Wealth Creation – Money vs Wealth

In the previous blog post, we established how startups have come to be known as the ultimate medium for wealth creation. We also touched upon the interrelated concepts of innovation and idea creation.

If you still haven’t gone through part 1 of the series, you can read the full post AI Startups and Wealth Creation.

Since the topic of the series is ‘Wealth Creation in the Age of AI‘, it is important to understand what wealth actually means. During our previous discussion, we briefly touched upon the debate on money vs wealth. Today’s post expounds on this topic and helps us understand the actual concept of wealth.

Later on, in the final post of this series, we conclude the discussion with how the age of AI impact wealth creation.

Wealth is different from money

Let us get straight to the point. In the span of human history, money is a relatively new concept. On the other hand, wealth has been around since the very beginning. The simplest explanation of wealth is ‘something that we want’. This can be food, shelter, clothing, an automobile, the ability to travel to new places, or some tool or gadget. This list goes on and on. As a matter of fact, you can have wealth without having money.

For instance, a person having fruit trees in his backyard has wealth in the form of healthy, organic food. Alternatively, if you are stuck in a remote desert with piles of cash, you may have money but no wealth in the form of life-sustaining food.

Money is simply a means of accessing wealth. It emerged as a medium of exchange because bartering proved to be too inefficient. In earlier times, precious metals like gold were assigned a certain value. You could exchange your service or goods for it. Later on, it was replaced by paper money. While this was a radical improvement historically, as we entered modern times, some of its drawbacks started to become evident. We talk more about this later on.

Wealth is not limited

If we look around us we can see wealth everywhere. One of the great misconceptions that we are taught is that wealth is a finite resource. This is a false concept.

In terms of money, we may have a limited amount of money at a certain time but this concept does not hold for wealth. There is a prevalent notion that the top 1% has accumulated a large portion of the total wealth, but as a startup founder, this notion proves to be a fallacy. Startups create more wealth. You can take some existing raw materials and manufacture a product that benefits the end-users, and in doing so you have created more wealth. For instance, a craftsman creating a table out of wood is producing wealth.

In the digital age, wealth creation becomes even more interesting. A software developer writes a few hundred lines of code and produces an app. In doing so he has created wealth out of seemingly nothing. He is not taking any wealth away from someone to do this but in fact adding to the overall wealth of the world. These few lines of code can very well create wealth amounting to millions of dollars.

Each of us possesses wealth in the form of knowledge about how to prevent common diseases or illnesses. Access to medicine and vaccines for previously untreatable diseases is a form of wealth that researchers have given to the world. Compared to people of earlier times, we have immense wealth in the form of faster means of traveling and efficient communication networks. Just having access to these makes us immensely more wealthy as compared to someone who lived just a few decades ago. Open-source software is another example of wealth that we can access without paying anything.

The smart money movement

With Satoshi Nakamoto’s famous whitepaper, the concept of a new form of digital money really started to take root. With the world becoming a global village, previous forms of money transfer proved to be too slow and also had the drawback of having too many fees that went to middlemen like financial institutions and banks.

Powered by blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies offer a much more transparent way of wealth transfer. Nowadays NFTs allowed artists and creators to get more value for their previously underappreciated artwork and generate substantial wealth.

Blockchain technology has really ushered in a new age of portable, digital money. It has brought a disruption in the financial systems and is fostering new innovation at a rapid pace. This ‘digital gold’ will truly play a key role in wealth creation and wealth transfer in the coming times.

Openfabric aiding wealth creation

With the age of artificial intelligence, new and exciting possibilities for wealth creation have emerged. Leveraging the power of the latest technologies, you can create solutions that offer immense value to end-users. This allows you to generate wealth that was simply not possible before.

Openfabric.ai provides you with all the necessary tools to make the most of Artificial Intelligence technology. By giving easy access to the world of AI and the powerful distributed ledger blockchain technology, the Openfabric platform gives new meaning to the term wealth creation.

To learn more about the latest developments at Openfabric, stay tuned to our Twitter.

Now that we have a better understanding of the topics of startups and wealth creation, we will conclude our discussion in the upcoming article on how technology has proven to be the ultimate leveler in today’s world.