One$ and Zero$

In the 1960s I worked as a counterman at Royal Castle cooking and serving hamburgers. Countermen were also the cashiers who would collect the money and make change. One day a man handed me a $10 bill that looked phony. It was an impressive bill, but it looked strange to my 17-year-old eyes. I asked an older employee if they thought the bill was OK. A quick glance at the bill and they assured me it was fine.

That bill was a gold certificate issued in 1928 as one of the last of its kind before America went off the gold standard. Regular bills were then called silver certificates before those were replaced with federal reserve notes. If memory serves, gold was fixed at around $35 an ounce until it was allowed to fluctuate.

All of this is background brings us to today when nothing backs our money other than a government promise of its value. Most of us don’t even use cash anymore except as a matter of convenience. Today we spend ones and zeros. Our “cash” in the bank is a set of binary numbers stored in a computer. With the exception of the 147.3 million ounces of gold stored in Fort Knox, our economy is nothing more than information. That information has value.

Our lives and livelihoods can be reduced to a set of digital ones and zeros stored in a collection of computers around the world. Some of that information revolves around our cash but businesses have found that personal information has value too. Companies often offer other things of value in order to get your personal information. Who you are, what you do, are you sick or healthy, do you like gardening, what are your hobbies, what are your political leanings, these are all bits of valuable information.

Watching a British-made film the other day I heard the term, “hoover up.” Having grown up with a Hoover vacuum, I understood that it meant to consume something quickly. Imagine my concern when it was reported that Elon Musk and his DOGE Boys were “hoovering up” one of our national treasures and sending it via their Starlink network to parts unknown. They were sometimes forcibly entering federal facilities where they would break into computer systems to offload data under the guise of looking for waste and corruption.

While most would agree that there is certainly some waste in government, why was it necessary to move that information to a secret location for analysis? Could this priceless commodity be used for other purposes? Who now has access to our personal data? Did some of it end up in Moscow? Beijing? Starbase, Texas (Musk headquarters)? Mar-a-Lago? I think the only place that could be considered safe on that list is the last one as Trump isn’t clever enough to know what to do with the data. I’m sure Trump’s BFF Elon will share.

We manage our personal finances with computers protected by passwords, pin numbers, fingerprints, and facial digital data. Now, Elon Musk, his designees, and anyone else capable of monitoring a digital satellite uplink, may now have enough access to enough information to put that personal data at risk. Now we have Trump and family getting into the crypto market as it is untraceable currency that makes money laundering and political payoffs easier.