When the towers in New York fell, I became obsessed with economics. I wanted to follow the money to understand what happened on that dreadful day. During that time of inquiry, I found myself very interested in Austrian economic theory. Soon enough, I realized that the reserve banking system was systemically corrupt. How can you have money based only on debt? How can central banks print debt out of nowhere and demand interest for that?It was a question that caused me to create the world’s first website where people swapped clothes online, in an attempt to enable people to stop using fiat debt certificates. I soon realized that swapping was a terrible way to trade. For instance, if Alice really likes a dress from Belinda but Belinda doesn't like anything Alice has, then the deal falls through. That's unfortunate. So then, how do I create a digital token that is used in the market so Alice could just pay Belinda a token for the dress that Belinda can trade with anyone else in the marketplace? Hmm, I thought. But if I issue the website’s own internal currency then I'm back to central banking, back to one company deciding what's good for the economy, inflation and everything else would be up to me. We built Swapstyle as an alternative economy based on swapping, as a tool to get around fiat — not become a new fiat. The more I thought about swapping and alternative currencies, the more I realized that money ne...
