If you took a university course in economics, you probably learnt a simple history of money. First, people bartered. But barter was difficult because you need a “double coincidence of wants”: I have to want what you have, and you have to want what I have. So people used bits of valuable metal to make the barter easier. Then paper came to represent the metal, and the paper took on value. Ta da! Money.

That history was selective and highly political. As the US government continues to create new dollars, and cryptocurrencies compete to see which can appreciate faster, we are seeing a renewal of an old argument over the history of money. Whoever controls what we use as money has great power. So there has always been a strong incentive to say that the only historical true nature of money is oh, wow, look! It’s the thing I have!

The phrase double coincidence of wants comes originally from Stanley Jevons, a 19th-century economist from the UK who published a detailed history of money in 1890. He arrived at the particularly Victorian conclusion that the UK was right: peg money to gold, a valuable commodity that would naturally flow with trade to where it was needed.