Credit & Debt
Money did not originate from the barter system, that is a myth. It originated from credit. Coins or units of exchange emerged later with warfare. Money is not a commodity, it is a social ledger. To gain independence from fiat, we need a social ledger.
Complex economies were run on credit as early as c. 3500 BCE. Metal coins appeared thousands of years later.
The standard textbook story, barter → coins → credit → electronic money, is historically backwards.
Human economies began with credit ledgers, coinage arose later for armies and taxes, and modern finance is effectively a return to virtual credit money but without the safeguards to reset debt traps.
We cannot have true internet money without building credit, the part that has been broken for thousands of years. Today’s credit score systems like FICO were built to serve creditors (Big banks). They are primarily derived from “repayments,” which encourage people to take on debt. If you choose not to participate, everything becomes expensive or unreachable, from insurance to home loan APR to even the job you are applying for, all because you refused to play along with a made up credit score.
The world has shifted heavily toward creditors, punishing debtors even when it is unethical. The 2008 crisis was a litmus test. Governments bailed out banks, not the individuals harmed by the banking collapse. The crisis exposed that money is just a web of social promises that elites freely renegotiate.
If democracy means anything, people should have a say in which debts are kept, reworked, or erased.
For most of history, money has been a unit of account plus transferable credit, basically a way to record and settle promises. The real evolution of money is the ability to record, transfer, and enforce claims, not merely to pass around a commodity.
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