Money
"The lack of money is the root of all evil."
~ Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper
There is something called the coincidence of ones. Suppose that I have a sheep and another person has wheat. I am hungry and I'd like to make bread and the other person would like to make a sweater. My sheep would be useful to the other person and the other person's wheat would be useful to me. We can barter.
What if the other person has vegetables and I don't want the vegetables but the other person still wants the wool from the sheep? How do we execute this trade? We don't have a coincidence of ones. Some theories suggest that money developed as a result of this problem.
The things that represented money had certain characteristics.
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They were rare
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They were not easily reproducable
Another theory about how many came about is the idea of receipts. I can store something of value somewhere in a depository and get a receipt which entitles me to the good being stored. The idea is money evolved out of trading this receipts. Whoever owns the receipt has access to the good stored in the depository.
Why does money have value?
Money has value because we give it value. It's a collective story that we all tell. If you have a dollar bill and you want to buy something from someone, they are going to take it. And they know they can also make an exchange with it too.
Tokens are essentially digital representations of things that represent money. The reason that they have value is because we give them value.