One interesting aspect of the Ripple system is that of the three or four functions of money, it really only functions as a medium of exchange. The other functions (unit of account, store of value and standard of deferred payment) aren't really covered at all, nor considered in its design.
Of course, traditional money is also not doing so well on all those functions; with the usual practice of aiming for mild, steady inflation, traditional money isn't much good at all as a store of value and needs to be re-calculated to be useful as a unit of account (adjusted for inflation for past amounts, discounted for future amounts) for all but the most immediate of transactions. Despite traditional money not being directly useful for those functions, they still affect its usefulness as a medium of exchange, so that areas or communities with a lack (or surplus) of money in its storage function suffer suboptimal results in the medium-of-exchange function — sometimes to the extent of engendering local or community currencies in an effort to patch over the mismatch.
I wonder to what extent it would be desirable and/or possible to de-couple one or more of these functions.
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