The perfect currency

Have you ever thought about what would make the perfect currency? I mean what would it's attributes be? First it would be impossible to counterfeit. And it would require little to no effort to maintain this immunity to counterfeiting. It would be durable, portable, easily broken down into smaller and smaller denominations and of course it would have to be accepted widely.

The objective with this is to have the total dollar (or whatever the currency is to be called) amount to be an inflexible value; neither increasing or decreasing. We're talking about currency - the money we use to trade with not a value assigned to anything we might possess. In other words; you yourself could go from being worth 20,000 to 2,000,000 but the total value of all currency in circulation would remain the same. You could be owed x amount but that doesn't effect the total value of currency in circulation; as whatever you lent is still out there somewhere.

In all labor there is profit. What if every work a man did every effort all the hard work and labor the gifts talents and skills the ideas the services provided the things created added value to the economy. Well actually they do now but they have to do so much to make up for inflation to just break even before we really see it as added to the economy. But if we had zero inflation then we would start getting deflation. The money would become worth more and more not less and less. After a while a Pennie could do what a dollar does now. Then after a while what 20 dollars does now. After a while we would need to come up with a smaller denomination.

So getting back to the objective of the 'perfect' currency. So when the rate of deflation eventually makes say a Pennie worth what 2o is worth now (that's an increase in value of 2,000 times) well first if you had saved just 20$ when this started it would now be worth 40,000$ in yesterdays dollars. Second with such high deflation (high deflation is good) we'll need a smaller currency denomination. This will be done by fractioning the currency into smaller units not by adding smaller units to the circulation of currency. In other words turn in a Pennie and get 10 of the new denomination which is worth a tenth of a Pennie. This is where it becomes important for the currency to be easily broken down into smaller and smaller denominations with out loosing its other attributes.

Now in our system of government the constitution tasks the federal government with regulating the value of the dollar. And regardless it would be impossible to implement a currency and a system like this without the support of the government. Still an Ideal currency would be able to maintain the inflexible currency circulation unit value without active work by the government. This is ideal because a currency dependant on the government for its regulation can just as easily be manipulated and corrupted by that same government as is the case now. Perhaps its time for an additional layer to our constitutional checks on government; one that would guard the economy from being screwed-up and miss used by the government. Oh wait we don't honor the current/original checks or the whole bloody constitution for that matter. -- err umm - Sorry for the laps into sarcastic depression.

Now I want to discuss two options; things that exist today and potentially could be modified to fit the ideal for a currency.

Gold
Gold (or any precious metal) is durable and portable. It is somewhat hard to counterfeit (you would have to mint your own coins making a gold alloy or diluting it with some cheap metal. Now a purity level could be set that would fix so many ounces of such and such purity of gold to be worth x amount of dollars. Now because metals have a specific density you could test coins to see if it has the proper amount of gold or is it just gold plated etc. But that is not really different then what we have now. Paper dollars can be identified as counterfeit. And if the counterfeit is not immediately identified then the counterfeiter gets away with theft.
So gold is not completely immune to counterfeit and another problem is that it is dependant on a commodity.

Here is an example of why currency based on a commodity is not the best. Pennies used to be mostly copper until the price of copper got so high (driven by demand for electronics) they had to be switched to zinc with a copper coating. Another example is the gold rushes; there was runaway inflation not because of counterfeit coins but because there was this vast increase in the total circulation of currency. Thus if you were saving while this was happening your coins would become worth less and less. Ok so we could make it so that it doesn't matter what a coin is made out of just what it looks like. We would no longer have a problem with it being based on a commodity; but it would be much easier to counterfeit.

Electronic credits
Credits would be durable, portable and extremely easy to break down into smaller units. It could be made very easy to track the total amount of currency in circulation thus ensuring that it remained constant.
Drawback open to manipulation/data faults

Now if you did all this you'd be well on your way to ending inflation. Of course you'd have to end Debt first. By debt I mean the borrowing of - insane amounts never to be paid back that didn't really exist in the first place money - stuff like fractional reserve banking or the government borrowing from itself to pay its debts. All stuff like that there is theft; legalized theft. Its why counterfeiting is wrong (not just because government says it's wrong) because - someone somewhere says I need money for xyz... BOOM presto there now I have money. They haven't done any work or created anything they haven't added anything of value to the world; so what that means is now my money is worth that much less. That is inflation - it is theft - and it is wrong.