Trade. At scale and at distance. Civilizations grow. (Coordination grows.) Then the money is too soft and leaves a lot of room for cheating. (Moral hazard grows.) This then leads to centralization of power and top down enforcement, which just concentrates the moral hazard at the top and corrupts the government. When Christendom (our civilization) rose out of the ashes of the Roman empire, at first it was very distributed. Thousands of small kingdoms. This worked. Things got better. Trade increased. Mints were established. Lending and insurance for ships. Things got better and better but corruption started to set in and eventually started to undermine the civilization. This took hundreds of years to it's hard to pin to date. But if I was going to pick an inflection point, I would say ... 1067: William the Conqueror established the autonomous "City of London" and started importing Jewish financiers from Rouen to settle there. (The "Square Mile".) This introduced organized interest-based lending to England, bypassing the Church's ban on usury. This has effectively been the world capital of the fiat system ever since. What is happening to Bitcoin right now is totally different. People don't understand Bitcoin yet and are stuck in ways of doing things that were based on gold's failure. So they are trying to use Bitcoin in the fiat system, which is built around the limitations of gold, because that is all they know or have systems to support. Those things will rot away because Bitcoin doesn't need them. You can just coordinate work directly without the fiat financial system because it doesn't have the limitations of gold.