Imagine handing a child a bag of salt and calling it a paycheck. They would laugh, bewildered. Yet the Roman soldier once marched home with such a wage, and the very word salary remembers it. Salt preserved food and life itself. To be paid in it was not absurd, but obvious.

That is money’s nature: what feels natural in one age seems alien in the next. Salt gave way to silver stamped with emperors, silver to paper promises, paper to plastic cards, plastic to glowing rectangles of glass — smartphones that hold in their memory more wealth than kings once commanded. My own children do not carry cash. They have never written a check. To them, a bank account feels archaic. Their “accounts” are apps, their wallets digital, their savings staked in tokens that pay yields far greater than the dust of a savings book.

Money mutates. And once a form of money is replaced, it does not return.

When Money Turns Bad

At every stage, money has gone wrong.

The Romans clipped their coins thinner and thinner until the silver vanished. Inflation rose, trust dissolved, and the empire’s arteries hardened into collapse. In Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe, governments printed notes until they were more useful as kindling than as wages. Paper melted in the furnace of hyperinflation, and trust with it.

Modern systems have their own poisons. Credit cards promise freedom with a smile, then imprison families with thirty-percent interest, minimum payments designed to never end, and fees upon fees. Fiat currencies, in the hands of elites, conjure trillions at will, sending asset prices soaring for the few while wages stagnate for the many. Central planning promises stability but often delivers boom and bust, bubbles and crashes repeating like a chronic fever.

Even the stock market, once imagined as a democratic engine of investment, has turned predatory. Retail investors are scorned as “dumb money,” their trades harvested by algorithms, their losses fueling the profits of insiders. It is a casino where the house always wins.

Bad money corrodes civilization. It does not guide us to flourish; it whispers panic, exploitation, collapse.

The Pooling of Power

Venture capital was meant to fund the new, the bold, the improbable. And often it has. But the structure of modern VC also repeats the logic of bad money: capital pools in ever fewer hands, power concentrates, and the game tilts. The same patterns of exclusion and extraction appear: terms written to favor insiders, companies forced to scale unnaturally or die, genuine innovation suffocated by fashions and fads.

When finance becomes about control rather than creation, about capturing upside while externalizing risk, it becomes another form of bad money. Just as fiat printing presses privilege the few, and credit card rates trap the poor, venture finance can — when misaligned — stifle the very evolution it claims to nurture.

Money, whether minted by emperors, printed by central banks, or deployed by funds, too often serves to reinforce the power of the already powerful.

The Rebellion of Code

It is no accident, then, that the first great rebellion against bad money was not political but mathematical. Bitcoin arrived in 2009, a protocol that no emperor could debase, no banker could inflate. Twenty-one million coins, forever. A ledger written not in paper but in cryptography. For the first time in history, ordinary people could hold value outside the reach of the state.

But Bitcoin was only the beginning. Ethereum extended the rebellion, transforming money from a vault into a workshop. Smart contracts made agreements into code, creating lending markets, decentralized treasuries, and tokens of art and culture. Solana pressed further, proving money could be fast, cheap, and adaptable, settling thousands of transactions in the time it takes to swipe a card.

And then came meme coins — absurd and revealing. If the old system mocked retail investors as “dumb money,” then young people embraced the insult, turned it inside out, and created tokens of belonging, humor, and defiance. Better to laugh with a dog on a coin than to be bled by bankers behind mahogany doors.

Together, these systems form the beginnings of a new stack: Bitcoin as anchor, Ethereum as programmable fabric, Solana as high-speed rail, meme coins as cultural signal. Not one perfect coin, but a layered ecosystem.

The Shape of Money to Come

What, then, would perfect money look like? Not the rigidity of gold, nor the inflation of fiat, nor the traps of credit cards, nor the insider games of markets, nor the distortions of centralized venture capital. Perfect money would preserve trust across generations, include rather than exclude, protect privacy while allowing accountability, reward creation and cooperation rather than speculation and exploitation. It would be programmable for innovation, resilient to shocks, and fair in its flows. It would price destruction — war, pollution, fraud — as costs too high to pursue, and channel energy into health, knowledge, and abundance.

It would be plural, not singular: a stack where different layers serve different purposes, but the whole remains honest and interoperable.

What Aliens Might Think

Imagine aliens arriving, watching us. They would see a species clever enough to split the atom, yet still trusting its future to slips of paper, digits conjured at will, and markets rigged against their own participants. They would puzzle over our salt wages, laugh at our paper promises, and shake their heads at our willingness to enslave ourselves with interest rates and bubbles.

But perhaps they would also recognize something else: a species in transition, fumbling toward conscious design of its own signaling system. They would see Bitcoin’s defiance, Ethereum’s experiments, Solana’s speed, even meme coins’ absurdity, and they might understand: here is a civilization in adolescence, stumbling but learning, beginning to realize that money is not a fact of nature but a tool it can choose to shape.

And they might think: if this species survives its bad money, it might yet outgrow money itself.

The Horizon

In Star Trek, no one speaks of money. Not because tyranny has abolished it, but because abundance has rendered it unnecessary. Needs are met, cooperation is effortless, freedom is the true currency.

We are not there. But we can see the direction. Each rebellion, each mutation, carries us closer to money that guides us not into collapse but into flourishing. Perfect money is not yet in our hands. But the shape of it is visible, in the wallets our children already use.

The question is not whether money will evolve. It always does. The question is whether it will evolve fast enough, and well enough, to carry civilization forward — before bad money drags it back.