In the Divine Comedy, Dante reserved one of his most ghastly punishments for the crime of forgery. In Canto 30 of the Inferno, a counterfeiter Adamo is condemned to the eighth circle of hell, just one above Lucifer in the ninth. In this Canto, Dante and Virgil, his guide through the underworld, meet two falsifiers, one of whom is the unfortunate Adamo, a real-life counterfeiter who in Dante’s youth had tried to debase the Florentine florin. Adam lived in Brescia, a city in competition with Florence, where he was persuaded by prosperous Brescian merchants to debase the florin by replacing three carats of the pure gold coin with copper. The coin weighed almost the same but it was a fake. Dante pairs Adam with another liar, Simon the Greek, the man who tricked the Trojans into believing the Trojan horse was an innocent gift. This betrayal led to the destruction of an entire civilisation.

Why would Dante equate Adam, an everyday, opportunistic counterfeiter, with Simon, the man who betrayed Troy? It seems disproportionate, but only if we fail to appreciate the role of the florin in underpinning the might of Florence.

For Dante, money was sacred and the florin’s integrity was central to Florentine power. Mess with the money and you mess with the foundation of a civilisation. This has always been the case. Few everyday signals capture the ascent or descent of a great power as the value of its money. Trying to pass off all sorts of fraud, forgeries or tokens as real money has been a recurring event in financial history. Bitcoin in particular and crypto in general are the latest incarnation of an age-old story.

Characters as diverse as the coin-debasing emperor Nero, Dante’s counterfeiter Adamo and even Adolf Hitler have tried to control money by manipulating it. All these........

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