THE WORLD has rarely reacted kindly to revolutionary ideas and technology especially when it deals with money. In Ancient Greece, Sparta was a militaristic state that had no use for money and the individual empowerment it signified. When the Spartans conquered Mantinea during the Peloponnesian War, they rid the city of its coins and abolished all forms of currency. More than a millennium later, medieval merchants found practicing fractional-reserve banking (having less cash on hand than the total of deposits) were threatened with beheadings. When the French scholar Nicolas Oresme suggested to the king in 1360 that money is not his royal property but that of the people who use it, he was ignored. Bitcoin faces an uphill battle. Its very design threatens to wrestle away control from governments and banks, two of our most entrenched institutions. It has to overcome our resistance to a concept of money that isn't physical. And like any new contraption, it's unproven and therefore doesn't yet deserve our trust. It's too early to say if Bitcoin is the currency of the future. But that doesn't mean we should just shrug this off as some trite hobby for tech-savvy Libertarians. Bitcoin takes a stab at solving problems most of us ignore: lack of access to money, high transaction costs, and forced reliance on trusted middlemen. These aren't societal glitches we can afford to disregard. They're holding us back from progressing together. The gap between the rich and poor continues to widen. Leaving behind the unbanked and saddling them with fees for moving their own money has the dangerous potential to destabilize our social framework. Left unattended, these will be a stain on human history. Then there's the matter that our handling of money has not caught up with the digital age. We interact with money in a digital format checking bank accounts online, shopping via websites, and paying in person with our smartphones. But behind that digital format is still an archaic system that's dreadfully slow and wasteful of resources. The most marketed banking innovation of the last few years is that we can now snap photos to deposit checks on the go. Shouldn't we stop to ask why we're still using paper checks? The waste is everywhere. The United States government spent 9.6¢ to produce each dollar bill in 2011.1 That doesn't sound like much until you consider the social cost. In a single year, the government spent $614 million just to print money funds that could have gone to schools, inner-city programs, and scientific research. And it redirected tons of raw cotton away from more useful products like clothing, increasing the demand and raising the price for the rest of us. And for what? Our obsession for a physical bill we can point to and call money? For nearly 2,500 years, every king and president has dealt with the problems of coinage, assessing the cost of forging little metal tokens and increasing or decreasing their purity to satisfy a desire based on an arbitrary measure of value. That innocuous craving launched crusades with the Arab world and brutal colonial pillaging throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Yet it was all based on a ruse. Our fixation with paper and gold and silver is a vast game of misdirection. Money is not about the tokens we have in our possession. It's the system of debt and credit, the IOUs that make up for our lack of trust in one another to trade with a legitimate object of value. Bartering doesnt cut it, so we decide to trust tokens instead. And we dont even do this consciously. Its not malevolent. We re simply filling a gap with an object. But we re better than that.