How do you pay for things in a shop? Perhaps you like the tangible reliability of hard cash? Maybe the financial flexibility of a credit card suits you better? Or perhaps you prefer the simple convenience of a smartphone?
商店里的物品你怎么付款？也许你喜欢现金这种可触摸的可靠性？也许信用卡的财务灵活度更适合你？或者你更喜欢智能手机的简单方便？
Whatever you use today, experts believe all these methods could soon become outdated. Instead, we will use our bodies: our eyes, our fingerprints, even our mere presence in the store. In fact it's happening already. Amazon are trialling stores which have no checkouts, where technology tracks the items you've taken from the shelves and deducts the total from your account when you leave the shop.
无论你今天使用什么，专家们相信所有这些方法很快就会过时。取而代之的是，我们将使用我们的身体：我们的眼睛，我们的手指，甚至我们在商店里实际的存在。事实上，这已经是这样了。亚马逊正在试开无结账台的商店，采取技术手段跟踪你从货架上取走的物件，当你离开商店时，自动从你的账户上扣除。
French supermarket Monoprix takes a different path: you choose your groceries and leave them with a human cashier. You then leave the shop while the cashier tallies up your bill, charges your account, and organises delivery to your home.
法国超市Momoprix采取不同的方法：你选取你的杂货食品，放在一个人工收银台，收款员收取你的货款，给你找零，你就可以离开商店了，超市安排快递到你家。
Amir Sajed, chief executive of Barclaycard, told the BBC that such new developments spell the end of the plastic credit card. Instead, wearable items such as rings, bracelets and keychains will carry chips that allow shoppers to " seamlessly shop, going between the web, an app or in store," he says.
布克莱首席执行官阿米尔该告诉BBC，这些新产品意味着塑料信用卡的终结，取而代之的是可穿戴物品，比如戒指，手镯和钥匙扣等，它们带有芯片，让购物者进入处于网络，APP或者实物店的不间断商店。
And while all the above payment methods are underpinned by accounts held in traditional currencies, let's not forget the rise of alternatives such as Litecoin. Such virtual currencies can rise in value very quickly, but are also susceptible to crashes and threats from hackers. Who knows, perhaps something totally new will take off that changes money as we know it? One such possibility is explored in the movie In Time. It imagines a futuristic society in which the currency is time itself, where people trade the amount of time they have left to live.
虽然上述付款方式是支撑在传统货币账户上，让我们不要忘记莱特币的兴起，这样的虚拟货币可以很快升值，但是容易崩溃，会受黑客的威胁。谁知道呢？也许今天某些东西会突然成功并且改变我们所熟悉的货币系统？这样的可能性已经出现在电影《IN TIME》中，可以想象未来的社会货币就是时间本身，在那时，人们可以用剩下的生命时间进行交易。
Or perhaps we'd do better to wind back the clock to the simpler financial world of the barter economy. While the term conjures images of sacks of grain and herds of sheep being exchanged in ancient times, there are signs that bartering is making a comeback in today's world of modern technology. Startup Let's Barter India has developed an app which facilitates the exchange of goods, and already has around 100,000 members.
也许我们最好回到过去，来到简单的以物易物的经济时代，联想到古代可以用来交易的一袋袋谷物以及羊群，有迹象表明在当今现代化科技时代以物易物再度兴起。
Maybe the only thing we know for certain is that money will keep evolving.
也许我们唯一知道的事情是金钱在不断进化。
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