Digital Gold Read Online Free Page B

notion of creating a new kind of money would seem, to many, a rather odd and even pointless endeavor. To most modern people, money is always and everywhere bills and coins issued by countries. The right to mint money is one of the defining powers of a nation, even one as small as the Vatican City or Micronesia.
    But that is actually a relatively recent state of affairs. Until the Civil War, a majority of the money in circulation in the United States was issued by private banks, creating a crazy patchwork of competing bills that could become worth nothing if the issuing bank went down. Many countries at that time relied on circulating coins from other countries.
    This was the continuation of a much longer state of affairs in which humans engaged in a seemingly ceaseless effort to find better forms of money, trying out gold, shells, stone disks, and mulberry bark along the way.
    The search for a better form of money has always been about finding a more trustworthy and uniform way of valuing the thingsaround us—a single metric that allows a reliable comparison between the value of a block of wood, an hour of carpentry work, and a painting of a forest.As sociologist Nigel Dodd put it, good money is “able to convert qualitative differences between things into quantitative differences that enable them to be exchanged.”
    The money imagined by the Cypherpunks looked to take the standardizing character of money to its logical extreme, allowing for a universal money that could be spent anywhere, unlike the constrained national currencies we currently carry around and exchange at each border.
    In their efforts to design a new currency, the Cypherpunks were mindful of the characteristics usually found in successful coinage. Good money has generally been durable (imagine a dollar bill printed on tissue paper), portable (imagine a quarter that weighed twenty pounds), divisible (imagine if we had only hundred-dollar bills and no coins), uniform (imagine if all dollar bills looked different), and scarce (imagine bills that could be copied by anyone).
    But beyond all these qualities, money always required something much less tangible and that was the faith of the people using it. If a farmer is going to accept a dollar bill for his hard-earned crops, he has to believe that the dollar, even if it is only a green piece of paper, will be worth something in the future. The essential quality of successful money, through time, was not who issued it—or even how portable or durable it was—but rather the number of people willing to use it.
    In the twentieth century, the dollar served as the global currency in no small part because most people in the world believed that the United States and its financial system had a better chance of surviving than almost anything else. That explains why people sold their local currency to keep their savings in dollars.
    Money’s relationship to faith has long turned the individuals who are able to create and protect money into quasi-religiousfigures. The word money comes from the Roman god Juno Moneta, in whose temple coins were minted. In the United States, the governors of the central bank, the Federal Reserve, who are tasked with overseeing the money supply, are treated like oracles of sorts; their pronouncements are scrutinized like the goat entrails of olden days. Fed officials are endowed with a level of power and independence given to almost no other government leaders, and the task of protecting the nation’s currency is entrusted to a specially created agency, the Secret Service, that was only later given the additional responsibility of protecting the life of the president.
    Perhaps the most famous, if flawed, oracle of the Federal Reserve, former chairman Alan Greenspan, knew that money was something that not only central bankers could create. In a speech in 1996, just as the Cypherpunks were pushing forward with their experiments, Greenspan said that he imagined that the