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When Money Becomes a Game of Musical Chairs
The September 2022 bank robberies in Lebanon weren't typical heists-desperate citizens were simply trying to retrieve their own frozen deposits. This crisis exemplifies a global monetary dysfunction affecting billions worldwide. In Nigeria, soaring 13% inflation has driven cryptocurrency adoption, while Egypt's currency devaluations have halved citizens' savings overnight. Even wealthy nations aren't immune-European and Japanese bond markets have offered negative yields, while contradictory Federal Reserve policies have triggered historic bank failures.
Our global monetary system resembles primitive barter-160 different currencies with local monopolies, most lacking foreign acceptance. Citizens in unstable jurisdictions desperately seek dollars to protect savings, facing an uphill battle to preserve wealth. This broken financial system, built on outdated technology, has contributed to rising populism as people sense something is "rigged" against them without understanding why.
Previous global financial orders have collapsed due to economic imbalances, geopolitical realignments, and technological disruptions. Signs suggest our post-1970s financial order is reaching its twilight years. Lyn Alden's "Broken Money" examines this system through the lens of technological development-tracing money's evolution, analyzing current failures, and exploring potential solutions in accessible language that illuminates one of our most fundamental yet misunderstood social technologies.
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The Evolutionary Puzzle of Money's Origins
Money begins with fundamental questions about cooperation and reciprocal altruism. As cryptographer Nick Szabo noted, monetary precursors, alongside language, enabled early humans to solve cooperation problems that other animals cannot. When strangers meet without established trust, they face the "double coincidence of wants" problem-each party must simultaneously have what the other needs for trade to occur.
Within trusted communities, flexible social credit solves this problem naturally. People freely provide favors during times of abundance, strengthening social bonds and creating informal mental ledgers of reciprocity. This social insurance depends on reputation-those with better "relational wealth" receive more support when in need. But between separate groups lacking trust, portable items with universal desirability emerged as proto-money.
Shells became particularly valuable as currency because they were scarce, durable, and aesthetically pleasing. Tribes across continents used different shells as money: dentalium on North America's Pacific coast (traded as far as North Dakota), wampum on the Atlantic coast, and cowrie shells around the Indian Ocean. Creating these shell beads required intensive labor-collecting, carving, polishing, and drilling-giving them significant value relative to size.
Unlike perishable food or bulky tools, shell beads functioned as "financial batteries" storing surplus time and resources. They eliminated the need for flexible social credit when dealing with strangers and represented final settlement rather than depending on memory. Those adorned with many shells signaled past abundance and high status, literally wearing stored-up favors on their person.
Shell beads function as nature's decentralized ledger, with possession determining ownership. No individual knows the complete ledger state, but all understand the shells' properties and rarity. This system works effectively when all participants have similar productive capabilities, but technological advances can disrupt it. If an advanced civilization develops tools to produce shells more efficiently, they can flood the market, devaluing everyone's holdings before others realize what's happening.
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The Competitive Evolution of Monetary Systems
While small kinship groups can operate on informal oral ledgers and social credit, groups that regularly trade with outsiders inevitably develop some form of money. Though seemingly arbitrary to outsiders, the labor-intensive creation of proto-monies like shell beads proves economically efficient by providing a standardized medium of exchange.
As economies grow more complex, barter becomes increasingly impractical. With just 20 different products, there are 190 unique trading pairs; with 100 products, nearly 5,000 pairs. Money solves this by serving as one side of every trade. The ideal money possesses several key attributes: divisibility, portability, durability, fungibility, verifiability, scarcity, and often utility beyond exchange.
The Austrian school of economics described money as the "most salable good"-the most universally accepted asset that effectively transports value across both space and time. The stock-to-flow ratio-existing supply divided by annual new production-often determines which commodity becomes dominant money. Gold's ratio of approximately 67 (with just 1.5% annual supply growth) represents the highest of any commodity, making it practically indestructible as a store of value.
Throughout history, various commodities served as money, each with different strengths and weaknesses. Shell money collapsed when colonists mass-produced them using industrial techniques. Tobacco money in colonial Virginia failed due to overwhelming production incentives and quality variations. Cocoa beans served as money throughout pre-Columbian Central and South America, complemented by copper tokens for larger transactions. Yap's massive limestone rai stones functioned as an immobile ledger system until Western technology disrupted their creation. West African trade beads maintained value until Europeans exploited the system with mass-produced glass counterfeits.
