yeah, Scoresby won again... (#1485174) I suck at this early-bird-gets-the-worm game...

Our beloved Mr. Szabo always had a way with words... what a waste having him argue (quite aggressively) on Twitter over BIPs and op_return nonsense.

In this short (by his standards) piece, he paints an imaginary picture of past tribal interactions that would have been fairly routine to every human-prehistorical society out there -- whether in his Pacific Northwest Indian tribes example or the Highlands of Papua New Guinea or Kalahari desert. Human interaction, human cooperation and conflict-minimization.

There will be friction between tribes over trespassing, over take/use of another's property, over another tribe's ancestral rights or fishing grounds. And in extension, friendship or marriage or alliance, or the necessity of ending conflicts in _any_ of these domains.

We do this today via money #793537... (and to a shockingly large extent, government-run courts or threats thereof) but it's not the invention of money that makes it so, it's the desire for humans to find solutions and mutually acceptable agreements. The collectibles and shells, so dear to Szabo since the essay that endeared him to us ("Shelling Out"), "emerged naturally from the difficulty of matching desires to what one has available to transfer."

"It is not markets that made money possible. It is collectibles, which we now call money, that make markets possible. For a good store of value the liquidity of markets is nice to have; it is not essential. Money is, instead, essential for efficient markets.""It is not markets that made money possible. It is collectibles, which we now call money, that make markets possible. For a good store of value the liquidity of markets is nice to have; it is not essential. Money is, instead, essential for efficient markets."

Over time and in true spontaneous order fashion,

Objects valued by some for practical or even superficial reasons can evolve into objects deeply valued by all in a culture for their stitching ability.

This story is roughly right as a matter of historical accounting. I'm not so sure it changes anything but terminologically about what we mean when we say "markets," "money", "goods" etc -- since honoring/upholding a contract is a market service, _money_ is any "commonly accepted medium of exchange" (even if it's as small-scale as whatever settles a dispute between two neighboring tribes), and "markets" is a shortform for any sort of human trading interaction. This is precisely why it's so weird to outline a pre- and post-capitalism world (#1426621).

It's all just human cooperation. Subjective value, exchange etc.

The most important arguments being made for Bitcoin today are probably over a hundred millennia old. Collectibles, which when used in today's markets we call money, can take many of the desires people have throughout life, along with its hardest problems and greatest opportunities — death, conflict, marriage — and make them virtually coincide, stitch them together in time and space. They transfer value across time and space from one set of events and desires to another.