Money acts as the foundation for all trade and savings, so the adoption of a superior form of money has tremendous multiplicative benefits to wealth creation for all members of a society. — Vijay Boyapati.
StagesMoney is the tool that functions as a store of economic value, a medium of
exchange,
and a unit of account.
It improves social coordination.
Economic value is a measure of the benefit provided by a service.
A medium of exchange is the asset used to settle a transaction (i.e., the currency in which it is denominated, such as USD), while a means of payment is the method used to execute the transaction (i.e., the instrument or tool, such as a credit card).
Currency is a generally accepted medium of exchange.
The attributes that enable a good to perform monetary functions are listed below in order of relevance:
The goods that have historically satisfied those properties evolved into money through the stages of:
1. Collectible stage:
Humans, driven by genetically evolved instincts, enjoy collecting, displaying, storing, and trading rare items.
50,000 years ago the Homo Sapiens took pleasure in collecting shells and animal teeth, making jewellery out of them, showing them off and trading them; Neanderthals did not.
Beads made from ostrich eggshells dating back 45,000 years were found in Denisova Cave, Siberia. However, the nearest ostriches lived thousands of kilometers away in warmer regions.
Through their hobby, Homo sapiens inadvertently developed proto-money, enabling them to store and transfer wealth. This social coordination advantage contributed to their triumph over the physically stronger Neanderthals.
The cost of these collectibles could be quickly assessed at a glance.
Some simply consisted of mnemonics representing privileges.
Their scarcity was easily verifiable and would foreseeably remain
so.
Scarcity is the relative low availability of something.
2. Store of Value stage:
Durable and easy to hide, these jewels protected value against theft or loss.
They were preserved across generations, being transferred only during significant
life events.
Their use helped temper aggression, as tribute proved more lucrative than continued violence
against the
defeated in battle.
Furthermore, they facilitated reciprocity of favors, fostering increased food sharing—a pivotal step
towards the
development of civilization.
3. Medium of Exchange stage:
During the Neolithic era (10,000 BC - 1,200 BC), money mostly consisted in collectibles made out of
precious
metals but without an uniform value.
Small, high-value items, distributed widely enough to be fungible, served
as a means of exchange.
Metal assessment was costly, limited to large merchants. However, around 700 BC, the Lydians,
residents
of a key trade hub in present-day Turkey, pioneered coinage. This innovation made it possible to
entrust
verification to coin issuers, providing excellent fungibility and
divisibility.
Lydian coin.
4. Unit of Account stage:
Monetary metals gained saleability, fostering market development and price standardization, with gold and silver emerging as value standards.
Historically speaking gold seems to have served, firstly, as a commodity valuable for ornamental purposes; secondly, as stored wealth; thirdly, as a medium of exchange; and, lastly, as a measure of value. — William Stanley Jevons.
In various regions globally, non-coinage forms of money persisted.
In 7th-century China, merchants started issuing paper receipts for coins entrusted to them.
Over time, this system became more centralized and government-controlled.
By the 10th century, only authorized establishments could provide this service, and two centuries
later,
the Song dynasty assumed direct control, issuing claims over nonexistent coins.
In the 13th century, exchanging paper claims for precious metals was prohibited.
Paper money from the 14th century.
Printing abuse led to hyperinflation and the collapse of the system in 15th-century.
Consequently, monetary metals regained prominence.
In the West, during the 16th century, paper receipts like bills of exchange and promissory notes
assumed monetary roles, facilitating trade across hostile lands.
By the 17th century, bank notes became prevalent as monetary receipts, representing specific amounts
of precious metals stored in vaults.
In the 18th century, technological advances of the industrial revolution led to widespread
counterfeiting of coins.
Bank notes emerged as a solution due to their easier verifiable authenticity, causing monetary
metals to flow
into bank vaults.
Improvements in communication and transportation, like the telegraph and trains, enhanced banks'
transfer
capabilities. Ultimately, a few banks became major custodians of gold and silver.
Governments restricted paper banknote issuers and eventually monopolized
the activity.
Paper receipts brought divisibility to gold, diminishing silver's advantage as a medium of exchange.
In 1717, British officials, influenced by Isaac Newton, introduced the "gold standard", a model
adopted
by around 50 countries by 1900.
At the start of World War I in 1914, major European powers, suspended the convertibility
of their notes for gold in order to finance their operations by printing unbacked bills.
By the war's end in 1918, most currencies had significantly depreciated.
The US dollar was pegged to gold at $20 an ounce, but the issuance of unbacked dollars prevented the
Federal Reserve from fulfilling this exchange promise. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt,
via Executive Order 6102, confiscated private gold, depreciating the dollar to a new exchange rate
of
$35 per ounce of gold.
Executive Order 6102.
During World War II (1939-1945), the continental United States became the most secure location for
gold
custody, so they came to hold most of the world's gold reserves.
In 1944, the victors
established the
Bretton Woods system, pegging their currencies to the US dollar, which, in turn, was pegged to
gold.