Even modern video games recreate these monetary dynamics. In Diablo II, players naturally converged on rare, small items like the Stone of Jordan rings as currency. When game bugs allowed players to duplicate these items, they ceased functioning as good money, demonstrating how technological advances can render commodity monies obsolete.
The purchasing power of commodity money consists of utility value plus a monetary premium-the additional value from widespread adoption as savings. This premium creates a powerful incentive to produce more of that commodity, which only the scarcest commodities with highest stock-to-flow ratios can withstand long-term. Money isn't merely a "shared delusion"-if easily produced, savings are quickly diluted as producers exploit the monetary premium.
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Gold's Triumph Through Technological Resilience
Within societies using commodity money, nature controls the ledger by setting boundaries for how difficult money is to create, making it resistant to debasement. Among technological equals, nobody can cheat this natural ledger-everyone must expend similar work to create new monetary units.
However, when industrialized societies encounter pre-industrialized ones, the technological advantage allows them to dilute the commodity money of the less advanced society. This exploitation continues until knowledge of this capability spreads through the pre-industrialized society.
This creates a natural filtering process where less-scarce monies gradually disappear while the most scarce persist. After thousands of years of competition, only gold and silver maintained their monetary attributes across multiple geographies by retaining sufficiently high stock-to-flow ratios despite advancing technology.
Authorities enhanced gold and silver as money by creating standardized units, typically coins. Lydia (present-day Turkiye) was among the earliest civilizations to mint precious metal coins in the 6th century B.C. These coins typically had three value layers: first, the precious metal content itself; second, the verification and convenience premium that coinage provides compared to raw metal; and third, a liquidity premium that domestic coins enjoyed due to their wide acceptance and recognition as legal tender.
The emperor's face stamped on coins with edge ridges to prevent shaving added verifiability regarding quality and content-even today, sovereign gold coins command a premium over raw gold for their authenticity and liquidity. Wages and prices denominated in coined units tended to be "sticky," changing slowly even when metal or coin supply varied rapidly.
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Reconciling Competing Theories of Money
The definition and origin of money divides into two primary economic camps: the commodity theory and the credit theory. The commodity theory, dating back to Aristotle and developed by Adam Smith and later Austrian economists, argues that money naturally emerges as a highly salable good resistant to debasement (like gold or silver) to overcome the inefficiencies of barter. As Carl Menger argued, money arises naturally from economic relationships independent of state power.
The credit theory, developed later by economists like Henry Dunning Macleod and Georg Friedrich Knapp in the late 19th century, posits that credit forms the core of money rather than commodities. This perspective influenced John Maynard Keynes and was further expanded by Modern Monetary Theory economists in the 1990s and anthropologist David Graeber's writings on debt history.
To reconcile these competing theories, we must examine what each gets right and wrong. Adam Smith correctly described how commodity money emerges naturally to solve the double coincidence of wants problem and why precious metals became dominant due to their unique properties. However, anthropological evidence shows Smith got the timeline backward-barter between specialized workers did not predate money. Rather, flexible social credit systems had already partially solved barter problems before specialized labor emerged.
Credit theory proponents fail to recognize several practical limitations. First, niche service providers like surgeons can't easily issue standardized credit claims-how many bread loaves equals one surgery? Second, when people move between communities, they need transferable wealth in physical form recognized by new communities. Third, small-scale social credit systems based on honor don't scale to impersonal nation-states with millions of strangers.
Rather than choosing between commodity theory and credit theory, we can unify them through a "ledger theory of money." Both represent ways to maintain ledgers, but with different authorities. Credit theory relies on human-maintained ledgers based on trust-informal in small groups, centralized in large societies. Commodity theory uses nature's physical laws as a trust-minimized ledger maintained through physical possession, resistant to human debasement.
The context determines which system prevails. When trust is high within small groups or well-functioning states, people prefer convenient credit-based ledgers despite their vulnerability to long-term degradation. When trust is low between separate groups or after ledger failures, people turn to commodity money despite its inefficiency.
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The Birth of Modern Banking
Banking evolved as legal and technological layers built atop commodity money, with proto-banking dating back thousands of years. The Code of Hammurabi included loan laws, while ancient Greeks had trapezites as early bankers.
