The first warning sign is the barter story. Superficially it seems to make sense, but there is very little evidence that it has ever been a dominant form of exchange, and the more you think about it, the more absurd it seems. For example, have you ever noticed how people always use agricultural goods to illustrate historical barter? Anybody who has studied basic anthropology realizes that in many premodern agricultural societies people were largely self-sufficient. It is very unlikely that you would find yourself in the strange situation of somehow having raised chickens while having neglected to grow cereal crops.

But let’s hypothetically say you did find yourself with a surplus of chickens and a corn deficit. In many ancient societies people did not own land—and therefore did not “own” the things they produced. That’s all to say that they were not in a trading mindset. Rather, they might collaborate in production within a hierarchical patronage system where a chief took whatever surplus there was and redistributed it, much like a patriarchal father decides who gets what in a family. If exchange occurred between people considered to be equals, it was more likely to happen via ritualistic gifting or informal reciprocity systems.

Reciprocity — which exists to this day — is informal scorekeeping between people who know and trust each other. It’s along the lines of: I’ll help you build a house now, and in a few weeks you can help me build a house. And if you don’t, things are going to get awkward between us.

It was 17th- and 18th-century philosophers like John Locke and Adam Smith—gazing out windows from where they sat in their urban studies thinking, “I wonder how strangers engaged in the specialized trade I now see when they didn’t have money”—who popularized the idea that barter was the primordial mode of exchange. It didn’t really occur to them that trade in specialized goods between strangers might be a result of money, rather than something that required the invention of it. Perhaps money catalyzed trade that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

One of the reasons why the barter myth stubbornly persists is because it’s part of a paradigm, a group of mutually coherent ideas that work together as a whole within economics. The barter myth is essential for establishing the idea that money is a special kind of commodity, which in turn is essential for maintaining the traditional story about banks as mere intermediaries that move this commodity around. The traditional Banking 101 story tells us that banks take money via deposits from savers, then lend it to borrowers and — as a side activity — enable those depositors to move it to one another through the “payments system.” It is this precise story which enables entrepreneurs to forecast that banks can be “disintermediated” from the payments and lending system.

Do yourself a favor and ditch this paradigm. Especially if you want to participate in changing the future of money.