Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better

by Lyn Alden

This book repeatedly explored the question of “who controls the ledger?” and the answer to that question has shifted over time. In early history, the answer was that local communities and nature (for commodity money) controlled the ledger. As some civilizations gained large technological advantages over others, their technology gave those advanced civilizations a way to basically control the ledgers of the less advanced civilizations they encountered by producing a lot of certain types of commodity money that those less advanced civilizations thought was rare. With the rise of banking and central banking in a telecommunication-enhanced world, where gold was too slow to serve as money anymore, the ledger became increasingly centralized and controlled by nation states. Governments and their central banks essentially acquired a monopoly on fast, long-distance money transmission, which gave them more flexibility to devalue the savings of people within their borders and channel that value toward their goals in opaque ways. Going forward, bottom-up digital monies such as bitcoin attempt to give the ledger back to the people, while top-down digital monies such as central bank digital currencies give nation states even more control over the ledger that people use.