The suftaja-an early letter of credit used by Muslim and Jewish merchants from at least the 8th century-marked a critical development in formal credit. These paper instruments served dual purposes: as wire transfers for distant payments and as traveler's checks to avoid carrying bulky cash.
This system evolved into the hawala network-a decentralized system of trusted brokers (hawaladars) operating on reputation. A person gives money and a password to their local hawaladar, who arranges for a distant hawaladar to disburse funds to the intended recipient who knows the password. Hawaladars settle their balances periodically through netting transactions.
Double-entry bookkeeping revolutionized finance by splitting ledgers into two reconcilable parts-where assets equal liabilities across counterparties. This innovation transformed payment systems in Italian city-states like Venice and Florence, where accountants sitting on benches (banco) in merchant squares served as bankers. Merchants could now trade without carrying coins by simply having bankers update ledgers, subtracting from buyers and adding to sellers.
Banking naturally evolved from full-reserve custodianship to fractional reserve practices through competitive pressures. Initially, bankers charged fees for safekeeping gold. However, observing that most deposits remained untouched, clever bankers realized they could lend a portion of deposits (keeping perhaps 80% in reserve), earn interest, eliminate customer fees, and attract more business.
When disclosed to customers, this represented a conscious trade-off rather than fraud. The competitive advantage was substantial-banks offering zero fees by maintaining 80% reserves would outcompete full-reserve banks charging storage fees. This innovation expanded credit throughout the economy, pleasing rulers who witnessed economic booms.
But competitive pressures pushed banks toward increasingly risky reserve ratios. If 80% reserves with zero fees attracted deposits, why not 60% reserves while paying depositors interest? This race to the bottom created inherent instability-the false promise that all depositors could withdraw funds simultaneously when the math made this impossible.
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The Telegraph and Money's Great Divergence
Banking evolved primarily to enable transactions to move more quickly than physical gold transportation would allow while also facilitating credit systems through trusted intermediaries. This separation of transactions (commerce) from settlements (money) allowed for more frequent commercial activity with less frequent, larger settlements in precious metals.
For thousands of years, transactions and settlements shared the same fundamental speed limit: physical human travel by foot, horse, and ship. Even early banking innovations like bills of exchange and paper notes couldn't overcome this constraint.
The telegraph's invention in the 1830s changed everything. By the 1860s, transatlantic telegraph cables connected major financial centers, allowing transactions to occur at nearly the speed of light. This technological leap created an unprecedented divergence: transactions could now happen almost instantly, while physical settlement assets (gold and silver) still moved at traditional speeds.
This speed disparity accelerated the abstraction of gold and silver into paper claims and ledger entries. As William Stanley Jevons observed in his 1875 book "Money and the Mechanism of Exchange," the global financial system was rapidly centralizing. His diagrams illustrated this evolution: from single banks allowing internal settlements between account holders, to interconnected banks accepting each other's payment instruments, to central banks facilitating multi-bank settlements, and finally to international clearing houses centered in financial hubs like London.
Throughout his work, Jevons documented the growing gap between gold claims and actual gold in the system. He cited figures showing UK banks held just 4-7% of claims in reserves, which themselves were fractional claims on gold. This efficiency created systemic fragility, as Jevons noted: "There is a larger and larger quantity of claims for gold, and comparatively less gold to meet them."
By the early 20th century, this extreme monetary abstraction facilitated World War I financing, causing the global gold standard to collapse permanently. In subsequent decades, governments abandoned precious metal backing entirely, leading to our current world of 160 different inflationary fiat currencies.
This represents the only time in history where, globally, a weaker money (fiat) won out over a harder money (gold). The triumph occurred because telecommunications introduced speed as a competitive variable. Gold's slow transport and authentication couldn't match the convenience of fiat currencies backed by legal tender laws and taxation authority, despite gold's superior scarcity.
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War, Debt, and the Petrodollar System
World War I began as a regional conflict but rapidly expanded into an unprecedented global war causing tens of millions of deaths. When the UK government attempted to finance the war through bonds in 1914, the public offering failed dramatically, raising less than a third of its 350 million target. The Bank of England secretly plugged this shortfall by creating currency deposits out of thin air, registered under the names of senior staff who then purchased the bonds-what Keynes called "a masterly manipulation."
