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>"Money only works because we all agree to believe in it." Not only that, but it's a derivative (or perceived derivative!) of an underlying value, which in turn can be another derivative! A long time ago, that was Gold, which in turn is a derivative of food and everything else that can be purchased by Gold. Early U.S. pennies, for example, had pictures of wheat stalks on them, the idea "you can use this coin to buy wheat (food)" (storage of value of food) is present in that picture... If you really want to go back in time, when you have food that doesn't rot and doesn't decay over long periods (for example, dry noodles), then we can see the noodles themselves as "storage" for the "value" of the underlying wheat (which decays much faster when not in noodle form). In fact, you might argue that nature's nuts (walnuts, hazelnuts, peanuts, etc., etc.) -- because they were food that could be stored for a long periods of time without rotting -- were the first historical "storage of value", and thus the first currency... Perhaps that's why everyone is so "nutty" -- about money! <g> Also, in any system where object A (stock certificate, money, IOU, metal, physical object, digital identifier, etc.) -- is a storage of value for some underlying value, or something which is value derived from somewhere else, or a chain of derivatives -- you have the potential (in those systems) for a) Ponzi Schemes (correctly or incorrectly called this) and b) Hyperinflation and c) Hyperdeflation and d) T