Computers are machines, which are known conceptually as deterministic finite automata (DFA). You have an intuitive sense of what this means even if you've never touched computer science. Deterministic means, unlike us mercurial humans, computers will do the same thing given the same state and same set of inputs. Finite means that try as you might, you will not be able to fit your extensive anime collection onto a single drive. And automata means that they'll do what they're determined to do whether you watch them or not.
Since human language as discovered before computer languages, we classified computer languages in terms of human languages. Human language is not deterministic or automatic, a fact that as the parent of a toddler I'm constantly reminded. So it's a subset of languages called regular languages that are.
The glyphs of the regular language is known as its alphabet. A surprisingly clear bit of naming for the computer scientists.
And if you have a DFA and an alphabet, you can show that you can reduce the number of glyphs by increasing the states of the DFA. This is what lets us build the machines that run on ones and zeroes we call computers.
But then you end up with stuff that looks like this: 00101010. That's eight bits, aka a byte, aka a char, aka a hue, aka an uint8. When it's a char in our common utf-8 encoding it's an asterisk *. When it's a hue in a pixel, it's a darkish shade of red, green, or blue. And when it's an unsigned eight bit integer, it's 42.
The fact that that byte represents those different things is what makes it a _token_. That the single character * means something within different human systems is what makes it a _symbol_.
And the fact that 42 is a really significant number to a subset of humanity is what makes that token a symbol of relevance within A Cultural System.
If that token becomes exchangeable, a property that needs to be enforced via the rules of a digital marketplace, and has value instilled by the cultural system of its marketplace, then it becomes part of the Money system of that cultural system.
So let's talk about Exchangeable Tokens As A Cultural System.