Roughly eight percent of the global currency actually exists as physical cash, meaning the overwhelming majority of the money in the world is just a collective hallucination stored on bank servers.

A closer look

Roughly eight percent of the global currency actually exists as physical cash, meaning the overwhelming majority of the money in the world is just a collective hallucination stored on bank servers. When you check your savings account, you are not looking at a vault full of gold coins or stacks of crisp bills; you are looking at a completely imaginary number sitting in a database vulnerable to solar flares and caffeinated hackers. We essentially abandoned the concept of tangible value decades ago in favor of typing zeroes into electronic ledgers, making the global economy nothing more than a high-stakes multiplayer video game. It is oddly comforting to realize your crushing financial anxiety is based entirely on made-up math!