OK, I'll bite. What is money really and how does it actually work?
On of the most interesting ideas I've read on this is from Debt The First 5000 Years, written by an anthropologist who took the approach of studying how societies actually use money rather than the economists approach of coming up with theories without much looking at real people.
Basically he says the idea that it originated from barter is pretty much never found in the historical record. 'Primitive' societies tend more to tally favours so you give someone food one day, it's remembered and they help you fix your roof another, without any formal currency measure. Formal currencies were often forced on people with threats of violence to get the natives to do stuff. Say you want to raise an army you declare a tax on everyone of so many coins which they can earn by feeding or serving in your army and people who don't come up with the tax are attacked in some manner.
Or you come up with some debt everyone owes and that kind of thing. Eg from the book
>In 1895, for example, France invaded Madagascar...
>...and declared the country a French colony. One of the first things General Gallieni did after “pacification,” as they liked to call it then, was to impose heavy taxes on the Malagasy population, in part so they could reimburse the costs of having been invaded...
leading on to in the modern day:
>But owing to IMF-imposed austerity programs, the government had to cut the [malaria] monitoring program. Ten thousand people died. I met young mothers grieving for lost children...
Over time cryptocurrencies will adopt all these features of government regulation and police protection over the transactions if it is to become ubiquitous. So, just another analog of any other money system we already have.
In an ideal world where you drive a solar-powered car with a dozen moving parts built by robots from recycled materials, costs would fall to a fraction of what they are now. With the same automation applied across all industries, prices would fall to the point where the opportunity cost for humans to be in debt/servitude to rent-seeking financial institutions would exceed the benefit of using money in the first place.
This is basically what happened on Star Trek and is likely to happen in coming decades with Tesla, Amazon etc as humans can no longer compete with machine labor. Things will cost less but incomes will be so low that we won't be able to afford them anyway. Personally I would argue that that started happening sometime after the late 1960s and has gotten to the point where the status quo can only be propped up by every-growing absurdities on a global scale.
An oldie but goodie:
Money = thank you points
You give it to people you’re thankful to, who either did something nice for you or gave you something you wanted.
There was no "old barter system" the way modern people think of it. The idea that pre-commercial economies operated on a "barter system" in the sense that people are directly exchanging goods of similar value is just a simplifying metaphor early economists made to explain how commercial transactions work.
Pre-commercial economies operate more like gift economies. It's not so much about trading objects based on their valuation, it's about doing favors for people with the expectation that they will do favors back for you. It takes strong bonds of social trust and cohesion for this to work. Everyone has to have a sense of obligation to pitch in for the community.
The bartering only comes in as a form of collateral when dealing with outsiders (people you don't trust as much). This is why the earliest form of exchanges in this way were tied to marriages (e.g. dowries, bride prices) or interactions with other political groups (e.g. treaties, armistice).
Barter doesn't actually work, it's basically just a format for giving collateral to make sure people don't welch on deals. Normal currency already solves that problem way better than trust chains based exchange does because the value is obvious and exchanged up front without having to go through any clearing-house to be validated.
So at the dawn of agriculture, people weren't using barter -- they were using credit unions.
Literally chisel some hash-marks into a rock so people don't "forget" and problem solved.
No.
I think people who are excited about cryptocurrencies assume that money is merely a tool to facilitate transactions between parties of people. The fundamental model of this is two people bartering goods, lol, in some sort of imagined "forest primeval" before money was invented. That money is just a substitute for that behavior. It's hopelessly naive.