I just finished reading Debt: The First 5000 Years by anthropologist David Graeber. The book looks at the history of money, debt, and how they relate to social structures from a lens that departs significantly from the conventional wisdom of economic thought.
Conventional wisdom paints a picture of people inefficiently trading goods and services for each other, and money arising naturally as a result of the problems involved. Graeber dismisses this statement looking at anthropological history. Primitive communities simply shared their resources freely with each other, lived a communal lifestyle, rarely traded, and only in the context of individual communities interacting together. He played no part in the internal affairs of early societies.
Money, as in commodity money, began to be used only in rare interactions between communities over great distances. The economy in local areas did not start using such mechanisms for exchange. They used credit. Credit run and managed by the government, such as in Ancient Sumer. This system grew out of the informal “faith” that people considered when sharing resources in more primitive societies. But it was formalized and maintained by the power structure of the government and the temples of Sumer. No money would change hands during exchange, people would simply register debts that were stored at the temple, and from time to time settle their obligations with real edibles.
Debt came before money, and was created and maintained on a scale by the state. Commodity money came only later, again minted and circulated by the state, as great civilizations based on trust collapsed and gave way to warring imperial states. Debt and credit make little sense in a time of constant war and mobile forces, with no certainty that they will ever return to settle debts after moving on.
Since then, with modern arbitrariness and central banks, human societies have moved between virtual credit money and currency depending on whether or not the era was largely based on war and conquest. The same patterns were repeated throughout the centuries as well, with people creating their own informal and local credit networks after great empires using money fell, the government slowly subsuming them into these. to mediate, and inevitably return money as a violent Empire arose.
Bartar, as it was commonly taught, was never part of this process of monetary development, and the state was completely directly involved in creating monetary systems and markets.
I'm sure a lot of people are very inspired reading that, but Graeber's case is very solid and based on real historical and anthropological evidence, rather than speculation. Especially the idea that Cartalism has a much sounder foundation than many in this space care to admit.
This really makes Bitcoin deeper for me. Bitcoin is not just goes back to stateless money, I don't think there really was one after reading Debt. Bitcoin is first stateless money will never exist. To me, that makes it an even bigger achievement and a historic move.
Regardless of your economic situation, I recommend reading this book. It gives you a lot to think about in the context of Bitcoin.
This article is a Take. The views expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
