Coined

What if money were not merely a human invention but the latest expression of an ancient biological principle—exchange itself? Kabir Sehgal’s Coined makes this startling claim: money is not an arbitrary tool of commerce but an evolutionary product of life’s drive to trade energy, resources, and information. From the metabolic swaps inside cells to the symbolic trades on digital networks, money evolves as a medium that enables exchange to occur more efficiently, widely, and abstractly.

Sehgal invites you to view money through multiple lenses—biological, anthropological, psychological, and technological. That interdisciplinarity is the book’s innovation. He begins not with banks or markets but with the Galápagos, where cleaning wrasse and sea turtles exemplify primal reciprocity. He ends with Bitcoin and mobile wallets—systems that compress trust and value into code. Across this sweep, his core argument holds: exchange is life’s organizing force, and money is its latest, most symbolic organ.

From Energy Flows to Symbolic Value

At the biochemical level, the mitochondrion’s ATP molecules fulfill the same function as money in human society—storing and transferring usable energy. Every level of life shows this logic of reciprocity: coral and algae, bees and flowers, humans and marketplaces. Haim Ofek’s evolutionary economics reinforces the point that cooperation itself can be an adaptive trait: species that trade well persist longer. When humans learned to store surplus resources—salt, barley, obsidian—they began codifying exchange. This set the foundation for symbolic money usable across time and distance.

From Tools to Tokens

The second evolution of money came with cognition. From Louis Leakey’s Acheulean hand axes to John Hoffecker’s notion of the "distributed super-brain," humans externalized thought into material form. Tools required planning, imitation, and abstraction—the same faculties that later created symbolic media. As tools became signs of status or trade items, symbolic value detached from immediate function. The trajectory from a prized hand axe to a stamped coin is thus a cognitive journey—from tangible utility to abstract value representation.

Exchange, Obligation, and Meaning

Sehgal integrates anthropology to remind you that not all “money” is arithmetic. In the gift economies observed by Marcel Mauss, exchange produces moral bonds rather than balanced ledgers. Whether in the Pacific Islands’ Kula ring, Japan’s ritualized giri gift cycles, or modern crowdfunding, the human impulse to reciprocate drives social cohesion. Money in this view is not just a medium of trade—it is a measure of relationship. Its misuse or overemphasis distorts that moral equilibrium.

Metal, Paper, and Code: Successive Abstractions

The final sections trace how each monetary leap hinges on expanding layers of trust. Coins turned state authority into currency; paper notes transmuted promise into policy; digital code renders consensus itself into value. From Lydia’s electrum staters to Kublai Khan’s chao, from Nixon’s suspension of gold convertibility to Bitcoin’s blockchain protocol, every chapter reveals money’s adaptive tension: balancing tangible backing against institutional belief. Money’s power lies precisely in that paradox—it is real because many believe it is.

By the end, you grasp Sehgal’s unifying message: money is not just an economic construct but a biological, cultural, and moral mirror. It measures energy in all its forms—nutritional, social, psychological, and virtual. To understand money’s future—whether mobile, neural, or entirely digital—you must see its past as continuous evolution. Coined asks you not only to follow how money changes but how it changes you.

Sehgal begins with biology to show that exchange predates humanity. Life itself trades energy. In the Galápagos, marine ecologist Rachel Gittman observes cleaning wrasse removing parasites from turtles—a small but essential act of mutual service. Each species in this ecosystem barters labor or resources to survive. From bacterial symbiosis to bee-flower pollination, cooperation is nature’s form of commerce.

Biological Currency and Cooperation

At the cellular level, the mitochondrion produces ATP—the biochemical ‘cash’ that powers life. Boris Kozo-Polyansky’s symbiogenesis theory reframed evolution itself as merger through exchange. Translation: even the cell is a marketplace. Haim Ofek extends this logic to economics, arguing that cooperation and specialization become evolutionary advantages. Humans, like their biological predecessors, evolved to track benefits and obligations—a neural prelude to the invention of money and trade.

Energy, Value, and Survival

When you view energy as the primary currency, evolutionary survival and economic prosperity follow the same rule: entities that exchange efficiently thrive. Coral polyps hosting zooxanthellae mirror merchants hosting markets—each side gains security and sustenance. From metabolism to marketplaces, exchange networks allocate energy to where it’s most needed, setting the biological foundations of future finance.

Core insight

Money is not an invention grafted onto human life—it emerges naturally from the logic of living systems that trade energy and cooperation to survive.

