Money: The Story of Humanity
Why our next epoch of money is most similar to golds debut, some 4,000 years ago.
COWRIE SHELLS
Most of you are familiar with the various forms of money that human culture has used over the centuries, from cowrie shells in our ancient history, gold in our more recent history, and both centralized and decentralized ledgers in the present day.
But what some of you may not be familiar with yet, is where each of these types of monetary systems fit on the time line of humanity, and what that time line can tell us about where we are at, and where we are likely headed.
In that spirit, buckle up for a grand tour of the story of humanity, as viewed through the “social credit systems”, the monetary systems we’ve utilized for the past 50,000 years, through ice ages, and great floods.
As it turns out, metallic coins, like gold, were not the first form of money, and not by a long shot. Compared to the 40,000 year run of cowrie shells, the 4,000 year run for gold hasn’t had a very long stretch thus far, and all indications point to the end of the line for our storied shiny yellow rock.
What is also somewhat surprising upon inspection of our history of money is where our centralized US dollar ledger system fits into our story line. How it was the necessary research and development precursor to the decentralized global bitcoin ledger system, which will be the next monetary phase transition to supplant gold, in the same way gold supplanted the cowrie shell, now that humanity understands what money actually is.
Now that we’ve expanded our conscious mind to comprehend the importance of money, of its fixed supply, it is likely that bitcoin will have at least as long a run as gold, but more likely, it will drive us forward for the next 50,000 years, deep into the next ice age, and potentially far far beyond. We may not need another form of money on Earth, ever again.
Oh, what’s that, you didn’t know we are heading into another ice age? Your friendly public schools and nightly news didn’t tell you about that?
You sweet innocent summers child. Lol.
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Let’s take a quick look at the history of planet Earth to get us started on this journey.
GLACIAL PERIODS
The history of money is really the history of mankind, and it starts some 50,000 years ago, during the most recent ice age.1
To understand this long ago time, we also need to understand what was going on with the world, with the Earth, how it has gone through numerous glacial periods and interglacial periods, just like the current warming interglacial period we are in.
The mainstream news, and your public science classes won’t tell you but the reality is that the Earth is warming, not from humans, or from cow farts, but from the dynamics of the solar system that the Earth resides within, and its been going on for millions and millions of years.
Although the science is not settled, there is a lot of supporting evidence, and every year, more independent studies support and validate the evidence.
Here’s what we think we know…
The orbit of Earth around the Sun, as well as all of the other planets, is not entirely understood, as your state funded science teachers might have led you to believe.
The orbits of heavenly bodies were not solved with Copernicus and Galileo, they simply got us pointed in the right direction.
As it turns out, the “three body problem” that is to say, how the orbits of planets around the Sun, are impacted not only by the Sun but by each other, is an incredibly complex and “chaotic” process that mathematics has not yet entirely resolved.
But thanks to more and more powerful computer modeling and ever more advances in mathematics, we have fairly powerful solutions that can plot the motion of the Earth around the Sun with rather impressive accuracy for periods that may very well extend for millions of years, which, with other evidence like ice core samples and seafloor core samples that corroborate those solutions, provide us with an incredible rich picture of planet Earth and its climate for the past hundreds of thousands of years.
As it turns out, planet Earth has a fairly volatile, yet predictable cycle of warming and cooling.
You see, our Earth does not pass around the Sun in a perfectly stable circular path, nor does it pass around in a perfectly stable oval shaped path. Instead, because of the pull of other large forces around Earth, primarily the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn which are much more massive planets than Earth, in fact they are failed stars in their own right, they cause the Earth to move about the Sun in an elongated oval shape which stretches out some times more and some times less, depending upon their orbital position relative to the Sun as we pass by them. And over the course of 100,000 years, a pattern of Earth’s distance from the Sun emerges, bringing us closer to and further from it, over the course of that large time frame.2
And as any of us that has stood around a winter campfire can attest to, a few inches closer or a few inches further from a campfire is the difference between a burning hot hand or an ice cold hand. And in exactly the same fashion, Earth being the place not too hot and not too cold for us, with its distance relative to the Sun, it just so happens to be the case for Earth as well, that over the course of this 100,000 years the orbit of Earth moves far enough away from the Sun for a period of time to cause the Earth to cool enough that it causes the glacial ice sheets that cover the land and sea to greatly expand. And then as the Earth returns closer to the Sun for a period of time, the slightly warmer temperatures melt most all of the ice on the planet. And this one hundred thousand year cycle has been repeating for the past few millions of years.
Here is a chart of these cycles, showing us the change in temperatures and ice volume over the past 450,000 years.
As we can plainly see, there is a cyclical pattern with a “quick” 10,000 to 30,000 year time frame of a sharp rise in temperature and a sharp decline in ice volume, followed by a “slow” 90,000 to 70,000 year decline in temperature and a slow increase in ice volume over that same period of time.
