It’s alive!
New-fangled monies are forever lumbering into life. Most are doomed
Agold cube worth $11.7m popped up in New York’s Central Park at the start of this month. It is made of 186kg of pure 24-karat gold and was the creation of 43-year-old German artist Niclas Castello, who has branded it the “Castello Cube”. The work is not for sale, we learn, but was a publicity stunt for the launch of an accompanying cryptocurrency, the Castello Coin. The Castello Coin is being traded as $CAST and is trading at an initial price of $0.44.
It costs almost nothing to launch a crypto coin and nothing to add more of them. So, whenever people buy the coin, it’s almost pure profit to the creator. Cool. But… but… the Germans must have a word for this… it’s the grim, uncontrollable need to look into the future… and weep. One of the problems with new forms of money is that tomorrow they are gone. You open your eyes, and they’re not there anymore. Hundreds – thousands – of new currencies have been born over the years. Now, they’re almost all dead. Sniff. Sniff. At least let us bow our heads in remembrance.
Dollardaze.com did a study of 775 “fiat” currencies. A “fiat” currency is simply one that is declared – by decree – to be the lawful currency of a country by its rulers. It found that the average one had a life expectancy of just 27 years. Like the soldiers at Colleville-sur-Mer, they were cut down in the prime of life. And where are their graves? The assignats, the Chinese “flying money”, the French livre, the French franc, the German papiermark, the German reichsmark, or just the plain old German mark? The confederate grayback, the Roman denarius, the Mexican silver peso, the Moroccan franc, the Romanian silver leu, the Maryland shilling, the Japanese oban… all forgotten. But let us not think of them mouldering in dark graves. Let us try to remember them as they were, so happy, optimistic and lively. They lived yesterday, remember, when it was all upside. Downside always comes tomorrow.
Many years ago, we came into possession of a display of defunct currencies. They hung on our office wall, a monetary memento mori, reminding us of the way of all paper. But wait… what about the cryptos? What about the newly minted Castello Coin? It is not paper. It is not a “fiat” currency. It’s something new.
If gold represents 50 centuries of relative monetary stability in the ancient world, will this new coin provide us with 5,000 years of purchasing power in the new world of digital monies, or should we prepare the black crepe and sympathy cards already, knowing that it will soon be gone? Already, more than a thousand cryptos have passed away. How long will the Castello Coin last?
We don’t know. But our guess is that Castello’s golden cube will last a lot longer.
“Thousands of new currencies have been born. Most are now dead”