People have made crazy stories up about "the origin of money" for a long time; Adam Smith makes up a zany story about people agreeing to use chunks of metal to make change for bartering because it's too hard to keep chickens in your wallet when you need to break a sheep[1]...

The notion that people gravitate to metal vs "fractional sheep" is without historical evidence. People in fact, a long time ago, did trade things like IOUs or pieces of broken reeds or sticks[2]. Those sticks acted like IOUs and were often traded around far past the original parties to the contract.

Money is a contract between you, your peer/counterparty, and whatever organization you "trust" to mediate if someone really isn't happy with the outcome of a situation.

Money is, indeed, culture.

[1] https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/chapter-iv-of-the-o... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick

I mean, cultures are also a kind of technology, arguably one of the first we developed as Homo Sapiens.

In my view the actual issue has always been that cryptocurrency folks don't understand what purpose money serves, mostly because they're all basically gold bugs. To strain the "money is a technology" metaphor, this is a product-market-fit issue -- like trying to build a cloud orchestration framework that only works on DIY Belwulf clusters or a web framework that only looks nice on teletype.

Or if you read Sapiens you'll know money is a story we tell each other. You can't literally do much with a coin or bank note or numbers on a screen but as long as we all believe it has value, it does. It becomes part of the culture, as you say.

Crypto also has to tell a story about why it's valuable. There was a lot of anti government rhetoric and fear mongering (from libertarians) but the public never really believed the story was true. It was a lot of FOMO.

NFTs failed completely to sell their story but crypto is still hanging on among its supporters. AI is telling a similar story about the value of tokens which is being well received