On the invention of money

Money was invented naturally as a commodity that everybody wants. Like rice or wheat.

Problem with those is not easy to transport. There's a lot of weight. They're bulky. And there's various quality.

So you bring the weight down and say well just an ounce of gold can can be worth lots and lots of rice. You say well an ounce of pure gold is the same as any other ounce of pure gold. And as far as commodity money goes that's about as good as it is ever got in the history of humanity: gold.

But there's another form of money. Each other. Labor is a commodity too. And so the government monopolized money around the commodity of labor, because people are willing to work for dollars.

Then they dropped the backing of gold. And all money became credit, and they're the sole issuer of credit.

So there's two kinds of money hard money and credit (a promise to do something for someone else: labor).

So Bitcoin comes along and says let's abstract hard money to the digital realm. "We'll bring down the weight to zero and difficulty to transfer to 10 minutes, regardless of distance."

So you might think you can only invent money again on the internet one time. But I actually don't think that's the case.

It was invented again with monero. Because Bitcoin wasn't anonymous like gold can be.

Then it was invented again with Ethereum because Ethereum offers programmable logic on how the money behaves. Programmable money is money that can control machines, it's the money that AIs will usually use.

I think of all legit crypto as immature shares of AI labor.

I think there's one more way to invent money online. Decentralized credit. I've seen a few implementations. And thought of a few. It seems like individual tallies is what it will eventually come down to for most things because that's the most efficient.

What do you think?