Money is the oldest story we tell ourselves, aside from ‘us vs. them’. It’s a technology, older than writing, that lets us cooperate without having to be family or friends. It's a shared illusion. A fiction we all agree to believe in so we can trade value. And for most of history, the people writing the story have been kings and governments. They control the money narrative, and therefore control you to a greater degree than you wish.
Let’s be clear: most people are financially uneducated. We had math in school but not everybody enjoyed lessons in macro-economics. We understand the brand of our sneakers better than the nature of our currency. That’s not an accident; I think this is a feature of the system.
The original SaaS was barter. A goat for your bananas. It was peer-to-peer, but it sucked. No one wants to bring a goat to the market. It doesn’t scale. It's like trying to run an e-commerce business using carrier pigeons.
So we invented abstractions: Shells, beads, shiny rocks. These weren't useful for eating, but they were scarce and portable. This was Money 1.0, a shared database of value running on the hardware of our collective brains.
Then came metals and coins. Money 2.0. Scarce, divisible, and durable. The iPhone of its day—a status symbol with actual utility. But heavy, hard to transport, and easy to steal.
The next great leap was an exercise in trust and control: Paper money. We gave our gold to a central authority (a bank, then the government), and they gave us a paper IOU (I owe you). People hated it. It took 400 years to catch on because it felt like a scam. Trading a claim check for actual gold? Insanity. But convenience won. We outsourced trust. In doing so, we handed the keys to the kingdom to a small group of people who could now print these papers at will. Your currency is on a treadmill, perpetually running from the inflation created by the institutions that print it.
Fast forward to today. You think you have digital money? You don't. You have a digital representation of the same old IOU, sitting on a bank's private server. In network language, it's a master-slave architecture. The bank is the master, you are the slave. That number in your banking app isn’t your money; it’s the bank’s debt to you. A debt they can choose not to honor. Ask anyone who lived through a bail-in in Greece or Cyprus. You have the illusion of control, a slick UI on a system of absolute power.
After the 2008 financial crisis, something new appeared. A mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, released a paper online and then disappeared. This was Bitcoin. It isn't an app, it is like the internet itself. A Protocol.
Before Bitcoin, you could copy any digital file endlessly. That’s why banks were needed. To make sure you didn't spend the same digital dollar twice. Bitcoin solved this double-spending problem. It created the first digital thing that can't be copied, like owning the original Mona Lisa instead of a photo of it.
This is what makes blockchain-based currencies like Bitcoin special
It’s a network, not a company. There’s no central office or CEO. It's run by computers all over the world, so no single person or government can control it, change it or stop it.
Anyone can join. You don’t need a bank's permission. You just need a wallet, which you can create with your internet connection. It cuts out the middleman.
You truly own it. The money in your bank is just a promise. Bitcoin is the asset itself. If you have the password (the keys), it’s yours. No one can freeze or take it. A simple 12-word password can be your key to your savings, accessible from anywhere.
Forget the noise about meme coins and overnight riches. That's the casino, a distraction from the main event. The real story is a tug-of-war for the soul of money. It’s a choice between two futures, and you’re already living in one of them.
The Intranet: This is the world your bank and government are building. A clean, walled garden where everything is efficient, tracked, and approved. It's money as a tool of control. A digital currency where your transaction can be declined because of what you said online, or your savings can be "adjusted" by a committee. It’s safe, sterile, and you are the product.
The Internet: This is the alternative. It’s messy, open, and borderless, like the early web. It's less efficient because freedom is messy. It’s volatile because it's new. This is money that puts you in charge, for better or worse. It's an escape hatch from a system that sees you as a line item on a balance sheet.
The current financial system is a glasshouse, and the people in charge keep throwing stones. It’s not a question of if it will crack, but when.
Open protocols like Bitcoin aren't trying to burn the house down. They're building a lifeboat...
Mario Kondo's Mind Palace
Support dialog
Thanks for your contribution Mario, loved the way you synthesize the history of value representation. I got a question for you, if BTC is the universal value storage, what does ETH represent?