“It is interesting and instructive that money itself rarely parades around in the open, though wealth may.

I suspect that value was understood, originally, as something hidden, discovered, uncloaked, revealed. Something found under the earth, or in caves. So, too, did we cache the valuable gifts we discovered, hiding them in special places on and in the land and water, such that these became constellations of memories… places and moments associated with value. All of these matters were involved in the ongoing development of the representation of value: money. Of course, money is nothing like the old stuff. The old stuff was real. Food. Gems and Metals. Medicine. Comfort. Shelter. Love. Power. Knowledge. Money is just the skeletal remains of the idea of the old gifts.

Thus we hide the money, which is the representation of value. It stays in purses, wallets, banks. All of which are cave-like, although the wallet is a flat cave… a cave made in the image of cash, rather than sources. Money’s reductive power is such that it overwhelms space itself, drawing it down to flatness, to representation… tokenizing it.”

— an anonymous informant