Europol and CIA engage in data mining in the SWIFT system [DE]
fm4.orf.at
fm4.orf.at
Even though they've been using the dollar for hundreds of years, it was originally the Spanish peso (dollars are Spanish silver pesos, you could get off a Spanish galleon and spend your coins with "$" designs on the back without going to a money-changer in America, that was the money), and get this--for all their sins, Spaniards never debased their currency during their empire. I think they're unique in that regard. It was generally made of the same grade of silver (work with me here) and it was kept up for centuries. Yeah they had a mine that was half of world production and yeah they pillaged and violed and all, all that shit the Inquisition everything, but a peso is a peso, the dollar was a dollar, and the whole world used that as its currency.
Or you know what? Actually printed dollars, paper is the new gold. Meant they had to use up real ink, and they hotted up the printer, actual cotton, wow, what millennium is it again? Printed dollars, the lower the denomination the better, that's how you store value.
I think "Money is a sign of poverty." [1] But we're in that difficult, long, transitory stage between universal scarcity and it becomes more obvious that post-scarcity is within practical reach. Kind of like that period when people suspected powered flight was theoretically possible from watching birds, but it wasn't obvious how to practically achieve it.
We just witnessed that the entirety of mankind's manufactured goods could be theoretically produced in a tiny landmass compared to the whole globe, at ridiculously low prices and high quality, with energy and raw goods inputs coordinated in a supply chain of dizzying sophistication but it isn't obvious yet how to make that work for us towards post-scarcity as that condition isn't a light switch and no one knows the map showing the road through the precursor elements.
[1] https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Money_implies_poverty