One bill makes you larger, two bills make you small, and the ones that Uncle gives you aren't worth anything utall....... I thank everyone for the explanations I read; they were all quite interesting, informative, and enlightening. I think that asking about the origins of the concept of money supply is a bit like asking about the origin of God or the Universe: it's just there. My question is still unanswered in my mind, and I think the best thing will be to do some further research in the library: Where did Alice get her money initially which she deposited in a bank for its safe-keeping and interim use. It was printed by the government. How did the gov. decide how much to "create" (print) and then assign a "value" to, from their gold reserve (back when it meant something). Too much or too little currency in circulation, and you have either inflation or deflation; I know it's arbitrary, but how was an acceptably correct proportion established initially, beginning from when the US was established as a legitimate nation; how was the process started, based on what sort of relationship between the abstract units and the available "stuff" used as reference to base it upon. The act of assigning abstract numbers to a concrete substance like gold: someone made the initial associations and established an understanding among the intended users. The procedure of using an exchange medium was familiar from centuries before. The medium changed, but the system of exchange remained and has been expanded upon, until now it is very complex. Really, now all that we mostly see are "money-numbers" attached to checks, credit cards, bank account statements, receipts, shares, etc. I don't ever see the gold and if I exchanged all of my checking account for it, I would probably find resistance to its use from the inconvenience and danger of actually handling it. This is now pretty well just an act of assessing value/worth based upon knowledge gained from the past relative to what everybody else has been doing, in terms of assigning any worth to any thing in terms of some number. It all makes sense, now. I understand this much: there is some gold and other actual metal located in a vault, sitting there as a symbolic standard of wealth, worth, value. Everyone stakes a claim to it, and they exchange that claim to others in substitution for something else (dog, rifle, gas in the car, baby-sitting). These claims can circulate as fast as a computer can calcualte & transfer them, and that is all that circulates while the standard continues to sit in the vault, not being used for anything by anybody. As long as you hold a claim to this lump of stuff, you're Somebody - a force to contend with in the Market Place. All you have to figure out is how to *get* some of that Claim in your hands so that you, too, can be involved in the Circulation Business. Something which can be converted from a solid to a liquid so it can be re-converted back to a solid or something similar. But you always want to maintain some Claim, some attachment, to that symbolic reference from which all money numbers derive their assigned worth. It's easy, when you know how. :>) Oh, and. . . uh.. .what this has to do with cypherpunks is... uh . ..uh. . .anarcho-capitalistic control of my destiny based upon fundamental comprehension of currency denomination & free market methodology with future potential within an encrypted digi-cash system? Blanc