> Barter is great but in a world where we set fire to the presses and hang all the bankers you're going to need a shovel. And you'll find someone with one and they'll want a hammock and you won't have one. So they'll trade their shovel to someone who will. And you can waste the daylight hours of your day trading your oil for some barrels and barrels for some whiskey and whiskey for some tires and tires for a hammock so that you can go back to your first guy to trade for your shovel, but now those bankers bodies have decayed and you've spent so much valuable time hunting down what you need and now your task you wanted to do in the first place is more miserable than it was at the start. This is a good example of the weakness of low tech barter. But you're immediately gravitating to 'money' (collectable imaginary units) instead of considering how we could engineer a more efficient barter system. If buddy wants to trade 1 hammock for 1 shovel it can be solved as a networking problem. We can use accounting and software (and a connectable network) to solve that problem, just as Bitcoin does to move money. Ie- a digital barter exchange app that connects traders directly, or indirectly (with as few hops as possible) to fulfill a given intended trade. Instead of moving arbitrary fungible units we are moving real things that people need. The only 'units' necessary are temporary; they exist at the accounting & software logic level serving only to fulfill the trade and reflect an interface to the traders involved.