What if we had a currency that was always backed by something solidly valuable? There's the gold standard, but even gold is only as valuable as we're willing to pay for it. It's a useless soft metal too rare to use in conductive wires. I say we should make a currency of energy! Energy, or at least, useful energy is what we use to do stuff, it's what we value. To be specific, we value work, or work over time known as power. (The Physics definition of energy is just a measure of how much stuff there is, not what we can do with it.) It takes units of power, or watts to make our food. It takes watts to power our machines. It takes watts for us to move, and watts for us to alter our environment for better or for worse.
All currencies, from pesos to dinars to dollars, can be minted at will. They represent a promise and the authority of a government, both of which are very weak, unstable, and prone to sudden failure. But if you exchange your currency for its equivalent in watts or joules (not sure which...?), then suddenly you have a currency that will never inflate, and will never collapse. The ratio of any country's currency to its equivalent in watts is an objective measure of the success and prosperity, and authority of that country. The more power a country has, the more watts per money unit.
When we first used the barter system, we thought in watts. We valued what we could get out of our neighbor's products, what we could do with them, and traded one for the other. Service for service, product for product, labor for labor, power for power.
Time is important too, because if I take your crops, and give you watts in electricity to compensate, then you can use a sun lamp to grow more crops, but it will take time. You might starve before you can get your crops to grow. Joules measure work, which is force applied over a distance. Watts measure Joules per second, or time. So plants are inherently limited in how many watts they can receive, because otherwise they'll get incinerated by the concentrated burst of light. Therefore you can oppose people who take your plants away more than you can spare, because they physically cannot repay you in watts since you would only be able to consume so many joules every second.
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