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DEBT: BITCOIN IS NOT A RETURN TO STATELESS MONEY, IT IS THE FIRST

Some quick thoughts on the book Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber, and
a non-Austrian view of the history of money.
 * Author:
   Shinobi
 * Publish date:
   2 hours ago



Some quick thoughts on the book Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber, and
a non-Austrian view of the history of money.

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I have just finished reading Debt: The First 5000 Years by anthropologist David
Graeber. The book takes a look at the history of money, debt, and how they
relate to societal structures from a lens that departs heavily from the
conventional wisdom of economic thinking.



Conventional wisdom paints a picture of people inefficiently bartering goods and
services directly for each other, and money naturally arising as a result of the
problems inherent in this. Graeber eviscerates this narrative looking at
anthropological history. Primitive communities simply shared their resources
freely with each other, living in a communal lifestyle, with bartering rarely
taking place, and only in the context of separate communities interacting with
each other. It played no role in early societies’ intra-communal affairs.





Money, as in commodity money, only began to be used in rare inter-communal
interactions across great distances. The economy in local regions did not begin
using such mechanisms for exchange. They used credit. Credit operated and
overseen by the government, such as in Ancient Sumer. This system grew out of
the informal “credits” people considered when sharing resources in more
primitive societies. But it was formalized and maintained by the power structure
of the government and temples of Sumer. No money would change hands during
exchanges, people would simply record debts stored at the temple, and
periodically settle their obligations with actual consumable commodities.

Debt came before coinage, and it was created and maintained at scale by the
state. Commodity money only came later, again minted and circulated by the
state, as large scale trust based civilizations collapsed and gave way to
warring imperial states. Debt and credit do not make much sense in a time period
of constant war and roving armies, with no certainty at all they will ever
return to settle debts after moving on.



Ever since, with the anomaly of the modern era and central banks, human
societies have oscillated between virtual credit money and coinage depending on
whether or not the era of the time was predominantly predicated on large scale
war and conquest. The same patterns repeated through the ages as well, with
people creating their own informal and localized credit networks after large
Empires using coinage fell, the government slowly inserting themselves into
these to mediate, and inevitably the return of coinage as violent Empires rose.





Bartar, as conventionally taught, was never actually a part of this process of
the development of money, and the state invariably had a direct involvement in
the formation of monetary systems and markets.

I’m sure many people are incredibly triggered reading that, but Graeber’s case
is very solid and built upon actual historical and anthropological evidence,
rather than speculation. Especially the idea that Chartalism has a much sounder
basis than many in this space would like to admit.

This actually makes Bitcoin all the more profound to me. Bitcoin isn’t simply
going back to a stateless money, I don’t think that one ever truly existed after
reading Debt. Bitcoin is the first stateless money to ever exist. To me, that
makes it an even more immense accomplishment and historical shift.



Regardless of your economic leanings, I recommend giving this book a read. It
will give you quite a lot to think about in the context of Bitcoin. 

This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author's and do not
necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.


Tags
terms:
David Graeberdebt
By
Shinobi
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