Thousands of years ago a human discovered something shiny and beautiful. He showed it to his friends and they thought it was beautiful too. It didn't take long for word to travel to the King of the Past. He demanded it as a gift. From then on people were searching for the shiny substance.
The king of the past made it so he would get large amounts of the shiny material. It didn't take long for people to think it was heavenly and indestructible. They even thought it was the flesh of the gods. People made beautiful things out of it like masks and jewelry.
It became very natural to trade this beautiful material for things that you needed like pots, weapons, and clothing. Then one day, the king of the past made them into coins for people to easily do their trading. The king was allowing his people to hold their own shiny coins, but, he wanted to build grand buildings and hire soldiers to expand his empire. He demanded they give him some of their coins as a tax.
A little time passed, then the King was running out of places to conquer to take their resources. It made it hard for him to keep making magnificent buildings and to expand his empire to be "bigger". Then it dawned on him, he thought people like my shiny coins, but I don't have enough shiny stuff to put into them. What a great idea he had, he would replace most of the good metal with metal that people didn't care as much about. A thin layer of the good stuff on the outside would fool them or keep them happy enough.
The only trouble was that the people DID care about the changes he made and they demanded more of his coins for the same things they were already doing. In the taxes that he was making he had to ask for more coins to be given back from the people. Anybody the king of the past encountered appeared to be asking for more of his coins. For his really important people, he had to give his pure, shiny coins to keep them happy.
The shiny coins lasted for nearly 2,000 years until a new one came along. The king of the present decided these coins were much too complicated to make. His great idea was to give people pieces of trees to use for trade. He even topped his idea off by adding great colors that everyone could appreciate. To sell his idea he just said we have enough of the shiny stuff in our possession to back the pieces of trees. If you want you can choose to trade in your colored tree for shiny stuff.
The game for the king of the present remained much the same. To pay for his projects he would demand that the people send him his tree bits back in taxes. Things were much better off, when he was falling short on tree bits he could just make more. He didn't even have to waste time on making coins.
The only issue was that the more tree bits he made, people seemed to demand more tree bits for the same things they were already doing. It didn't bother the folks that already had a lot of tree or were receiving a lot of them. However, it really bothered people that were getting smaller amounts.
The king of the present was making so many tree bits he found that he just didn't have enough shiny coins to allow people to trade in for nor the time to go and find more shiny coins. His brilliant idea was that we didn't need to worry about shiny coins at all.
Then something very strange happened. A mysterious person or people created an electronic coin that had a limited amount and could never be altered. At first, people laughed and ignored the coin, but slowly people came to see the advantages of it. The king of the present wasn't bothered by it much because not everybody was using it. He also knew it would take a long time before everyone did use it.
The king of the present was unhappy though. It seemed that people using electronic coins were not paying him enough tree bits in return for the climbing value of their coins. He wasn't gonna have that so he quickly made some new rules to get his deserved tree bits.
That brings us to the king of the future. This king found that too many people started using electronic coins. This interrupted his strategy he was so fond of for manipulating tree bits. He decided to place more taxes on them to keep a good supply of his tree bits and he started regulating who can use electronic coins.
It didn't take long for the king of the future to get so frustrated with electronic coins that he had a big decision to make. Should he make holding electronic coins illegal as his former king had done with some shiny stuff, should he make it illegal all together, or should he create his own electronic coin?
That is where the story ends.
