for an Ikea cot.
All currency notes are promissory notes, or IOUs. In India banknotes ‘promise to pay the bearer the sum of xx rupees’ followed by the RBI governor’s signature. The note in itself is not xx rupees; it is only a guarantee that this sum will be paid to its possessor. But what is the sum, or the worth, of xx rupees? By what criteria is this sum arrived at, and what does it stand for by way of tangible goods or commodities?
When paper currency began to supplement coins in Britain some 300 years ago, each promissory note was backed by the country’s gold reserve. But when countries went off the gold standard, the US officially doing so in the mid-1960s, the actual worth of money became a commonly accepted fable, like a child’s belief in the existence of Santa Claus. Money is worth only the paper it’s printed on. Or, rather, worth the confidence we have, by conspiratorial consent, in the paper that bears its denomination.
Just how misplaced such confidence can be has been shown by the bouts of hyperinflation nations have suffered, as post-World War 1 Germany did when a wheelbarrow of bank notes was required to buy a loaf of bread. With the entrance of cryptos and digital currencies, money has morphed into a flicker on a screen, a firefly dance in the reaches of cyberspace.
Perhaps it’s to cloak the open secret that money has only the illusory value we ascribe to it that we surround it with so many slang synonyms, like a thieves’ cant of code words. However, the jury is still out as to why the British pound should be called a ‘quid’. Does it come from ‘li-quid assets’ as some have hazarded, or from the Latin ‘quid pro quo’, which means ‘something for something’. Americanisms like ‘bread’ and ‘dough’ are of obvious provenance, money now being seen as the Biblical staff of life. Bollywood has popularised the Bambaiya ‘bhai’ use of ‘peti’ to denote a lakh of rupees, ‘khokha’ for a crore, and ‘tijori’ for 100 crore, useful terms when conducting cache-and-carry property deals, or brokering hush-hush political horse-trading.
All of which is another way of saying that money ain’t what it’s said to be.
