WHAT IS MONEY?
"Your true wealth is your time and freedom. MONEY is just a tool for trading your time. It's a container to store your economic energy until you are ready to deploy it. But the whole world has been turned away from real money and fooled into using CURRENCY - a deceitful imposter that is stealing your two most valuable assets:
Your time and your freedom. Welcome to the rabbit hole."
- Mike Maloney Hidden Secrets of Money
MONEY
MONEY: a natural system of value that facilitates the exchange of goods & services; a baseline for efficiently measuring (pricing) goods & services.
MONEY Unit: acts as a Store of Value (SoV) because its supply cannot be arbitrarily created, it must be produced or earned at a cost. SoV enables a person to save the value of their labor or work.
Example: Gold, Silver, Bitcoin
CURRENCY
CURRENCY: a controlled system of value whose units are used as a medium of exchange
(value not backed by Money but by the good faith and credit of the government).
CURRENCY Unit: does NOT act as a Store of Value (SoV) because its supply can increase at an arbitrary rate which is decided by the issuer of the currency.
Example: Fiat Dollars (US Federal Reserve Notes)
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Evolution of Money
American Revolution
After experiencing The Successful British Counterfeiting of American Paper Money During the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers of the United States were uniquely prepared to address concerns surrounding our nations money.
They made it explicitly clear in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 5 of the Constitution that:
"the Congress shall have power to coin money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures."
Article 1, Section 1O, Clause 1 of the Constitution states:
"No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility."
The Constitution prohibits the states from coining money and emitting Bills of Credit, thus the Supreme Court has recognized Congress's coinage power to be exclusive.
Take notice that states were only allowed to make gold and silver Coin legal tender for payments of debts.
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.... I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."¹
Thomas Jefferson
"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance."
James Madison
"All the perplexities, confusions & distress in America arise from downright ignorance of the nature of Coin, Credit, and Circulation."
John Adams
The Switch: Money to Currency
The Founding Fathers knew from experience that paper currency would open up the doors for counterfeiters and ultimately lead to more national economic security concerns from not only the plots of other Nation States but also International Bankers alike.
The way banks used to work is as follows... A person makes a deposit of gold and/or silver coin at the bank. The bank issues a 'claim check' (banknote) for the gold/silver coin.
It's like when you drop a shirt off at the dry cleaners, you get a claim check for when you return to pick up your shirt. The real value is not in the claim check but in the shirt.
The same is true with paper commodity money. The value was not in the paper claim check but in the underlying gold & silver coin.
At any time the bearer of the claim check (banknote) could redeem the gold/silver coin on demand as authorized by law:
The problems with traditional banking in the USA all started when U.S. politicians allowed for the banks to make the legal change from MONEY to CURRENCY.
That historical and momentous shift away from money started in 1837 with The Michigan Act which allowed banks to use State Bonds as reserve collateral, in addition to gold and silver coin, for expanding credit.
The only reason the Supreme Court ruled this act as Constitutional (McCulloch vs Maryland - 1819) was because the banknotes were still required to be redeemable to the bearer upon demand for gold or silver coin.
The final victory for banks, that shifted us from traditional to modern banking, took place in 1971 under President Nixon.
Nixon completely removed the gold-backing of the Dollar (ended convertibility) under the guise of protecting the dollar from "speculators."
Let's take a look below at the alterations that took place in the US Dollar as it was changed from MONEY to CURRENCY:
As you saw above, when the US Dollar was MONEY, it was a 'certificate' that acted as a claim check redeemable for gold or silver coin on demand.
When the US dollar was changed to CURRENCY, it switched from being a 'certificate' directly redeemable for gold & silver coin to being a plain paper debt 'note'.
After the switch, using the US dollar became like trying to trade your dry cleaners claim check after you had already picked up your shirt. There was no shirt to back the value of the claim check, whoever traded for it was stuck with a worthless claim.
People would keep trading the claim check back and forth until finally one day someone went to the dry cleaners to get the shirt only to find out the shirt had already been claimed and there was no value at all behind the claim check (banknote).
This game of musical chairs is now coming to an end. The people who are left holding debt notes will be stuck with a claim check that is not redeemable for any real value.
As you can see in the Federal Reserve Education Department chart below, the amount of dollar debt notes issued has diluted the dollar and destroyed its' purchasing power.
All the unsustainable economic trends we see today began at this exact time in 1971 and can be visualized and confirmed in the charted data supplied at WTFhappenedin1971.com
FOR A MUCH MORE DETAILED HISTORICAL REVIEW, CHECK OUT THE HISTORY OF MONEY PAGE.
Money Dilution Kills Empires
The fall of the most famous empire, Rome, was indeed the result of the Roman governments abuse of their own metal coin money.
The Roman government was a big spender. To cover the cost of their unbalanced budget (deficit spending) they were forced to constantly dilute the quality of their metal coin money.
4O years after the time of Jesus Christ (7O AD), when Rome had just destroyed the Jewish Temple, a Roman Denarius (silver coin worth 1 days work) consisted of 9O%+ silver.
17O years later the Denarius had been extremely diluted and consisted of approximately 4O% silver.
Less than 3O years later, the Denarius had been completely diluted and consisted of less than 5% silver.
The dilution of metal coin money was hard for Rome to hide from the merchants and its people.
Deficit Spending is Money Dilution
The fall of the most famous empire, Rome, was indeed the result of the Roman government's abuse (dilution) of their own metal coin money.
Notice the denarius coins in the pic above from the year 24O easily stood the test of time. Yet the denarius from the year 27O was so diluted the coin quality literally withered away.
The Roman government was a big spender. To cover the cost of their unbalanced budget (deficit spending) they were forced to constantly dilute the quality of their metal coin money.
Sound familiar? It should.
The United States government is a big spender. To cover the cost of their unbalanced budget (deficit spending) they are forced to constantly dilute the quality (value) of their debt notes.
In the chart below, you will notice the inverted silver denarius chart from above section. The more the denarius was diluted, the more coins were in circulation.
Similarly, the more the dollar is diluted, the more currency units are in circulation.
The US government is on the same exact path as the Roman Empire.
"To contract NEW DEBTS is NOT THE WAY TO PAY OLD ones."
George Washington
Gold & Silver have historically performed best as money because, unlike government made paper debt notes, its existence is rare and there is significant cost to produce more of the units to put into circulation.
It's the cost to produce more money that enables the free market economic mechanism - the Supply/Demand Equilibrium Price Discovery process - to properly store value.
If MONEY is rejected and CURRENCY is used (and abused) in place of money then the continued dilution of the currency will make the life of We the People more expensive:
GOT FINANCIAL FREEDOM? Or are you still playing musical chairs with government currency?
BITCOIN is considered Digital Gold (Money) 2.O.
At the protocol level of the asset there is computer code guaranteeing both monetary policy through finite supply and a built in "difficulty adjustment" which controls the cost to produce a Bitcoin.
These guaranteed policies ensure purchasing power which enables We the People to properly store the value of our labor over time.
Learn more on the WHAT IS BITCOIN? page.