I see you've read Graeber. Great book and changed my views on a lot of things, particularly how much of our "common sense" understanding/education on topics relies on "just so" assumptions made by some aristocratic scholar a couple centuries ago.
Anyhow, to explain for the forum: Graeber's book goes through the evidence we know of from the places were money first appeared. In essence, debt came first, and money was a later innovation. Very interestingly temple records using tally mark schemes may have been what lead to the development of cuneiform writing in the levant. A similar debt first pattern appears in other places, at other times too.
Coinage, particularly metal coins, came about much later as a clever hack by rulers to simplify raising and maintaining a large army. Pass a law demanding all citizens pay you X coins each year. Pay your soldiers in coins. Suddenly your society is figuring out how to feed and house soldiers, without you haven't to build a command hierarchy to run it all directly.
I can't recommend this book enough. It's dense in parts because he goes into a lot of detail that fully justifies what he's saying. Still, completely fascinating to learn much of the way we think of economic history is mythology. It's also a great lens for understanding what's happening now with cryptocurrencies.
> It's also a great lens for understanding what's happening now with cryptocurrencies.
Expanding on this - one of the brilliant innovations in Bitcoin was to make the ledger fundamental and the coin an implementation artifact. The blockchain doesn't store coins - it stores a ledger of who transacted with whom, and for what amounts, and then ownership of a Bitcoin is a derived quantity from the transaction history. Ethereum just expands that ledger to let smart contracts on the blockchain define other quantities to track, as well as the rules and relationships between them.
It's completely backwards from how I would've thought to implement a cryptocurrency, which would be to start with the coin and figure out how to make its ownership distinct & incorruptible. By starting with the ledger first, you don't need to think very hard about ownership (because it's all recorded in the ledger), you just need to find a way to define a source of truth for the transaction history.
Yeah. That’s a great way to describe it! It’s like a differential equation where the fundamental function is the change and you have to integrate it to find the state. Traversing the blockchain is like integration.
Anyhow, to explain for the forum: Graeber's book goes through the evidence we know of from the places were money first appeared. In essence, debt came first, and money was a later innovation. Very interestingly temple records using tally mark schemes may have been what lead to the development of cuneiform writing in the levant. A similar debt first pattern appears in other places, at other times too.
Coinage, particularly metal coins, came about much later as a clever hack by rulers to simplify raising and maintaining a large army. Pass a law demanding all citizens pay you X coins each year. Pay your soldiers in coins. Suddenly your society is figuring out how to feed and house soldiers, without you haven't to build a command hierarchy to run it all directly.
I can't recommend this book enough. It's dense in parts because he goes into a lot of detail that fully justifies what he's saying. Still, completely fascinating to learn much of the way we think of economic history is mythology. It's also a great lens for understanding what's happening now with cryptocurrencies.