Money Has No Value

Preface

Money Parables: From Coin to Edict to Crypto

For a very long time the story of money was straightforwardly told through coins. Digging up old coins as artifacts of previous civilizations seemed to reveal a thing called “money,” understood as bits of metal of certain weights. In the typical tale, the metal was “rare” and thus thought to have some intrinsic value, and in turn the coins – the money – had value because they contained a specified weight of the metal. Because money itself possessed value, and because it was generic and standardized and would not spoil, we could exchange it for the wide variety of other things we needed or wanted – things that were of value precisely because they satisfied those needs or wants directly ...