A Revolution in Money

Imagine it’s 2040.

You go to the grocery store, and when you look for the checkout counter there is none. There’s no place to pay for your groceries because you already did.

When you walked into the store, a sensor identified you, perhaps from a ring or watch you were wearing that transmitted the information. Or perhaps you didn’t need to wear anything special. Maybe a device in the store figured out who you were using a combination of facial recognition, 3-D body shape identification and your gait.

Your unique identifier is attached to your digital wallet, which transmits payment for the groceries directly to the store. But you don’t pay in dollars. Your wallet has a dozen digital currencies in it, all with different values based on a variety of factors, including loyalty programs. At certain stores, you might pay with their version of frequent-flier miles. At others, you might pay with the equivalent of a virtual credit card â€" except the credit card isn’t issued by a traditional bank.

You might also pay with credit that you received through a peer-to-peer online exchange that connects investors with people seeking short- and long-term loans. That’s how you got your mortgage and financed your self-driving car, too.

Welcome to the future, courtesy of the minds of some of the sharpest futurists around. The scenes just described may sound as if they came from a futuristic movie or an episode of “The Jetsons.” Yet, that’s just a middle-of-the-road view of the future; it gets wilder from here.

If the last three decades revolutionized the information and telecommunications industries, the next three may upend the basic tenets of finance: currency, credit and banks, as well as payment and transmission systems. Your children may even ask you, “What was it like to see that old-fashioned building called a bank?”

In recent years, we’ve already begun to see hints of an impending overhaul: the emergence of Bitcoin and the ecosystem growing around it; the adoption of peer-to-peer lending businesses like Lending Club; and the introduction of Square, the payment system, to name just a few.

And even if you believe Bitcoin is no more than a fad â€" and that may well be, given its volatility, security issues and potential regulatory challenges â€" it has raised the prospect of new virtual currencies and, at the least, cheaper and more efficient transaction mechanisms.

“Money is a very interesting philosophical idea in that we have all of humanity agreeing on this system,” said Ray Kurzweil, a futurist, inventor and author. “So even though we may radically disagree on some things â€" like let’s say the U.S. government and Al Qaeda â€" they both respect money. So it’s remarkable how we have this universal respect for this very esoteric virtual construct.”

Several prominent dreamers, including Marc Andreessen, who led the team that invented the first commercial web browser, say they believe that new virtual currencies will come to dominate the way we pay for things in the future. “Bitcoin offers a sweeping vista of opportunity to reimagine how the financial system can and should work in the Internet era, and a catalyst to reshape that system,” he wrote recently.

Mr. Kurzweil, however, is not so sure how easy it will be for new currencies to emerge. “We’ve built up respect for currencies associated with nations,” he said. “People respect dollars, mostly, I think, because of the track record, relative stability.”

Other futurists suggest that there will be dozens of ways to pay for products.

“We are going to have individually issued currencies. We already have corporations issuing currency: frequent-flier miles, although people don’t see them as that from a legal perspective,” said Heather Schlegel, a futurist and social scientist who recently started a project called the Future of Money as an online documentary series supported through â€" what else â€" Kickstarter, a crowdsourced investment tool.

Ms. Schlegel is hoping to explore various new payment methods, transactions and what it all means. Some of her exploration is beyond anything we can comprehend today: She considers, for example, the kind of manipulation of the subconscious that happens in the 2010 movie “Inception” as something that could really happen in the future.

For all the promise of new currencies and transaction systems, there is a long trail of failed efforts. In 1998, a virtual currency called Beenz was introduced. Customers earned Beenz when they visited certain websites and shopped at certain online stores. It had the backing of investors like Lawrence Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle. But for all its promise, it went bust by 2001.

Flooz was another currency born during the dot-com era that ended as quickly as it arrived, as did Internetcash.com. E-gold, a virtual currency backed by gold, also failed. All of them were plagued by some customers trying to use them for illicit purposes.

While the future of currency may be the biggest question mark around finance, shifts in the plumbing of transactions and the future of banks may be the most transformative.

What happens when you no longer need a bank to provide capital? Instead, investors and those looking for credit â€" individuals and businesses â€" meet online. Is that a real possibility? What are the regulatory ramifications? Are we more interconnected or less? Where will people store money in the future? And will it be safe?

These are the questions that fill not only the minds of today’s executives but also the minds of social scientists and investors in Silicon Valley.

Of course, while the future may look different, it may turn out to be familiar.

“Maybe nothing is going to change, really,” Ms. Schlegel said. “Maybe a lot of these new concepts are going to get rolled into the dollar and the dollar will evolve slightly, because what’s happening is all these new ideas will put pressure on the dollar to kind of be different.”

Andrew Ross Sorkin is the editor at large of DealBook. Twitter: @andrewrsorkin