(bags, shoes, bins, & bits of money)
Commodities that had intrinsic value like grain, livestock, salt (Roman Empire), shells (Africa and Asia), and raw gold were the earliest form of money, used about 5000 years ago. Coins were first minted about 2500 years after that (in what is now Turkey) and made of electrum, a natural alloy of silver and gold.
A few hundred years after that China invented paper money, (around the same time as moveable type, see the last post), which became widely used around the 10th century. (Europe didn’t use paper money for another 600 years).
Sneaker-dealers speculate on limited edition runs of hype shoes. Provenance and condition for them are just as important as it is for high-end art. Shoe aficionados use insider jargon like “very near deadstock,” which refers to sneakers that are barely worn. I watched the buyer on the right inspect, for about 15 minutes, the treads, laces, insoles, and even the tissue in the box. (I was surprised he didn’t pull out an Air Jordan© jeweller’s loupe). The thick-soled thicc-soled shoes (by satanist Rick Owens) worn by the guy in the image below retailed new for $1000; on the resale market a year later, $4000+ . (If unworn. Never. Wear. The. Shoes). Limited edition sneakers are very hard to understand.
Paper money was always backed by gold, all the way up to the 1970s, when the US decoupled from it, turning the US dollar into a fiat currency (backed only by the “full faith and credit” of the government, not by precious metal reserves).
Fashion is backed by the full faith and credit of the consumer. Bathing Ape (above) is a Japanese streetwear company. To get their most-coveted limited edition clothes you have to first own a BAPE NFT. An NFT is a non-fungible token, which is basically a visual digital asset, like a jpeg of a funky Ape (as with crypto, the NFT’s blockchain code creates scarcity and provenance). You buy an NFT using a digital currency like Bitcoin. (Bitcoin is not backed by gold; nor by the full faith and credit of any government).
Bitcoin was first mined (not minted) in 2009. In 2010, programmer Laszlo Hanyecz made the first real-world purchase using crypto. He bought two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoins, at the time the equivalent of $41 in real cash. Bitcoin is not just a currency, it is also a stock. Somehow. You are not supposed to spend it, just invest in it, and hold on to it for dear life. Had Lazlo HODLed, that $41 dollars of Bitcoin today would be worth over a billion old-fashioned dollars — $1,027,379,668.16 USD to be exact, depending on when you are reading this. That’s more than 50 million pizzas. Crypto is hard to understand.