Nick Szabo  🔑

As long as people define money using a list of observed roles, anyone can rewrite the history of money to suit any agenda. “Money must serve as a medium of exchange, unit of account, and standard of deferred payment -- therefore money originated as debt!”https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/981680064390664193 …

more importantly, what possible purpose would be served by defining sports cars and Picassos as "money" - I mean, other than trying to win an argument?

by broadening your definition of money, you get a more inclusive history of similar objects that could have evolved into modern money!

you're talking to an anthropologist. No anthropologist defines "any enduring valuable" as "money" even if not used to measure or exchange other things because to do so would bring absurd results for reasons I already pointed out

maybe it seems absurd to you because it doesn't fit your preconceived notion of how money should be? believe it or not, there were societies and civilizations very different from our own that used "money" to serve different, but not unrelated, purposes.