From clay tablets to crypto: Rethinking money in the age of blockchain

If money isn’t coins, bills or even cryptocurrencies, what is it, really? That’s the question at the heart of this week’s episode of The Clear Crypto Podcast, where hosts Nathan Jeffay (StarkWare) and Adrian Blust (Tonal Media) sit down with Bill Maurer, dean of the UC Irvine School of Social Sciences and a leading anthropologist of finance.Back to the beginning“I generally begin by going back to history and talking about case studies like ancient Mesopotamia,” Maurer said. He explained that leading into a conversation about blockchain or crypto, he points to the emergence of society, and therefore the eventual emergence of a currency system. However, at the beginning, it wasn’t a token, coin or banknote; it wasn’t even something that was “passed hand to hand.”He explains:“What they had was an elaborate system for keeping records.” For Maurer, that’s the key to understanding both ancient economies and today’s digital currencies: “money is essentially a way of memorializing credits and debts, and that’s all that it’s ever been.”Bitcoin’s roleWhile Bitcoin is often treated as a new form of digital cash or even hailed as the new “digital gold,” Maurer challenges that view: “Even though the Bitcoin system recognizes that money is a record keeping operation, it's still stuck in the idea that it is money in the form of something like a coin.”Maurer sees this as a missed opportunity. “It can be a whole different set of relationships around data and value without having to abstract it out into thinking of it as money,” he said. “You would call it sort of rights to a portion of a ledger that is always unfolding going forward in time.”The conversation also explores what blockchain reveals about how humans organize trust. “We are relational creatures, not individual creatures,” Maurer said. “What blockchain has promised is a way of creating that sort of frame, but also doing it in a decentralized way.”To hear the full conversation on The Clear Crypto Podcast, listen to the full episode on Cointelegraph’s Podcasts page, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows! Magazine: US risks being ‘front run’ on Bitcoin reserve by other nations — Samson Mow