The birth of Bitcoin is actually solving an old problem in human society:
🔥How to make economic value flow across time and space? !
To understand it, we must first understand currency and its origin!
The birth of currency comes from "barter", which is suitable for simple, limited small economies.
As the market becomes larger, the professional division of labor becomes more detailed, and the number of transactions increases, the coupling becomes stronger and the matching becomes more difficult!
It brings three mismatches:
1️⃣ Value: What I want is not equivalent to what you hold
2️⃣ Time: Mine is easy to store, and yours is easy to rot
3️⃣ Space: A house in Beijing cannot be exchanged for a tree in Sanya
Direct barter cannot solve the above mismatches!
Then: indirect barter, the birth of transaction intermediaries!
And currency becomes a widely accepted transaction intermediary!
Therefore, transaction intermediary is the most important function of currency as currency, and it is also the original function!
People hold currency not to consume the currency itself.
It is not for the purpose of producing other goods (this was the case in the early days, but it is different now).
It is for the purpose of exchanging it for other goods!
So what can become currency?
Obviously, as long as it can be freely exchanged for what you want anytime and anywhere, it can be used as currency (transaction intermediary)!
In addition to gold and silver, copper, shells, stones, salt, livestock, and tobacco and alcohol in specific environments can all be used as currency!
There is no "right" or "wrong" currency choice, as long as you choose, the result will be formed!
This is the marketability of currency: the convenience of the holder to sell the commodity in the market at a small price loss at any time!
The ability to become currency for a long time comes from its marketability in value scale, space and time!
1️⃣Value scale: can be easily divided into smaller ones, or combined into larger ones
2️⃣Space: easy to carry, the value per unit weight should be high
3️⃣Time: future value preservation ability, some people are willing to use it to preserve and inherit wealth
We see that it is not difficult to meet 1️⃣2️⃣, but it is difficult to achieve the third one!
This is also another very important function of currency in addition to the function of transaction intermediary: value storage.