⚖️ What Makes Money "Good"?
The 6 properties — a scorecard you can test anything against.
Start the interactive lesson →
The scorecard
Good money needs six properties:
- Scarce — hard to make more of
- Durable — doesn’t rot or degrade
- Portable — easy to move and send
- Divisible — splits into small units
- Fungible — every unit equals every other
- Verifiable — easy to check it’s real
Every money in history succeeded or failed on these.
Quick check: A cow is durable-ish and valuable. Why is it bad money?
- It isn’t divisible — half a cow isn’t half the value ✓
- Cows are too cute to trade
- It’s actually great money
You can’t make change with a cow, carry it in your pocket, or verify its "quality" at a glance. Fails on divisibility, portability, and fungibility.
Quick check: How does the paper dollar score on SCARCITY?
- Excellent — there’s a strict limit on dollars
- Poor — more can be created at will, and regularly is ✓
- Perfect — scarcity doesn’t apply to paper
Paper money aces portability and divisibility but fails the most important test: scarcity. Trillions of new dollars can appear by decision — and since 2020, trillions did.
Now you have the test
This scorecard is the lens for everything ahead.
Gold: great scarcity, weak portability.
Fiat paper: great portability, zero scarcity.
The question that created Bitcoin: could something score high on ALL six?
Hold onto your scorecard. You’ll grade Bitcoin with it soon.