And then the cycle repeats, over and over with each cycle from rise to fall lasting approximately 100,000 years in totality.3
Here is a depiction of our estimates of Europe during the Earth’s most recent ice age, the “Last Glacial Period” which started approx. 115,000 years ago. As you can see, most of northern Europe, including all of Scandinavia and present day Great Britain, was blanketed in glacial ice that was miles thick.4
And here is a North American depiction, with all of Canada, and all of the mid west United States including Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and all of the US east cost including New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine covered in the same miles thick glacial ice.5
So what the hell does any of this have to do with humans, money, and with Bitcoin?
Well, in a word, everything!
A SOCIAL CREDIT SCORE
Money has always been, for tens of thousands of years, and remains to this day, and will continue to be for the next tens of thousands of years, nothing more than a decentralized social credit scoring system. Those with the most units of credits, with units of money, have the highest social credit scores, and those with the least, have the lowest social credit scores.
Money has always been and will continue to be, what separates mankind from the animal kingdom. Although many animals have the ability to vocalize and communicate verbally, and visually, and use complex tools, the animal world has not adapted their minds to the complex abstract requirements necessary to apply advanced value transfer functions using speech, including the most advanced speech function of them all, that of monetary value exchange.
When we look back at the historical record, what we find is a divergence of humans from those that didn’t make the cut, like the Neanderthal, some fifty thousand years ago in the middle of the last ice age.
In the archeological record are the remains of decorated and adorned seashells and snail shells, and the same cowrie shells that have been used as recently as four thousand years ago, primarily as a monetary tool. And what do we also find in the archeological record around the time frame of fifty thousand years ago? The end of the line for our near cousin the Neanderthal.6
So how could a smaller, weaker human outlast the Neanderthal in that harsh ice age climate?
The answer is simple.
Humans have the strange behavior to specialize and create more than they need of a single thing, with the understanding that the rest of the neighborhood is making more of other things, and through the medium of value transfer, through our social credit system, everyone can trade their expertly made goods for other expertly made goods, allowing the group as a whole to be greater than each of them could be individually. And it all hinges upon our ability to track each others output, with our social credit scoring system that we call money.
Through our social credit system, we out collaborated our opponents, the Neanderthals.
And there is something else very interesting in the historical record. Some twelve thousand years ago we see the extinction of large animals, like the wooly mammoth.
There were likely two reasons for this.
First, the global climate begin to warm significantly approx. 12,000 years ago (and continues to warm to this day) as we came out of the most recent ice age, and that changed the available vegetative food for these animals. And secondly, with the warmer weather, and easier living, and reduced competition, the growing human population demanded more food, likely putting even more pressure on the dwindling animal population.7
So why didn’t humanity die out when its wooly mammoth food source disappeared?
Because humans are adaptable, highly adaptable indeed, with their ability to specialize, because of their cowrie shell monetary system. And they (we) turned to domesticating animals, and agrarian culture some twelve thousand years ago, as the archeological record shows, with the warming of the planet.
From there we spread across the planet, with our shell money carried around our necks.
IMPROVING UPON WHAT HAS BEEN
And then something extraordinary happened once again.
Around four thousand years ago, we expanded our conscience once more, as we left the stone age, and entered the age of metals.8
Towards the end of the bronze age, with the start of the iron age, we began fashioning cowrie shells from metals, like copper and bronze. It was the first money printing operation in the history of mankind, as we could create more shell money with bronze faster than we could make real cowrie shells in some parts of the world.9
Here are some of the first innovative bronze cowrie shells, from the Shang Dynasty, about 4000 BP (that’s Before Present for my left of the bell curve squad, lol :-).
And from this the natural step was to do away with the shell money all together and only use bronze for it lasted longer, was much more durable, could be produced more consistently, increasing fungibility, etc. It was just a better money. But it was too common a material, a more scarce metal was needed.
And so, some 750 years later, the Lydians, the ancient Greeks, began using electrum for their social credit tokens, a naturally occurring metal alloy of gold and silver.10
However, the alloy wasn’t scarce enough.
The world demanded a purified gold social credit token. And so it would come to pass, some 750 years later, after refining innovations, and the realization that gold was a more scarce metal, the Roman Republic would introduce a solid gold social credit token, the aureus around 250 BC.11 And with it’s introduction the republic would thrive for the next 250 years.
Of course, controlling the gold coin printer is always the goal, so the printers, or in this case, the mints, changed after Rome debased their money into oblivion, and destroyed their civilization, after the fall of the Roman Empire, some 750 years later, around 500 AD the solidus was the next new shiny gold coin for humanity.12
And surprise, surprise, humans can’t help themselves but to debase their currency. Thus, it would be another 750 years for the next gold coin to hit the market, this time, the florin which began it’s issuance around 1250.13 And with the florin, what we know as modern history would take shape, amongst Florence, and then the Dutch of Amsterdam, the Spanish, the French, the Germans, the English, and the Americas.
