From clay tablets to crypto: Rethinking money in the age of blockchain

Anthropologist Bill Maurer joins the Clear Crypto Podcast to explore how blockchain revives ancient ideas about money, not as tokens, but as systems of record-keeping and social trust.

If money isn’t coins, bills or even cryptocurrencies, what is it, really? That’s the question at the heart of this week’s episode of The Clear Crypto Podcast, where hosts Nathan Jeffay (StarkWare) and Adrian Blust (Tonal Media) sit down with Bill Maurer, dean of the UC Irvine School of Social Sciences and a leading anthropologist of finance.

“I generally begin by going back to history and talking about case studies like ancient Mesopotamia,” Maurer said. 

He explained that leading into a conversation about blockchain or crypto, he points to the emergence of society, and therefore the eventual emergence of a currency system. However, at the beginning, it wasn’t a token, coin or banknote; it wasn’t even something that was “passed hand to hand.”

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