The idea is that the value of the new money is derived not from the imprimatur of any state but from a combination of mathematics, global connectedness, and the trust that resides in the world’s biggest social network. In June of this year, Facebook unveiled Libra, global currency that draws on the architecture of Bitcoin. The quest for new forms of money hasn’t gone away.
As a direct response to the crisis, in October, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever he or she or they might be, published the white paper that outlined the idea of Bitcoin, a new form of money based on nothing but the power of cryptography. The credit crunch in 2008 triggered a panic when people throughout the financial system wondered whether the numbers on balance sheets meant what they were supposed to mean. It’s only at moments when the system buckles that we start to wonder why these things are worth what they seem to be worth. That’s hard to remember: we grow used to the ways we pay our bills and are paid for our work, to the dance of numbers in our bank balances and credit-card statements. Paper money, backed by the authority of the state, was an astonishing innovation, one that reshaped the world. The instruments of trade and finance are inventions, in the same way that creations of art and discoveries of science are inventions-products of the human imagination. He took measures to insure the authenticity of his currency, and if you didn’t use it-if you wouldn’t accept it in payment, or preferred to use gold or silver or copper or iron bars or pearls or salt or coins or any of the older forms of payment prevalent in China-he would have you killed. Genghis Khan’s grandson didn’t have that difficulty. The problem with many new forms of money is that people are reluctant to adopt them. Anyone forging it would be punished with death. And when all is prepared duly, the chief officer deputed by the Khan smears the seal entrusted to him with vermilion, and impresses it on the paper, so that the form of the seal remains imprinted upon it in red the money is then authentic. All these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver and on every piece a variety of officials, whose duty it is, have to write their names, and to put their seals.
When these sheets have been prepared they are cut up into pieces of different sizes. What they take is a certain fine white bast or skin which lies between the wood of the tree and the thick outer bark, and this they make into something resembling sheets of paper, but black. He makes them take of the bark of a certain tree, in fact of the mulberry tree, the leaves of which are the food of the silkworms, these trees being so numerous that whole districts are full of them.
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