Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin says we’re thinking about money all wrong — Quartz

Every time someone comes up with a new representation to manage the physical world, people become suspicious. When Marco Polo first came back from the East, his stories of people using paper representations of money in China, not metal, were discredited as sorcery. How could slips of paper equal a chicken?

The European world continued to resist representative money well into the 17th century. Later forms of derivative money, electronically transferred over wires and computer networks, also took time to be understood and accepted.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the emergence of cryptocurrencies has unleashed equal waves of fascination and skepticism. These bits of cryptographically secured bundled data are just the newest form of value representation—the 21st century’s version of that flimsy paper money.

“Some of the most important human creations have been new representation systems,” said cognitive scientist Margaret Boden in The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms….