In Vedic times, barter was common and wealth was measured in terms of land and cows. But Srila Prabhupada thought a gold standard was a good idea for contemporary exchange. Unfortunately, the gold standard was degraded to a silver standard and then to a paper standard. One who has vast piles of paper money is considered ‘wealthy.’ In more recent times, however, even such paper wealth has been abandoned for electronic storage and transfers. Trillions of dollars are now exchanged daily worldwide through electronic systems. Major wealth is now only an electronic impulse on a computer disk, invisible to the naked eye.