Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

This social credit, this informal mental ledger, is the friend-and-kin group solution to the “double coincidence of wants” problem. With flexible social credit, we can easily help each other when one person needs something even if the other person currently needs nothing.

Politics can affect things locally and temporarily, but technology can affect things globally and permanently, which is why I analyze money primarily through the lens of technology.

At its core, money is a ledger. Commodity money serves as a ledger governed by nature. Bank money serves as a ledger governed by nation states. Open-source money serves as a ledger governed by users.

Compared to food that decays, or furs and spears that are too bulky to hoard or carry, these small wearable shells arguably represent the invention of long-term savings technology — meaning a way to convert surplus time or resources into a financial battery.

A double coincidence of wants is an economic description that means that for the trade to be successful, each party must have an excess of what the other wants.