The Origin and Evolution of Money: From Barter and Credit to Bitcoin as Sound Money in a Post-Labor Economy

Money emerged not from a single isolated need but as a product of humancooperation in complex societies, with two complementary origins: barter-based commodity exchanges that evolved into monetary commodities, and credit systemsrooted in social and labor obligations. Drawing on economic and anthropological perspectives, this article traces these origins, showing how money became a social representation of human productive effort. It then examines the structural transformation of money’s functions in an economy dominated by artificial intelligence and automation, where human labor ceases to be the primary limiting factor in production. In this setting, money partially loses its historical role as a mechanism for dividing social output based on productive contribution, while resource allocation becomes more dependent on institutional coordination. Proposed solutions include the reintegration of humans as producers of informational inputs through data monetization via blockchain, complemented by redistributive mechanisms such as universal basic income (UBI) reinterpreted for a post-labor world. Finally, Bitcoin is positioned as the technological culmination of monetary history: a digitally scarce, decentralized form of sound money that serves as a superior store of value and neutral infrastructure for global economic coordination in an automated future.