they're a reliable, long-term storer of value, but they're cumber many. you do -- cumbersome. you do not want to fall into the swimming pool at the senior living community with your pockets full of maple leaf coins. metal commodity money is portioned out by weight. commodity money coin is just a hunk of precious metal stamped to indicate how much that it weighs. now, with prices set in coins, making change is much easier. i mean, there's no more having to fish a ham sandwich and three pork chops out of your pocket in order to pay for a goat. but coins cause confusion of their own. going from weighing money to stamping coins, the very simple step, but it was a couple of thousand or years that went by before that step was ever taken, and there's a good reason, good libertarian reason for that delay. nobody trusted anybody else to stamp those coins with the weight. and when coins were invented, that distrust proved to be totally well founded. the first western coins were minted by the kingdom of lydia in what is now modern turkey, and they were made of a gold-silver alloy called