"_Natural Order_ is a powerful, vehement objection to that very common and popular current idea: money, institutions, and wealth can be whatever we want them to be, operate any which way we like, be arranged and re-arranged any which way we prefer. The way Sebag sees money, and thus gold, is that it first has to be harvested from nature: it’s an “energy embodiment” that must be resistant to entropy. He concludes therefore that the “only remaining option is for money to be elemental.”
Interestingly enough, nostr:npub1jt97tpsul3fp8hvf7zn0vzzysmu9umcrel4hpgflg4vnsytyxwuqt8la9y , a prolific Bitcoiner with a deep interest in Austrian economics, has already delivered that elemental connection to bitcoin. In _Bitcoin: Everything Divided by 21 Million_ he writes that bitcoin is the essential element, element zero, the top-left and missing piece of the periodic table — a pure, unforgeable object of pure (economic) energy without mass.
Sebag doesn’t see it that way, but instead obsesses over weights, as if the physical quantity of something — the gold, the harvest — is what economically matters. But it was never the quantity preservation aspect of gold that made it a functional and flourishing base money in the nineteenth century, but its built-in long-run price stability."