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.
:::tip Mantra 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?