The abuse of printing presses led to currency devaluation against the US dollar. In 1971, President
Nixon
announced the end of the US dollar's gold convertibility.
Since then, Central Banks print pure fiat money.
Explain to me how an increase in paper pieces can possibly make a society richer. If that is the case, why is there still poverty in the world? — Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
Fiat Money is the currency exclusively issued by political authorities.
Its monetary units are created through a Central Bank controlled by a state or a group of
states.
The plan for assigning newly created fiat units is known as monetary
policy.
Physical fiat units include coins and bills, while digital units are represented by Central Bank's
accounting notes known as Commercial Banks Reserves. The sum of both forms
constitutes base money.
Individuals can only possess physical units. Exposure to digital units occurs indirectly through
intermediaries like Commercial Banks, which issue promises in the form of checking
accounts.
These accounts, also called demand deposits, represent claims on a specific amount
of money, ostensibly redeemable on demand.
If banks held the full deposit amount as a reserve, accounts would be termed
money-certificates.
However, banks typically keep only a fraction in reserve and invest the rest,
resulting in multiple
liquid claims for each actual unit. The aggregate of these claims is referred to as
bank money.
Cash plus bank money is widely considered the current available
monetary value. Consequently, consumer prices are more responsive to changes
in these amounts than to alterations in the monetary base.
This recognition prompted the study of money aggregates like M2, also known as
money supply or broad money.
Money aggregates represent the accounting aggregation of various types of monetary claims to cash.
The money multiplier concept posits that bank money is determined by dividing base money by the average reserve ratio, where the reserve ratio is defined as demand deposits divided by bank reserves.
In the short term, central banks influence the quantity of bank money by creating or withdrawing
bank reserves, thereby manipulating the rates at which commercial banks lend reserves to each other.
Incentives to borrow increase when interest rates are lowered, leading to the creation of bank
money, while raising interest rates has the opposite effect.
The digital age saw a progressive restriction on the use of cash, accompanied by expanding
regulations that led to extensive bureaucracy and financial censorship.
Capital controls were implemented under the guise of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws,
and Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements that compelled financial services to collect
and disclose user information that would eventually be publicly exposed.
Trusted third parties are security holes.
People gather your data on the promise that they will never share it, when in fact they cannot,
and will not retain control of it for long. — Nick Szabo.
Financial assets became concentrated in the custody of a few government-controlled entities, transforming them into tools for surveillance. Owners were only granted access to software displaying accounting entries, subject to permission.
Don't put most of your family's wealth in assets that some stranger can turn on and off like a switch. — Nick Szabo.
Nevertheless, every time a money becomes more of a Medium of Censorship, it becomes less of a Medium of Exchange.
I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government; that is, we can't take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop. — F.A. Hayek, 1984.
In the 1980s, a group known as cypherpunks emerged, dedicated to preserving privacy in communications
through the development of encrypted systems.
The intersection of their ideas with those of libertarian futurists gave rise to dreams of
depoliticizing money.
Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself.
The computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them.(...) It's going to have to be a grass-roots activity, one in which individuals first learn of how much power they can have, and then demand it. — Hal Finney (1992).
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. — A Cypherpunk's Manifesto by Eric Hughes (1993).
Early attempts like Hashcash by Adam Back (1997), B-Money by Wei Dai (1998), Reusable Proof of Work
by Hal Finney (2004), and Bit Gold by Nick Szabo (2005) failed due to lack of decentralization.
However, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto figured it out.
The Bitcoin White Paper, "Bitcoin: a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", was published on
October 31, 2008, at bitcoin.org.
Cash is defined as bearer money, i.e., not in the custody of a third party.
The proposal was shared with the main cryptography mailing list. Nine days later, Satoshi Nakamoto
stated,
"I had to write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every problem,
then I wrote the paper."
The code was ready.
The software was released as an open-source project, and on January 3, 2009, the Bitcoin Network
commenced operation.
Cryptography is the science that creates protocols to configure messages in such
a way that will only be able to be revealed by their receiver.
The term has Greek roots, stemming from "Kryptós" and "Graphía," which translate to
"To hide" and "To write," respectively.
The word Cypher is a Latin synonym for Kryptós.
The headline from that day's edition of The [London] Times is embedded in the block 0 of the Bitcoin chain.
The Times main page on January 3, 2009.
Nobody showed much interest except for Hal Finney, who was the first person to join the network.
"Running bitcoin" — @halfin (11/01/2009)
Although the nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime as Satoshi posted, new developers joined the project and contributed to improve the security of software.
On May 22, 2010, the first commercial exchange of bitcoin occurred: Laszlo Hanyecz posted a thread on Bitcointalk.org with the title "Pizza for bitcoins?" offering 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas. Another forum user accepted the offer and ordered two pizzas for Laszlo.
On April 23, 2011, Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared, mentioning in an email, "I've moved on to other things."
Appreciation for Bitcoin grew slowly.
In under 10 years, the Bitcoin Network emerged as the world's most reliable and secure financial network, supported by tens of thousands of globally distributed nodes.