Seen this way, human economics becomes the continuation of ecology by cultural means. When you exchange a dollar, you’re participating in the same long arc of transaction that powered mitochondria, coral reefs, and entire ecosystems. Money becomes the language evolution invented to manage exchange at ever larger scales.

Money’s conceptual birth required the ability to turn thoughts into objects. Archaeologists such as Louis Leakey interpret hand axes at Olduvai Gorge as early evidence of planned design and skill transfer. They mark not just utility but the dawn of symbolic behavior. The maker of a hand axe imagined function before creation—proof that the mind could externalize ideas.

From Utility to Symbol

As tools circulated beyond immediate need, they gained social meaning. High-quality axes or shells signaled skill and identity, becoming tokens of prestige or exchange. This cognitive milestone links anthropology with economics: once humans could imbue objects with abstract worth, money’s emergence became inevitable. Maria de Sautuola’s discovery of Altamira cave art reinforces that symbolic consciousness—the ability to represent and share meaning outside the mind—predates civilization itself.

Externalizing Mind, Expanding Exchange

John Hoffecker calls this ability humanity’s ‘distributed brain’: the mind projected onto shared symbols, language, and tools. Money is one node in that network—a cognitive prosthesis for tracking obligation and value. Once exchange required specialization and surplus, a standardized medium like metal, shell, or bead made coordination easier. Adam Smith’s division of labor and Darwin’s specialization of species embody the same evolutionary pattern: differentiation breeds interdependence.

The invention of symbolic value thus extends biology into cognition. Hand axe becomes gift, gift becomes standard, standard becomes coin. Each stage compresses meaning into form—eventually producing the smallest, most portable symbol of all: money itself.

Sehgal dives into psychology and neuroscience to show how money influences thought and emotion. Daniel Kahneman’s research on System 1 and System 2 proves your economic brain is rarely rational: intuition and bias dominate most everyday decisions. Thinking about money triggers primal circuits linked to reward, fear, and disgust—areas shared with food and survival behaviors.

Biases and the Emotional Brain

Kahneman and Tversky’s heuristics—availability bias, loss aversion, and the money illusion—show how context shapes choice. Losses hurt roughly twice as much as gains please you, making risk avoidance a biological reflex. fMRI studies by Brian Knutson reveal that anticipation of gain lights up the nucleus accumbens, while unfairness activates the anterior insula, prompting rejection even of beneficial offers. Your neural economy thus negotiates between dopamine-driven pursuit and insula-driven repulsion.

Hormones, Genes, and Trust

Genetic variants such as 5-HTTLPR influence risk sensitivity, and hormones like oxytocin modulate trust and generosity—though not uniformly. Experiments show oxytocin enhances giving to familiar partners while failing to erase suspicion toward strangers. These findings map biological substrates to market behaviors: greed, panic, altruism, or irrational loyalty all emerge from deep neural wiring.

Insight

Because money engages pleasure and pain systems simultaneously, financial markets often behave less like efficient computers and more like emotional ecosystems.

By integrating neuroscience with economics, Sehgal urges humility: financial rationality is bounded by biology. Understanding your own biases makes you a better decision-maker and reveals that markets are collective expressions of shared psychology, not impersonal calculators of value.

Once money became tangible through metal, it entered politics. From Lydia’s electrum coins to Rome’s debased denarii and the New York Fed’s gold vaults, hard money symbolizes trust in scarcity. But Sehgal shows that gold’s solidity never freed it from power: every empire found ways to manipulate metallic content, enforce seigniorage, or finance wars through debasement.

From Hard Metal to Soft Promise

China’s Tang and Song dynasties pioneered paper money; Kublai Khan’s fiat chao demonstrated both the potential and peril of trust-based currency. John Law’s 18th-century French experiment with the Mississippi Company foreshadowed modern credit bubbles: state-sanctioned paper issued faster than faith could sustain. The pattern repeats with every fiat regime—paper brings flexibility but tempts inflation.

The End of the Gold Anchor

In 1971 Nixon severed the dollar’s convertibility to gold, ending Bretton Woods. The “Nixon Shock” ushered in floating currencies and put monetary value squarely in institutional trust. Central banks gained enormous influence, wielding policy instead of metal reserves. Soft money became a tool of fiscal alchemy: conjuring liquidity to rescue economies—but also enabling political excess.

Lesson

Every evolution of money—from gold to paper to pixels—represents a trade-off between flexibility and faith. Stability depends less on substance and more on governance.

Today’s fiat systems highlight money’s greatest paradox: its power depends entirely on confidence. Lose trust and paper burns like straw; keep it, and paper functions like metal. Sehgal’s history warns that monetary alchemy works only while the spell of belief endures.

