🤑 Money, So They Say, Is the Root of All Evil Today 🖤
Money Is Not Made Up A short history of why value was never invented by feelings, and what that means for digital assets today. There is a strain of thought in digital currency circles — earnest, sometimes feverish — that money is fundamentally a social construct, a collective hallucination , worth exactly whatever the next person agrees it is worth. The logic tends to go: fiat is fake, gold is arbitrary, and therefore anything can be money if enough people believe in it hard enough . This reasoning gets things approximately backwards. Value is not an agreement. It is a description of usefulness. A brief tour through the history of exchange makes this clear. The Word Salary Is Not a Coincidence The Latin root of the word salary is salarium . The prevailing etymology holds that Roman soldiers received salt as part of their compensation, or were paid wages specifically intended for the purchase of salt . Whether the literal payment was always in salt cakes is debated by hi...