Money evolution
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.
Money 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:
- Verifiable scarcity
- Storability
- Transferability
- Fungibility
- Divisibility
- Saleability
Stages
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.
Scarcity is the relatively 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 a 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.
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.
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.
The appearance of paper money
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.
Printing abuse led to hyperinflation and the collapse of the system in the 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 to finance 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 $35 per ounce of gold.
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.
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 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 (demand deposits), representing claims on a specific amount of money.
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 unit. The aggregate of these claims is referred to as bank money.
Cash plus bank money is widely considered the current available monetary value. Consumer prices are more responsive to changes in these amounts than to alterations in the monetary base, motivating the study of money aggregates like M2 (money supply / broad money).
The money multiplier concept posits that bank money is determined by dividing base money by the average reserve ratio, where the reserve ratio is 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, while raising interest rates has the opposite effect.
The digital age
The digital age saw 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 AML laws, and KYC requirements compelled services to collect and disclose user information.
“Trusted third parties are security holes… People gather your data on the promise that they will never share it, when in fact they cannot.” — 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.
Cryptographic money
“I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government… introduce something that they can't stop.” — F.A. Hayek, 1984.
In the 1980s, cypherpunks emerged to preserve privacy in communications through encryption. The intersection of their ideas with libertarian futurists fueled attempts to depoliticize 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…” — Hal Finney (1992).
“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.” — Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (1993).
Early attempts like Hashcash (1997), B-Money (1998), Reusable Proof of Work (2004), and Bit Gold (2005) failed due to lack of decentralization. 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 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 wrote: “I had to write all the code before I could convince myself… then I wrote the paper.” The code was ready. The software was released as open source, and on January 3, 2009, the Bitcoin Network commenced operation.
Cryptography is the science that creates protocols to configure messages so they can only be revealed by their receiver. The term has Greek roots: “Kryptós” (to hide) and “Graphía” (to write). “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.
Nobody showed much interest except for Hal Finney, who was the first person to join the network.
“Running bitcoin” — @halfin (11/01/2009)
On May 22, 2010, the first commercial exchange of bitcoin occurred: Laszlo Hanyecz offered 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas.
On April 23, 2011, Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared, writing: “I've moved on to other things.”
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.