I just finished reading Debt: The First 5000 Years by anthropologist David Graber. This book takes a look at the history of money, debt and how they relate to social structures from a lens that is very far from the conventional wisdom of economic thinking.
Conventional wisdom paints a picture of people directly exchanging goods and services for each other, and money naturally arises as a result of the inherent problems of doing so. Graber destroys this narrative by looking at anthropological history. Primitive societies simply shared their resources freely with each other, living a communal lifestyle, with infrequent commodity exchanges and only within the context of individual interacting communities. It had no role in the internal affairs of early societies.
Money, like commodity money, was used only in rare interpersonal interactions over long distances. Economies in local areas did not begin to use such mechanisms for exchange. They used credit. Credit administered and monitored by the government, as in ancient Sumer. This system grew out of the informal “credits” that people considered when sharing resources in more primitive societies. But it was formalized and preserved by the power structure of the Sumerian state and temples. No money was exchanged during the exchanges, people simply recorded the debts stored in the temple and periodically settled their obligations with real consumer goods.
Debt predated coinage and was created and maintained by the government. Commodity money came later, again minted and circulated by the state, as large-scale trust-based civilizations collapsed and were replaced by warring imperial states. Debt and credit mean little in a time period of perpetual war and wandering armies, with no certainty they will ever return after moving to settle debts.
Since then, with the anomaly of modern times and central banks, human societies have oscillated between virtual credit money and coinage, depending on whether or not the age was predicated primarily on large-scale war and conquest. The same patterns were repeated throughout the ages, with people creating their own informal, local credit networks after the fall of great empires that used coinage, the state slowly inserting itself into these networks to mediate, and inevitably with the rise of violent empires. , coin return.
The Supreme, as is commonly taught, was never actually part of this process of money development, and the government was always directly involved in the formation of monetary systems and markets.
I'm sure many people will be incredibly irritated when they read it, but Graber's case is very solid and is based on actual historical and anthropological evidence rather than speculation. Especially the idea that Chartalism is a much more solid foundation than many in this space would like to admit.
This actually deepens Bitcoin for me. Bitcoin is not simple Back to A stateless money, I don't think it really exists after reading the debt. It is Bitcoin the first Stateless money will always exist. To me, that makes that achievement and historic change even greater.
Regardless of your financial inclinations, I recommend reading this book. This gives you plenty of time to think about Bitcoin.
This article is one take it. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
