Money, since the invention of double entry bookkeeping, means something different than it did in the days of the Roman solidus, the most advanced relative value calculus available for use in bazaars. Money meant in those days a store of value useful for computing ROI in time and location arbitrage. Constantine designed it to be maximally useful in that setting.
It was made of gold in a specific weight and size to ensure that it held its value. Being made of gold it was an asset unit that worked for trade, quid pro quo, interest being considered usury, immoral and illegal. It was never intended for debt service since without interest lending makes no sense, all risk, no reward.
Trade was an asset mechanism until interest became legal. Beginning with the Sumerians and their clay receipts of surplus grain and such, which could easily be traded, money was, and I suggest is, solely an asset unit.
What we have today is something different, not just a fiat currency, but an abstracted ledger based accounting token, a qubit unit because like qubits it can hold two values at the same time, debit and credit, asset and liability. I do not use currency lightly. I suggest the money of bazaars, of moneychangers, of merchants, be termed exclusively “money”. Furthermore I suggest that what we call money in modern times, since the invention of double entry bookkeeping, be termed “currency”. This will resolve a great deal of confusion since the two are not identical.
Banks, by their operations, cause a certain amount of that confusion. “Money”, properly termed, fiat or hard, coming into a bank is abstracted into “currency” in a ledger entry. “Money” going out of a bank is reified from ledger entries, from “currency”, out of the bank's vaults. That removes a great deal of confusion from the subject.
The idea behind double entry bookkeeping, that currency can be a debit or a credit, has led to oversimplified notions that money, any possible unit of exchange, a credit, is that which cancels a debit in a ledger. However it has a long history as an asset unit of a relative value calculus in bazaars without a corresponding debit, as “money”. Calling it, what I term “currency”, “money” confuses everyone.
Do Well and Be Well.
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