Crypto, Money, and Desire

In my book I put basically all my thoughts about money into some pre-history of monetization work. The book is spendy so look at it on a library website. Given the situation with the crypto crash, it seems relevant to return to that section of my book to get your key arguments:

1. Stories about the origins of money are all wrong, they tell you about the ideology of the person telling them, not the history. Money was likely created multiple times in human history for various reasons, the seamless story of money replacing barter is just a way of explaining a way a lot of cool stuff about money in a very boring way. Archeology about money is well beyond my zone, so I was comfortable in the book resolving the deep history of money with the key point that it is a really rich field and that any single historical thrust for money is silly.
2. Social agreement theories of money are naive. The social agreement that money is worth something fluctuates in ways that make no sense if it is a simple social agreement, especially in the context of fetishistic attachments to money which are leveraged for critique. Slowing that down, if money only had value because of social agreement we would do a lot of other interesting things to manage the economy, there is a lot more stuff going on their than just an agreement that some pieces of paper mean something, the feelings are much deeper. Add some historical depth here, Aristotle wrote about fetishization and money, the King Midas story is a way of warning folks about the dangers of disarticualting value from the…