[brianpgordon]

Yeah I'm also pretty critical of their narrative of how centralized currency came about. Their timeline is wildly wrong. The author makes it seem like states started minting coinage in the middle ages, when the advantages of a standardized coin with a mandated-by-fiat face value (possibly different from the actual value) were well-known - and famously used to great effect by - even the early Roman Empire.

Then there's this sentence, which is just nonsense:

> All money was borrowed from the central treasury, at a rate of interest set by the king.