Currencies Preserve Culture

On Friday morning, I decided to shell out the handful of coins I had accumulated from spending Colombian pesos.

Normally, I find spare change quite annoying. It’s inefficient. I don’t like keeping a bowl of metallic coins that are worth less than the bowl itself.

But today, as I counted the coins and made piles with different denominations, my attention drifted to something else. I started to notice the engravings on the coins. They were beautiful.

Each denomination had its own engraving with tiny elevations and depressions. I rubbed my thumb over the coins and – for a brief second – sensed something I’d never felt when handing out my credit card. I sensed culture.

I looked at the 2,000 Colombian peso bill next to me. Featured on the bill was the face of a smiling girl: Débora Arango, a feminist and artist with a legacy spanning almost 8 decades of socially provocative artwork.

I flashed back to one of my first Spanish lessons here when my teacher taught me the Spanish word for money. “Dinero. But in Colombia, the locals say plata.”

Immediately, I felt guilty. I planned on devoting my days to crypto and web3. An industry whose zenith would be the day coins and bills go extinct.

A big appeal for crypto is the notion of a global, borderless currency. And I understand the appeal.

When it comes to money, borders create inefficiencies. They create a laundry list of “international transaction fees” and “exchange fees”. They also give birth to hundreds of fiat currencies, some of whom prosper while others hyper-inflate and suffer.

But, at that moment, as I rubbed the coins and glanced at the bills, I sensed a deeper truth. Borders also create culture. And currencies help preserve it.

I will admit that crypto degens have followed routes to create culture. They’ve created altcoins, stablecoins, memecoins, shitcoins, and tons of other {prefix}coins. Some of these have amassed followings full of culture and acronym-intensive lingua franca.

But, this culture is borderless and country-agnostic. That may sound great, but it’s not what we’re evolved to build. We’ve spent generations living in tribes, creating and preserving cultures tied by geography.

And that’s why a piece of paper with a smiling Colombian artist will always supersede a digital token in preserving culture: because it is preserving bordered culture.

In the process of creating these borderless virtual cultures, I’m worried that we’re endangering older cultures rooted in our geography and history.

Yes, I agree that the move from fiat to crypto makes money more efficient. But, I fear the price we’re paying might be worth more than those pesky 2% fees.

Written by Aryan Bhasin