Introduction

Now that we have a better idea of the trust problems that exist with our current fiat money that we have stored in our bank accounts, and understand what the real world impacts are of breaches of this trust, we should discuss why we keep using banks and central banks in the first place. Essentially, this segment will attempt to answer how we got ourselves into this situation.

We will start with a very short history of money and talk about why the hardest form of money won out. Specifically, the first segment will explain why the difficulty associated with producing more gold inevitably made it the best money for thousands of years. We will then talk about how gold got accumulated and centralized by banks and central banks over time, in an attempt to resolve some of the issues physical gold had as a form of money. In particular, how gold started to show its limits when the pace and scope of our commerce increased with improvements in communications technology. And lastly, we will talk about how this centralization inevitably led to the trust issues discussed before.