Aristotle said that money needed to have specific properties, so that it could be used as a unit of measure for things you want to exchange. Much like the centimeter or inch is useful to know how big an object is physically.
Money is a unit of measurement that helps us measure how much we value something in terms of how much energy we would expend to get it. He believed that money should be durable, portable, divisible, and intrinsically valuable. Over time, we’ve developed additional ideas about what money should be. But these are foundational ideas that have proven themselves true over and over again. Economies that use money that break these rules fail, and economies that follow them, flourish.
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