Fractional reserve banking, perhaps the oldest and greatest fraud throughout history, probably originated with goldsmiths in ancient times. People deposited their gold for safekeeping with these goldsmiths who learned quickly that they could spend "receipts" into circulation in addition to the legitimate ones ones given out to the depositors. Any civilization that allows fractional reserve banking has a burst of expansion/prosperity but then quickly collapses. The fraudsters make off with the spoils of an entire civilization and repeat the corrupting process in a new civilization (leaving behind mounds of ruins). One can trace the movement of the "Money Power" center from ancient Babylon to Athens to Rome to Venice to Amsterdam to London to New York. The coming collapse of the world's fiat currencies will be monumental.

There is a big difference between "real" paper money, which is a claim on a specific amount of a standardized commodity, and fraudulent "fiat" paper money which can be and is inflated to pay for war and bribing voters with "free lunch" bread and circuses.

Cryptocurrency (and other blockchain uses for the new technology) have the potential to remove fraud from government and commerce. But it requires an educated and vigilant populace that values liberty. Blockchain technology could also be totally centralized and become the most efficient system of coercion that Money Power and corrupt government could ever conceive.

Unfortunately the vast majority of people have always valued (a false sense of)security over freedom and responsibility.

"“Freedom, free thought and science, will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves,” the Inquisitor says. “Others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet.”
The Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov