Money, says Moldbug, is a bubble that never bursts, until it does. A very long time ago, all sorts of strange things, such as dog canine teeth, were money. It came to pass that only silver and gold were money. And then only gold. The demonetization of silver gave us the long depression, which by modern standards was not bad at all - because it was long, gold rose, which is to say prices fell, very slowly, because silver was demonetized very slowly. People did not like it, hence the "cross of gold speech" demanding that state power be applied to remonetize silver, but all the supposed horrid evils of deflation turned out to be not very evil at all. From time to time governments discover that they can make some arbitrary thing money by the mere exercise of power. This usually ends horribly badly. Right now we have the disturbing and strange situation that it is hard for savers to receive positive real interest on their money, and at the same time hard for worthy borrowers to borrow money. The system is malfunctioning rather badly, but monetary systems have frequently malfunctioned one hell of a lot worse, so I will not bother explaining why we are in this hole. (tl; dr; Governments did wicked, but extremely popular, things with money. To the surprise of many people, myself among them, this did not destroy the currency, but it had other extremely bad effects.) Because of governments doing bad things with money, the thought occurred to some people: maybe private individuals, not armed with state power, could make some arbitrary thing power. Turns out, we could.