The florin did look pretty nice.
Which then brings us to today, 750 years later, once again.
So what’s it going to be this time ladies and gentlemen, another random gold coin from a nation state power that declares their coins as the only acceptable gold coins, or is it time to innovate once more, just as we moved beyond cowrie shells to gold tokens, is it time to move beyond gold tokens?
Perhaps it is time to create something new, something with a fixed supply, based on an infallible ledger system, something we can verify rather than trusting, based on the essence of what our social credit scoring system is all about.
Maybe it’s time to do away with the shiny physical tokens all together. But since our animal minds have a hard time conceptualizing something we can’t see, we better give the world a picture of it. And we better make it something they are familiar with.
In the same way the first metal coins resembled cowrie shells, its fitting that the next iteration of money will resemble the predecessor, a gold coin, and we’ll name our new social credit system… Bitcoin!14
YOU’RE NEVER LATE TO BITCOIN
It’s time for humanity to learn what money actually is, nothing more than a social credit score. And if you want a fair social credit scoring system (and voting system), you can’t just redo the game by printing new tokens from a new office, in a new imaginary country every 750 years. You need something with staying power, something that can’t be faked. And something that can last for the next 50,000 years.
It’s time to grow up.
If you look at the historical record, three things stand out.
One — bitcoin, as a decentralized ledger system is a radical departure from gold coins, in the same way, gold coins were a radical departure from cowrie shells.
Two — those that didn’t grasp the next monetary system were clipped from the family tree. Those that didn’t comprehend cowrie shells, went extinct, like the Neanderthal. Those that didn’t grasp gold coins went extinct like the numerous human tribes across Earth. And today those that don’t grasp bitcoin are also going to be culled from the family tree of humanity. It’s not personal. It’s adaptation. Get some in case it catches on, or get left behind from the gene pool. Brutal, but, it’s the cold reality.
And three — if we liken the Lydian coin made from electrum, an impure gold coin, but on the right track, to the present day, we can think of the current central banking ledger system in the same way, as an impure ledger system but on the right track. It wasn’t until the Roman Republic adopted the aureus, a pure gold coin, that their civilization really took off. And similarly it isn’t until each of us adopts bitcoin, the pure fixed supply decentralized ledger, that our lives really begin to take off. Anyone that has begun their own bitcoin standard can certainly attest to this.
So, although those of us that have already found bitcoin have begun the start of a fifty thousand year race, the reality is, because Bitcoin is the next monetary standard, it’s impossible to be late. Imagine saying you don’t want any US dollars because you think you are too late. It’s nonsensical. To all of those that haven’t yet found the next social credit system, Bitcoin, don’t worry, you are not late. It’s not possible to be late to something that is going to keep going for thousands and thousands of years.
Cheers!
Nick Szabo has well document in his 2002 article Shelling Out: The Origins of Money, that cowrie shells started as money tens of thousands of years ago.
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/shelling-out/#fnB04
See J. Laskar’s article La2010: a new orbital solution for the long-term motion of Earth.
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2011/08/aa16836-11.pdf
From the article Ice core basics by Bethan Davies, 2020.
https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/ice-cores/ice-core-basics/
The Last Glacial Period (LGP), also known as the Last glacial cycle, occurred from the end of the Last Interglacial to the beginning of the Holocene, c. 115,000 – c. 11,700 years ago, and thus corresponds to most of the timespan of the Late Pleistocene.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period
From The Great Ice Age by the US Dept of Interior.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/ice_age/ice_age.pdf
The population of Neanderthals dropped to extinction levels some 50,000 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal
This extinction formed part of the Late Pleistocene extinctions, which began 40,000 years ago and peaked between 14,000 and 11,500 years ago. Scientists are divided over whether hunting or climate change, which led to the shrinkage of its habitat, was the main factor that contributed to the extinction of the woolly mammoth, or whether it was due to a combination of the two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolly_mammoth
The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three historical Metal Ages, after the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age. It has also been considered as the final Age of the three-age division starting with prehistory (before recorded history) and progressing to protohistory (before written history). In this usage, it is preceded by the Stone Age (subdivided into the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic) and Bronze Age. These concepts originated for describing Iron Age Europe and the Ancient Near East. Still, they now include other parts of the Old World (the indigenous cultures of the New World did not develop an iron economy before 1500).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age
Shang Dynasty and Zhou Dynasty coinage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_dynasty_coinage
Electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver with traces of copper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrum
The first solid gold coin, the aureus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureus
The second solid gold coin, the solidus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidus_(coin)
The third solid gold goin, the florin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florin
The first and last, decentralized ledger money for Earth, bitcoin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin