- she/her
i love you
the trillion-dollar coin does not exist, but it should.
there's a popular version of the origin story of money that goes like this: you're a potato farmer and you need shoes. in order to get shoes, you go to the cobbler and hope that he needs potatoes. maybe he doesn't! this is annoying and eventually everyone comes up with the idea that you can have little shiny things to represent, broadly, a favor, and so you can give potatoes to someone else for a shiny, and give the shiny to the cobbler and get your shoes. we've invented money!
this never happened. it did not work like this anywhere1. for the long version, i encourage you and everyone forever to read Debt: The First 5000 Years, but the short version is more like this: you're a king and you are ruling over a land. you have some knights who are loyal to you. you want the peasants to give you stuff and it is annoying, to you personally, to have the knights go poke them with spears every time you need something. so you come up with this scheme: you'll give out some shinies in exchange for people giving you potatoes and shoes. then you'll say that a year from now, everyone has to give you some number of shinies or else they get the spear-poking again. it's not just shared faith that gives these things value: it's the taxes and the spears behind them. since everyone has to pay their shiny tax, well, you better get busy finding some shinies. if you aren't doing favors for the king, you've gotta do favors for someone who did. and that's what keeps the shinies going around.
now, let's get back to that wacky coin.