Imagine if one measured the amount of money one had as a fraction of the total amount of money in the world rather than in arbitrary units. That way, when inflation happens, the number representing the amount of money you have goes down rather than prices going up.
Obviously that would be rather difficult to do with old-fashioned coins and notes but it would be trivial for a Cryptonomicon-style completely electronic currency. We'd probably use units of trillionths or thereabouts (or maybe "year 2000 dollars") to avoid having to write too many zeroes (and avoid accidents miscounting them).
One advantage of such a way of measuring money would be that the effects of inflation would be rather more obvious to people (at least, those of us who keep a more careful eye on our bank accounts than we do on the consumer price indexes) and might therefore discourage inflation somewhat. It would feel more like a tax (which, of course, is what it really is when it comes down to it - a very fair tax, I think, since the people with large reserves of cash seem to be the people who can best afford to pay taxes).
Another advantage is that it becomes easier to compare prices over time (since you don't have to adjust for inflation). A third is that things that tend not to be index linked (but which really should be, like salaries) would be more likely to.
A side effect would be that the velocity of money would greatly increase - cash would be a hot potato.
[...] taxes, as I’ve mentioned here before. Seignorage (if carefully controlled) is probably also a good idea. It would be nice if the government had a national surplus rather than a national debt, so that it [...]
[...] amounts in “year 2000 dollars” (for example) – in other words, the Inflation-linked currency I’ve written about before. [...]