Cryptocurrency?
Over millennia, money has functioned across human civilizations serving as: (1) a unit of account, (2) a medium of exchange, and (3) a store of value.1 From the use of barter in primitive neolithic societies, to the minting of shekels in ancient Mesopotamia, to the advent of paper money in ancient China, money evolved continuously in the ancient world allowing peoples to coalesce around trade routes and establish the first city centers and modern states. In the course of human history, money has been a precondition for both commerce and the formation of advanced empires. Cryptocurrencies ,2 such as Bitcoin, are one of the most recent nodes in the long evolution of money. Cryptocurrencies have been hailed as a decentralized means of exchange that will usher in a new age of free market capitalism. But their billing has yet to materialize. To date, cryptocurrencies have not been widely adopted as a mainstream medium of exchange. Nor does recent history suggest that Bitc...