Currencies, tokens, and precious metals have indeed been used as means of exchange for thousands of years; but debt-based, interest-bearing, bank-issued central currency is a very particular tool with very particular biases—most significantly, a bias for growth. Capitalism itself is less the driver of this currency than it is the result. Capital is not an ideology so much as an artifact of a kind of money—a way of exploiting a particular operating system that runs on growth.