Nick Szabo  🔑

interesting. so money is a store of value, medium of exchange & unit of account; where currency is forms of money in circulation: promissory notes which became fiat currency and no longer a store of value, since the removal of monetary backing. gold is money, fiat is currency.

Gold maximalism. Only dominant for a short period of time. For most of the history of the metallic metals (gold, silver, copper), from Mesopotamian tablets to still many parts of the world in the 19th century, they were all considered money.

Yes, from 1871 to 1914 to be exact. A short period of time, but an incredible period, too!

It was a period where the gold mostly sat in bank vaults and people used trust-based IOUs. Which trust was later abused to turn those IOUs into fiat. Meh.

Easy to knock it now that we have bitcoin, but before 2009 nothing could even come close to it!

the term electronic cash might have be coined (ahem) by @chaumdotcom in the 1980s, who tried to cooperate with banks; and that's fine, physical cash is also issued by banks. As we learnt that's not possible, money for the digital sphere had to be reinvented from the ground up.

so Bitcoin is electronic money, and Chaum's (coiner of the term electronic cash) Digicash was electronic cash (because it was fractional, fiat deposit based backing). and of course ideally electronic cash should be self-auditably backed by electronic money, to avoid trust.

I like cash because it emphasises no intermediaries. We already had electronic money through banks but not electronic cash. Opens conversations up to questions like "what would an economy based on cash look like?" and "would a settlement layer based on cash be more effective?"

Financial definitions highlit by that video and online assert that the term money includes being a store of value where currency is typically not a store of value these days, initially being a promissory note redeemable for gold or silver. and later Fiat with no monetary backing.

Cash settlement etc yes it's bearer but so is a gold coin, that's probably cash also. Maybe we should say digicash was electronic cash backed by currency where Bitcoin is electronic cash that is in itself money. So Bitcoin is both cash and money, in the process of monetisation.

IMHO, in legal jargon, currency is only a central bank-note and nothing else. "Money" is a economic term that includes currency, currency bank credit at sight -miscalled "deposit"- and whatever is generally used as money.