Money Patterns

Shermin Voshmgir, September 18 2025

Money Patterns is a new brand under which I will be exploring the topic of money in all its dimensions — historical, political, social, and technological. The aim is not to reduce money to what it is today, but to understand what forms of money have existed over time, what their impact and limitations were, why we are where we are now, and how we might create new forms of money and finance that are more empowering.

With a newsletter that just launched and a podcast that I am preparing, I will draw on perspectives from anthropology, political economy, macroeconomics, behavioral science, and crypto — highlighting the work of authors, researchers, policymakers, and activists who help us understand money and finance more clearly. The aim is to cut through the myths and simplifications that dominate public debate.

Challenges of Understanding Money & Designing Token Systems

Over the past ten years, I have been working in the crypto space — first trying to make sense of Bitcoin and later the broader Web3 ecosystem. My goal was to understand what these tokenized forms of money and value represent, and to contextualize them within the history of economic thought and financial institutions. But the deeper I went, the more I realized how little I knew about money itself — even though I had studied business administration, which included economics classes.

Even after years of research and writing Token Economy and The Bitcoin Book, I often found myself returning to the same basic question: if I, who studied business and economics and worked for a decade at the frontier of crypto, struggled to give a coherent answer to “what is money?”, then who really can?

This lack of clarity is not unique to me. Most people finish school, and even university, without ever having been taught what money is, where it comes from, or how financial markets function. Having completed my studies at the Vienna University of Economics in the 1990s, I learned about categories of government-issued money (M1, M2, M3). But I was never taught the history of money, the varieties of monetary forms, or the fact that modern fiat money is created primarily by private banks when they issue credit. Friends from other business and economics schools around the world report the same experience.

The financial literacy I have today is almost entirely self-taught. It grew as I tried to wrap my head around cryptocurrencies, tokenization, and the politics of financial infrastructures. And yet, even with years of work, one realization remains: money and finance are two sides of the same coin — deeply intertwined, more diverse in form, and more complex in function than our textbooks and public debates make them seem.

Different Shades of Money

Money is not a single institution with a fixed definition. It has taken many forms across time and cultures: shells, stones, precious metals, tally sticks, banknotes, credit entries, and now digital tokens. Each form solved certain problems while creating others.

Finance, too, is not a monolith. It is the set of practices and institutions that build on top of money: lending, credit, insurance, investment, speculation. Finance can stabilize economies or destabilize them; it can widen access or deepen exclusion.

Looking across history, we see not one pattern, but many. Sometimes money is tightly linked to political authority, as in the case of state-issued fiat. At other times, it emerges from community practices of trust and obligation, as with local credit systems or mutual aid. Sometimes finance extends prosperity; at other times, it amplifies crises through bubbles and busts.

Recognizing these patterns — and their contradictions — is essential if we want to move beyond ideology and see money and finance as living, evolving systems. This is what Money Patterns sets out to explore: not a single definition or formula, but the plurality of ways societies have imagined, organized, and contested money and finance.