This monetary expansion doubled both the money supply and consumer price index over five years, devaluing the purchasing power of British currency and bonds. The ease with which paper money could be manipulated compared to physical gold created a new dynamic where governments could drain citizens' wealth quickly and non-transparently. Every combatant country printed money for war, with losing sides experiencing hyperinflation while winning sides merely had "very high" inflation.
After World War II, representatives from 44 countries met at Bretton Woods to design a new global monetary system. Two competing visions emerged: John Maynard Keynes proposed a neutral "bancor" system that would automatically correct trade imbalances, while Harry Dexter White advocated for all currencies to peg to the dollar, which would remain pegged to gold. With America's unparalleled economic strength and leverage through the Marshall Plan, White's proposal prevailed, shifting the world reserve currency from the pound to the dollar.
From 1950 to 1970, America's gold reserves plummeted from over 20,000 metric tons to just 9,000 tons due to foreign central bank redemptions. Yet simultaneously, base dollars doubled and broad money supply tripled, making dollars exponentially less "backed" by gold. In 1971, President Nixon officially ended dollar redeemability for gold to foreign central banks, claiming it was temporary but making it permanent.
After the Bretton Woods system collapsed in 1971, the world faced an unprecedented situation-a global fiat currency system completely unbacked by anything scarce. In 1974, Treasury Secretary William Simon negotiated a crucial deal with Saudi Arabia: The U.S. would purchase Saudi oil and provide military equipment and protection, including naval security for the critical Strait of Hormuz. In return, Saudi Arabia would invest their dollar surpluses primarily in U.S. Treasury securities and sell oil exclusively in dollars, reinforcing global demand for the currency.
This "petrodollar" system established in 1974 continues to the present day, effectively backing the dollar with oil not through direct redemption but by ensuring global demand for dollars. Any oil-importing nation must hold dollar reserves to secure their energy needs, maintaining the dollar's network effect despite its lack of commodity backing.
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The Structural Flaws of Our Global Financial System
For several centuries through the first half of the 20th century, large portions of the world existed under European colonialism. While many regions regained independence in the second half of the 20th century, vestiges of that colonialism remain today. The Bretton Woods and subsequent Eurodollar/Petrodollar systems represent forms of monetary neocolonialism with the United States in charge.
A key difference between developed and developing countries is that developed nations have debts denominated in their own currency, while developing countries have significant debts in foreign currencies like dollars and euros. This creates a dangerous mismatch where their assets and revenues are in local currency but liabilities are in dollars. When the dollar strengthens, their debt burden grows substantially, causing economic pain, volatility, or sovereign defaults.
When developing countries face currency crises, the International Monetary Fund offers dollar financing with strict conditions. IMF loan terms typically include currency devaluation, abolishing import controls, shrinking domestic credit, higher interest rates, increased taxes, ending subsidies, wage ceilings, and restricting government spending-austerity measures wealthy nations rarely impose on themselves during crises.
France maintains control over former colonies' currencies through the CFA franc system, requiring these countries to hold at least half their foreign exchange reserves in France's custody while charging fees for currency services. The CFA franc isn't accepted outside these African countries, even in Europe, despite being pegged to the euro. Most of these nations remain deeply impoverished under authoritarian rulers supported by France.
While the United States benefits from being at the core of the global financial system as the issuer of the world reserve currency, this position carries significant drawbacks. The dollar's global reserve status creates an artificial strength that increases American import power while reducing export competitiveness. Starting in the 1970s, the U.S. began running consistent trade deficits, and by the mid-1980s, foreigners owned more American assets than Americans owned foreign assets. By the 2000s, U.S. industrial production had plateaued and begun declining on a per-capita basis after eight decades of growth.
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Bitcoin: The Internet's Native Money
In February 2009, one month after Bitcoin's release, Satoshi Nakamoto summarized his creation: "The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work." He explained how traditional financial institutions must be trusted with our money and privacy while operating on fractional reserves. Bitcoin solved this by creating a distributed public ledger allowing global consensus every ten minutes, eliminating the need for trusted third parties.
