.... till recently governments had monopoly on money issuance since they controlled means of communication via which value can be transferred. As I also said, private money in the form of cash (i.e. which relies only on hand-to-hand transactions) is devastatingly useless. And with the Internet arising from obscure military labs, the state lost its monopoly on global means of communication and thus lost its monopoly on money (obviously, they couldn't foresee that). Money, conceptually, is all about transferring value, and in today's world transferring value means transferring it instantly and to every corner of the world. Anything which aims to become money but doesn't offer the possibility of such transfers is set to fail miserably