Money, in and of itself, is not evil. It is simply a tool for social interaction. It is almost instinctual. Left to themselves, third graders will create money. They will barter for gum, or trading cards or beads or some item that has attained value in their social circle.
Money has evolved through the centuries. First appearing as an item or commodity. Feathers, shells, beads, tobacco, sticks with notches on them, giant carved stones.... The list of items that humans have used for money through the ages is enormous. Then money went through it's first major evolution when we started using metals. Primarily gold and silver, and usually cast into specific shapes and denominations. In the middle ages, people would leave their heavy gold with the goldsmith and receive a paper receipt to claim it later. It didn't take them long to realize that it was easier to trade the receipts than to actually get the gold and move it around and we entered the era of paper bills that were backed by precious metals. The second transformation of money.
Fast forward to the United States under Nixon, and people have become so accustomed to using paper bills, that they no longer needed any backing to function. Thus we enter the third great evolution. The gold standard is abandoned, and we begin to use fiat money, otherwise known as "It has value because I said so!" This form of money has detached itself from the real world of tangible things and has allowed for some pretty disturbing behavior. It is created by a privately owned banking cartel called the Federal Reserve, and it's value seems to be derived from the threat of violence. It makes insanity, such as fractional reserve banking, derivatives, and credit default swaps possible. It has allowed a system of parasitic, rent seeking behavior to flourish and grow. Grow to the point that, I am supposed to sit here and accept the proposition that 15 minutes of time for a CEO or Stock Broker is equivalent to 40 years of my hard labor.
The problems we see are not intrinsic to the concept of money, only to the current iteration of money.
In 2008 a radical new invention by the anonymous person or persons known as Satoshi Nakamoto has opened the doors to the fourth major change in the form of money. A distributed ledger of ownership. A way to send value securely over an untrusted network. Just as we use this network of computers to exchange ideas, and receive information that would be otherwise inaccessible, bitcoin is allowing a new era of economic activity that was never possible before.
No more excluding 6 billion people from the financial world. No more middlemen taking a cut of the profits without adding any value to the system. No more banks creating money out of thin air and devaluing our savings.
Bitcoin as a currency, may or may not be the iteration of this technology that the world embraces. But the world will embrace this technology, just like it is embracing the internet, because it is advantageous to the individual to do so. And I have no doubt that the world will be a better place for it!
