"Money itself is an abstraction. If it's not an abstraction, then it's not money- it's barter."
-Andreas M. Antonopoulos-
What makes good money?
Something that is rare. In early days, shells, and feathers were used.
You can transport the value easily. With few exceptions, most forms of money are highly portable.
It must be difficult to forge; it has to be difficult to create more of it. You should be able to detect at a glance or relatively easily that it is real.
It should be fungible. If I give you a dollar, it doesn't matter which dollar I give you, it's fungible. Every dollar can be substituted for every dollar.
These are the technologies, and gradually over time we've created abstractions. Money itself is an abstraction. If I give you bananas for a goat, that's not money. Bananas are not money because you eat them. You don't use them to do further exchanges. Therefore, that's barter. You're exchanging one commodity for another. If it's abstract- if it doesn't have any practical use in itself- then as an abstraction of money it represents something else, some share value.
This leads to the inescapable conclusion about money: Money is a shared cultural hallucination. It's a shared delusion. We walk around and associate with other people on the basis of germ-ridden pieces of cotton printed with green ink. By exchanging these pieces of cotton, you could create social relationships, transactions, and trade- you could feed yourself, shelter yourself, etc. It's based on the assumption that if you give me a dollar today, someone else will accept that dollar in exchange for something of value tomorrow. If I still believe that is the case, then it has value. value comes from the assumption that I can use it again.
