MoneyPatterns

Created by @sherminvo, author of Token Economy & The Bitcoin Book: Money Patterns explores how money evolves, its history, politics & technology.

[MoneyPatterns @MoneyPatternsHQ]

This account, once @token3conomy, is now @MoneyPatternsHQ.
Why? I spent 10 years writing about crypto—only to realize how little we know about money. Yet here we are, trying to reinvent the wheel on crypto rails 👇

https://t.co/uaO4ZVJlDC

[Shermin Voshmgir 🌈 🪐 💫 @sherminvo]

When #AnnPettifor published her book #TheProductionOfMoney in 2017, the financial world was still digesting the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Central banks had spent a decade expanding their balance sheets, while governments imposed austerity. At the same time, cryptocurrencies were rising as a counter-narrative — Bitcoin often claimed as “sound money,” Ethereum as “programmable finance.”

Her argument cut across the moment:
money is not a scarce commodity dug from the ground, but a social construct — a credit system designed by institutions and backed by political power. She emphasizes monetary sovereignity, bank credit creation & critiques austerity/QE distributional effects.

The book is compact, polemical & accessible. It explains how modern money is created — who has the power to issue credit, and why that power matters — in clear, everyday language. It treats the monetary/credit system as public infrastructure that can be designed for collective well-being or for private gain. It’s one of the rare economics books you can read in a weekend and come away seeing the financial system differently.

At the time, few in the crypto space paid attention.
While Pettifor highlighted the political nature of money creation and the fallacy of treating states like households, early blockchain discourse often treated money as a purely technical problem or simplified macro concepts. Many proponents of Bitcoin promised to remove politics from money — to replace trust in institutions with trust in code. But as we’ve since seen, every codebase embeds its own power structures and politics.

In Token Economy, I’ve argued that many so-called “decentralised” systems have replicated familiar hierarchies — now in protocol form.
Who can issue tokens, validate transactions, or change parameters are political questions, even when written in code.

Today, as we debate central bank digital currencies, tokenised assets, and “decentralised” finance, Pettifor’s core question still stands:
Who gets to create money, and in whose interest?

I’ll be recording a Money Patterns episode with Ann Pettifor on these themes.

Find a link to her book below 👇

[MoneyPatterns @MoneyPatternsHQ]

RT @sherminvo: Money has always been a design problem. In her book, #TheCodeOfCapital, @KatharinaPistor helps us see that the language of m…

[Shermin Voshmgir 🌈 🪐 💫 @sherminvo]

#ThePriceofTime, one of the most discussed finance books of recent years by @chancellor_e, reframes a very old debate on the price and morality of money across time in an accessible manner.

THE MORALITY OF INTEREST
Chancellor describes how from Mesopotamia to the Middle Ages, religious traditions condemned interest aka usury.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all placed restrictions on charging interest.
Philosophers like Aristotle declared it “unnatural.”
Profiting from time without labor was seen as unjust.
But prohibitions never erased interest.
Instead, they pushed it underground, reshaped it through loopholes, or outsourced it to groups outside the dominant order.
The very persistence of interest across millennia shows that societies cannot coordinate capital and risk without some price on time.

INTEREST AS A SOCIAL CONTRACT
In his book he reminds us that interest is not just the price of money, but the price of deferring repayment into the future.
It is compensation for uncertainty, a signal of risk, and a mechanism to balance consumption today with investment tomorrow.
This makes interest a social contract.
It links present and future, lenders and borrowers, savers and investors.

RELEVANCE
Chancellor’s wrote this book as artificially low or even negative interest rates started to distort financial markets, where:
Savers are penalized.
Zombie firms are kept alive.
Speculation is rewarded over productive investment.

The book connects technical problem of central bank balance sheets with ancient moral debates:
Who should capture the value of time?
Who bears the cost when time is cheapened to zero?

By historicizing interest, the author reveals that today’s debates about “easy money” and “financial repression” are not new.
They are part of a long struggle to define what is fair, sustainable, and just in the relationship between present and future.

This makes the book accessible beyond specialists.
It is not only about bond markets or central banks.
It is about the ethics of capitalism itself.

CRYPTO RELEVANCE
A fixed money supply solves one problem, but not the problem of time. If money is a technology for exchanging value across space, then interest is the mechanism for exchanging value across time. Without a clear way to price time, no monetary system — fiat or crypto — can coordinate capital efficiently

More in comment below 👇

[Shermin Voshmgir 🌈 🪐 💫 @sherminvo]

Anthropologist #DavidGraber published the book #Debt: The First 5,000 Years in 2011 on the heels of the global financial crisis. It soon became a bestseller and is more relevant than ever. His core claim:
* Debt is older than money.
* The textbook story that — barter came first, then money, then credit — is a myth.
* Communities operated on credit systems long before coins existed. People tallied favors, obligations, and trust: “I’ll help you today, you’ll help me next harvest.”
* Barter only appears in marginal situations, usually between strangers or when larger systems collapse.
* Money, he says, began not as a commodity but as a unit of account — a ledger. The ledger was kept as a way to measure obligations, not a thing with intrinsic value.
* He links the appearance of coins to states & violence: minted to pay soldiers, demanded back in taxes.

Graeber shows that debt is the grammar of human relations. Who owes what to whom is never neutral: it is shaped by morality, politics, and power.

