As energy has a usefulness and intrinsic value that even gold lacks. It could be traded anonymously like cash like batteries as dollars or as energy storage and quick and efficient transfers becomes smaller and more convenient. Im thinking specifically electrical energy with batteries and capacitors but even gas could be used.
It could be created by individuals with solar panels or bike mounted generators. It could be stored as potential energy in large amounts as heat or pressure and then converted back to electrical energy when needed. It could be networked for large transfers. There could even be large banks that hold energy as a business, but they would not be able to lend more than they hold. Private individual energy storage would be the most secure from government or other seizure obviously.
Wheres the flaw?
holding/storing energy is not trivial, especially in bulk.
batteries are environmentally expensive.
and if everybody was doing it, you would never make enough to buy your food.
Im not sure I understand this. The free market would still exist, the farmer would trade the food for energy, and he couldnt charge a kWh that nobody could afford.
There is no infrastructure to store energy in a meaningful format. What is one batteries worth of energy worth? It takes about one minute for a single solar panel to charge a AA sized battery for example. How many AA's can you carry around in your pocket?
While I don't disagree that it may be possible at some point in the future for energy to be a viable medium of exchange, we are no where near that capacity at this time.
Ok so AAs could be coins in this system and car batteries could be bills.
If we get to a point where something the size of a couple AAs could pay for groceries for the week, we will have arrived, right?
It takes ONE MINUTE for a solar panel to charge a AA battery. That is a SINGLE solar panel. That solar panel costs about a hundred dollars or so in initial investment and lasts 20-30 years. We would need for AA's to be about a million times more energy dense to be viable as a storage medium. And that assumes that people would need energy as we currently do. If energy was currency, then everyone would be mining it. If everyone is mining something, and the technology for that mining gets better and better all the time (as these things do) how many people will need more?