What Is Money, and Why Does Crypto Exist?

What you’ll learn

• •Money works because a community collectively trusts and accepts it — value sits in shared confidence, not in the physical object.
• •Money's three traditional roles: medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value.
• •Fiat currency (like GBP, USD) gets its value from trust and institutions, not a physical commodity like gold.
• •Most money today is already digital — crypto didn't invent digital money, it introduced a different way to record it.
• •A ledger is simply a record of who owns what; the key question crypto raises is who controls it.
• •Bitcoin (2009) explored whether a ledger could be maintained by a distributed network instead of one central institution.