Critics, accused him of overgeneralizing, cherry-picking anthropology, and dismissing economics too casually. Yet even his critics acknowledged that the book forced us to ask uncomfortable questions about the foundations of money and social and political aspects of debt.

In a nutshell, Graeber distinguishes between:

* Human economies
based on reciprocity, mutual aid, and flexible obligations. Wealth was measured in relationships (e.g. bride price, feasts), not price.

* Commercial economies
based on strict equivalence, contracts, and impersonal exchange.

History, he argues, is a pendulum swinging between coinage ages (markets, war, slavery) and credit ages (trust, religion, reputation). Every cycle ends the same way: through forgiveness, jubilees, or collapse.

* Across history, every debt regime eventually reached a breaking point. Mesopotamian kings, biblical prophets, medieval credit systems, and modern states all found ways to forgive or reset debts.

* Graeber concludes asking whether we will continue stumbling from crisis to crisis — or design new forms of obligation that don’t destroy social cohesion.

CRITICISM

* Some economists criticized Graeber for overstating the myth of barter, or for cherry-picking anthropological evidence.

* Historians argued that his cycles of “coinage vs. credit ages” simplified messy realities.

* Others felt he was more activist than scholar, too eager to draw political lessons.

But even among critics, there was recognition that Graeber forced uncomfortable questions back onto the table:

*Why do we treat debts as sacred when they are clearly political?
*Why are creditors shielded while debtors are punished?
*And why do we assume the current monetary order is natural or permanent, when history shows it is neither?

The controversy was part of the book’s power. Graeber did not offer the final word on 5,000 years of history, but he opened a debate that will likely remain with us for decades.

@Graeber_social

[Furt'Her @Furt_her]

S2E5 – 🧠 “The Token Economy” books' author @sherminvo shares with us her 10years journey to the 3rd edition of her book!

▶️ Full episode: https://t.co/BqDgMRLOW6

💡 Is tokenisation the realm of web3?

@tokenkitchen @token3conomy @thebitcoinbook

[Shermin Voshmgir 🌈 🪐 💫 @sherminvo]

@ettanehsan @tokenkitchen @token3conomy

[Ettanehsan @ettanehsan]

What’s the #Token Economy?

@sherminvo explains how #blockchain could reshape how we share, trust, and build online 🙌

Watch the Full interview next week on my @YouTube channel. #EttanEhsan

#decentralization #tokeneconomy #digital #STEM #education

[ETHSofia.eth @ETHSofiaBG]

🎙️ New speaker reveal:

She’s been shaping the conversation since before “Web3” was a buzzword.

@sherminvo, author of @token3conomy and Founder of @tokenkitchen, is coming to #ETHSofia2025 ��

[DCF @DCF_io]

⏰Last chance to start reading with us!

The DCF Book Club's May title is “Token Economy” @token3conomy by @sherminvo 🙌

[DCF @DCF_io]

@token3conomy @sherminvo 📖 The DCF Book Club explores the most interesting titles on blockchain, decentralization, governance, and privacy.

Join us on Discord and let's read and discuss together 👇
https://t.co/LS5eqy4lxn

[DCF @DCF_io]

📚💫 The DCF Book Club's May Title is Here 💫 📚

We're excited to reveal our latest pick 🤓 This month we'll be reading the third edition of "Token Economy" @token3conomy by @sherminvo 👇

[Sandra ✨ @desandralise]

husband: i need to learn crypto

me: hold my matcha

[Shermin Voshmgir 🌈 🪐 💫 @sherminvo]

🧵 The 3rd edition of @token3conomy is out! This marks the end of a 10 year journey that began back in Berlin when the crypto community was still small. and everyone was trying to find words to describe this new, abstract Internet. Read more below 👇

[sabinedewitte 🍾 @sabinedewitte]

While I’m taking a little ‘work in crypto break’ I finally took the time to catch up on these books by ⁦@sherminvo⁩ ⁦@tokenkitchen⁩ - if you want to understand DAO’s, tokens, money, #defi and nft’s, these books are a great starting point.
#dyor #cryptoeducation

[Agustina Perez Comenale @PerezComenale]

RWA- Real World Asset
Tokenizacion de activos o bienes del mundo real ⬇️
Considerar la regulación específica sobre esto en el MICA/MICAR y la nueva implementacion en
Plataformas ⛓️ @sherminvo

https://t.co/GloUxWzg28

[Shermin Voshmgir 🌈 🪐 💫 @sherminvo]

Gracias @soycriptowilly por traducir el resumen del capítulo de "dinero y crédito" de mi libro @token3conomy en este hilo 👇

[Shermin Voshmgir 🌈 🪐 💫 @sherminvo]

Concepts such as #engineeringethics are well known and can be applied to the creation of Internet-based systems, something that Silicon Valley and other big players of the Internet era have – for the most part – failed to do. Web3 protocol designers need to be wiser.

[Shermin Voshmgir 🌈 🪐 💫 @sherminvo]

Web2 has shown that, eventually, all political, moral or ethical questions will need to be resolved, but if that is done after the fact – after a system has been created – biases are hard to reverse due to system inertia & vested interests of existing stakeholders.

[Shermin Voshmgir 🌈 🪐 💫 @sherminvo]

#Tokenengineering is often reduced to tech & econ topics. Terms like #cryptoeconomics or #tokenomics are a testament to that. Token systems design also requires ethical & political thinking. What type of system we create is not a tech question-it's economic, social & political.