The Story of Money and Why Bitcoin is needed

In the beginning, it was barter. Ten sheep in exchange for half a kilogram of glass (yes, glass was very expensive at the time). As time went by, it became increasingly challenging to carry sheep in your wallet, so we invented coins. Initially, they were worth the same as the material from which they were made. We used gold, silver, and even salt (where the word salary comes from) as forms of payment, and everything went well until it became too complicated to carry enough metal to pay, say, a house. We then began to use a symbolic representation of those assets that, it was accepted, supported the value of money.Thus, the conversion factor incorporated a soft and elusive ingredient that would accompany us for centuries: trust. The money object ceased to have value in itself. Still, a certain authority guaranteed that it could give you the corresponding amount of some tangible good of value more or less universally accepted in exchange for those coins and bills. Whoever deposited dollars will receive dollars, let’s say.Thus, we exchanged concrete things with tangible value to exchanging colored pieces of paper that represented a certain amount of gold or silver. That is why here we call silver. In other words, the pesos.Now why bother hoarding gold to back a coin? There we took another step:Central banks were born in the 1930s.The United States separated the dollar from gold.Nations began to establish the value of money arbitrarily.Or not so much; it’s a bit more complicated. But, simplifying, instead of offering gold as backing, the states put themselves as guarantors. The more trustworthy that State was (that is, the behaviors of that State as such a State), the more stable its currency would be.If you suddenly see an X-ray of why your currency is devalued,…