This is the whole story of human civilization summarized in a single ledger! I see it as a story of the evolution of trust across four major phases:
1.Commodity Money (Weights to Coins): Trust in the inherent value of the object itself (barley, silver, gold).
2.Representative Money (Paper Receipts): Trust in the issuer's promise to redeem the object (receipts for gold deposits).
3.Fiat Money (Government Notes): Trust in the authority of the state and its military/legal power (post-gold standard).
4..Digital Commodity (Bitcoin): Trust in mathematics, code, and distributed consensus (a peer-to-peer, programmable asset).
The constant theme is the search for a money that is hard to seize and hard to inflate. We've finally outsourced trust to code. 🧡