Bitcoin operates through a decentralized network of nodes running open-source software that anyone with a basic laptop and internet connection can join. Users can interact with Bitcoin at various technical levels: running their own nodes for maximum sovereignty, using third-party nodes while holding private keys, or relying on custodial services for convenience at the cost of counterparty risk. The network's control is distributed among thousands of node operators who collectively maintain the ledger and enforce rules, while miners compete to add new blocks using computational power.
Unlike gold, Bitcoin can be safely self-custodied in large amounts, sent globally within minutes, and transported anywhere by memorizing just twelve words. This utility combined with Bitcoin's finite supply attracted attention for its monetary properties, particularly its ability to facilitate unstoppable global payments and value transfer across borders. Though volatile due to its rapid monetization from zero to over a trillion dollars, Bitcoin offers critical features: censorship-resistant payments and portable, non-debasable self-custodied savings-particularly valuable in authoritarian regimes, failing states, and high-inflation environments.
Bitcoin's scaling challenge is solved through a layered approach rather than attempting to optimize a single blockchain for all purposes. The base layer processes about 400,000 transactions daily (potentially over one million payments with multiple outputs), comparable to Fedwire, while additional layers provide greater throughput. The Lightning Network functions like a restaurant tab but without credit-users open payment channels with Bitcoin transactions, creating 2-of-2 multi-signature time-locked channels that allow instant transactions between parties with sufficient liquidity.
Bitcoin's network creates a new block approximately every ten minutes through miners solving cryptographic puzzles with specialized computers. The difficulty adjustment mechanism automatically recalibrates every two weeks to maintain the ten-minute block time regardless of total network computing power. This resilience was demonstrated when China banned mining in 2021, causing half the network to relocate internationally while maintaining 100% uptime.
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Privacy, Surveillance, and the Future of Money
Privacy, once expensive to violate, has become increasingly vulnerable in the digital age. Governments, corporations, and individuals can now effortlessly breach privacy without detection. While the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment and the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights explicitly protect privacy, these protections are routinely ignored worldwide.
Transactional privacy, historically preserved through bearer assets like coins and banknotes, has diminished with modern banking systems. Bank ledgers allow complete surveillance of financial activity, and governments routinely demand this data. The 1970 Bank Secrecy Act exemplifies this trend, requiring reports for daily transactions exceeding $10,000-a threshold that inflation has effectively lowered over time, expanding surveillance to increasingly smaller transactions.
In 2013, NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the agency's surveillance capabilities extended far beyond public knowledge. The NSA could directly tap into major telecommunication providers and corporate platforms to harvest emails, video chats, photos, VoIP communications, file transfers, and social networking details. Their PRISM program allowed them to obtain targeted communications without individual court orders or requests from service providers.
Central banks, noticing Bitcoin and private stablecoins, are exploring digitizing their monetary base. As BIS head Agustin Carstens candidly explained, CBDCs differ fundamentally from cash because "central banks will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that determine the use" and "the technology to enforce that." This enhanced surveillance and control capability offers improved cross-border transactions and targeted monetary policy but raises significant privacy concerns.
In our modern era, we should assume all our information is collected in corporate databases, accessible to governments and vulnerable to breaches. Combined with programmable central bank digital currencies, this creates a potentially Orwellian future where facial recognition can automatically identify protesters and freeze their accounts. Already implemented in authoritarian regimes like China, this could lead to automated financial restrictions based on social credit scores, carbon quotas, protest participation, or currency controls.
Encryption serves as a powerful decentralizing force and asymmetric defense against surveillance-cheap to deploy but expensive to attack. The cypherpunk movement emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as technology-focused individuals recognized how digital systems could enable oppression. Eric Hughes' 1993 "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto" distinguished privacy from secrecy, arguing that privacy means selectively revealing oneself while secrecy means hiding completely. He maintained that open societies require anonymous transaction systems and strong cryptography.
Today, we face a choice between bottom-up digital monies like Bitcoin that return ledger control to people, and top-down central bank digital currencies that enhance state control. Ledger control involves two questions: who can surveil/censor transactions, and who can create money nearly for free? In fiat systems, governments blame outside forces when their mismanagement causes inflation, often blocking exits to alternative assets. Bitcoin offers a system where nobody has seigniorage power or can censor transactions without controlling over 50% of the network. Separating money and state isn't about eliminating government but creating a level playing field where governments must be more transparent.
