Bitcoin: The Future Of Money

Currency has gone from cows to coins to paper to plastic. The next big disruption? We could all be spending digital dough. 

- Kashmir Hill

THE NEXT TIME you pull a tattered $5 bill out of your pocket to pay for a coffee, consider the fact that you’re handling one of society’s oldest and most important inventions: money. Relatively soon after humans decided that we liked living in groups, instead of in panda-style isolation, we came up with ways to value what we had—and make people pay for it. We bartered cattle and grain until the Lydians—the Bronze Age inhabitants of what is modern-day Turkey—realized those were hard to stuff into a wallet, and introduced government-minted coins. It turned out coins were still a pain to carry around, so eventually they evolved into the paper money we all use today.

But paper was still just a stand-in for metal:Sure, coins mostly disappeared, but we were symbolically carrying gold around in the pockets of our bell-bottom jeans until 1971, when Richard Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard. Divorced from the physical, money became a kind of belief system. It went from representing something precious and valuable to representing value in and of itself. Everyone agrees that if you walk into Starbucks with a $5 bill, you can walk out with a latte.

Of course, rarely do any of us walk into Starbucks with a $5 bill anymore. We walk in with a credit card, or a Starbucks gift card, or with an Apple Pay app on our iPhone. And that’s another way money has changed. It’s become more and more abstracted. It’s numbers sitting in our bank accounts or on our credit-card statements. It’s a series of digital ledgers kept by banks, payment processors, and financial startups. The USA Network’s