Before the widespread use of high-speed internet, distribution of software, music, and movies was mostly anchored in physical media. Buyers of CDs and DVDs could sell the albums they no longer wanted or movies they had seen in secondary marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon or locally on Craigslist. Today, software is widely sold as a service (SaaS) and media is rented or licensed to users in a purely digital form. As this digital content is easily copied, distributors can embed software into media to limit and monitor its usage.
While entrepreneurs and analysts will frequently point to parallels between blockchain and internet solutions, references are often limited to the standout examples. This analysis aims to provide a more nuanced perspective for discerning capital allocators.
In his fundamental book, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange, English economist William Stanley Jevons explains that currencies address a fundamental economic problem: the double coincidence of wants. The phrase describes the conundrum inherent in barter where the parties of the transaction have to agree to sell and buy each other’s goods. The obvious challenge is the improbability of the wants, needs and events that would enable such a transaction occurring at the same time and the same place. In absence of this double coincidence of wants, the parties need to settle on an acceptable substitute: the medium of exchange. The article reviews the state of money in general and the media of exchange, and its potential trajectory in particular.
Complete version of my original article on Forbes.com.
In his fundamental book, 