Modern money isn’t minted—it’s programmed. Sehgal unpacks how central banks, treasuries, and commercial banks weave money into existence. When the Federal Reserve buys Treasury securities, it credits reserves digitally, increasing the money supply through a multiplier effect. Those keystrokes ripple through fractional-reserve systems as loans, deposits, and eventually, tangible cash in circulation.

The Mechanics of Creation

Open-market operations target the federal funds rate by injecting or withdrawing liquidity. Lending multiplies those reserves; every new loan becomes a deposit elsewhere. This process magnifies initial inputs tenfold under normal conditions. The Treasury prints paper, but the Fed distributes it—literalizing the partnership of fiscal and monetary powers. Yet this efficiency carries risk: fast money can fuel booms as easily as bubbles.

Risk, Guarantees, and Debt Monetization

Fractional reserves mean banks hold only a fraction of deposits on hand—so systems rely on confidence, insurance, and central bank backstops. Deposit guarantees and lender-of-last-resort functions stabilize the structure but socialize risk. When central banks purchase government debt, they compress yields and indirectly finance deficits, a practice critics call “monetizing the debt.” Overuse erodes purchasing power through inflation, effectively taxing savers invisibly.

For you as a citizen, this machinery means money’s abundance is managed, not discovered. Understanding it inoculates you against both cynicism and utopianism: modern currency is just trust formalized through accounting and policy. Managing that trust is the art of central banking.

The digital era transforms money back into pure information. Bitcoin’s blockchain represents a radical idea: you can encode trust without intermediaries. Through decentralized consensus, the network verifies ownership—solving the ‘double-spending’ problem without banks. Its supply is fixed (21 million coins), making it algorithmically scarce.

Promise and Peril of Decentralization

Sehgal outlines Bitcoin’s dual identity: currency and protocol. As currency, it is volatile and still tied to speculation; as protocol, it may underpin future ledgers for contracts or digital goods. Early crises, such as Mt. Gox’s 2014 collapse and regulatory constraints in China and the U.S., remind you that code alone cannot replace institutional trust. Volatility turns stability into engineering’s next frontier.

Mobile Money and Networked Payments

Meanwhile, mobile payment platforms quietly revolutionize global inclusion. Square’s simple reader grants small merchants instant access to digital payments; M-Pesa’s SMS-based system effectively ‘banks the unbanked’ in Kenya. These tools ride on top of Visa and Mastercard networks but democratize access—proof that innovation thrives where necessity meets connectivity.

Three Possible Futures

Sehgal sketches three futures: the bear case (return to hard or barter money during crises), the bull case (fully digital, seamless payments), and the dream case (exchange beyond money—via neural, reputational, or experiential currencies). Each path reveals both technological daring and moral peril, from privacy erosion to inequity expansion.

Reflection

Money’s future will depend not on hardware or software but on human choices regarding trust, transparency, and shared value.

From Bitcoin to Apple Pay to speculative neural currencies, Sehgal portrays a world experimenting with the boundaries of exchange. The tools change; the principle—mutual benefit through trust—remains eternal.

In closing chapters, Sehgal returns from systems to spirit. Across Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, one theme echoes: money is a moral test. It can unite or divide, liberate or enslave. Using narratives from Jesus’ teachings to Mother Teresa’s hospice, from Jewish tzedakah to Islamic zakat, he shows that abundance demands responsibility.

Faith, Responsibility, and Detachment

Christian doctrine cautions that attachment to wealth clouds spiritual sight; Judaism frames charity as a central duty; Islam views wealth as a test of remembrance; Hinduism reconciles material success (artha) with ultimate liberation (moksha). In each, ethical detachment—not destitution—frees one to use money wisely. The measure of a culture, Sehgal suggests, is not its GDP but its generosity.

Cultural Symbols and Legacies

Coins themselves become moral texts: images of gods, rulers, and ideals pressed into metal. From the Wari-Bateshwar silver coins near Dhaka to Saint-Gaudens’ double eagle in the U.S., numismatics reveals how societies define virtue and identity through currency design. Collectors preserve not just metal but moral history—the stories a nation chooses to advertise on its money.

Enduring insight

Money mirrors values: it circulates not only wealth but worldviews. To renew monetary culture, you must realign it with moral imagination.

Sehgal’s journey from biology to spirituality ends with balance. Money, properly understood, is not evil or holy but neutral—a reflection of human intent. When guided by empathy and trust, it becomes the bloodstream of community rather than the chain of greed.