Money
What makes money valuable?
Primitives
What are the irreducible functions of money?
| Primitive | Function | Question |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of Account | Naming value | How do you measure? |
| Medium of Exchange | Transferring value | How do you move it? |
| Store of Value | Preserving value | How do you keep it? |
The first primitive is Unit of Account — a naming problem. You can't exchange or store what you can't measure. This is first principles applied to money.
Money is tokenized time and energy stored as opportunity.
Properties
What makes good money?
| Property | Definition | Bitcoin |
|---|---|---|
| Scarcity | Limited supply | 21M cap |
| Durability | Lasts over time | Code is forever |
| Divisibility | Can split small | 100M sats |
| Portability | Easy to move | Internet native |
| Fungibility | Units interchangeable | Mostly |
| Verifiability | Can prove authenticity | Cryptographic |
Flow
What makes money go round?
- Time and Energy — The source
- Economics — The system
- Capital — Flows
- Cryptocurrency — Programmable money
- Investing — Putting it to work
Psychology
Why do rational models fail?
Myth
Money works because we believe it works. The shared fiction enables coordination at scale.
Context
- First Principles — Decompose to primitives
- Naming Standards — Unit of account is naming
- Standards — Money needs standards to function
- Time and Energy — The source of value
Links
Questions
What is the most important question this topic raises that current discourse tends to avoid or understate?
- Which assumption in the standard framing of this topic is most likely to be wrong in a 5-year horizon?
- How does the DePIN or agent-native lens change what matters most about this topic?
- Which first principle, if violated, would make the analysis of this topic fundamentally incorrect?