biccs👨🏽‍💻 @itsbiccs - Twitter Profile

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9 months ago

Trust, Money and State At the beginning of times, the first attempts at proper writing happened thanks to agriculture. For the first time, humans had more food than what they could consume, so the need for a place to store the surplus was created. Due to the difficulty for each individual to have their own storage facility, a central storage unit was commonly used, where individuals would store their crops surplus and in exchange they would receive a receipt, which basically was a shell with the weight of crops represented by a number that was stored in the barn written in it. There were times when the crops that were written in the receipt were not produced yet, so this shell receipt was the first form of debt that was created in human history. As we already know things only get more interesting from here. At the same time, these receipts were utilized as a form of money, due to the fact that the farmers utilized these receipts when trading for other products in the market, even though the crops the receipt represented were not produced yet. After the use of receipts written in shells for crops surplus, came the use of metallic coins which were distributed to represent the distribution of agricultural surplus from central warehouses, at least in Mesopotamia. After all this happened, there was a period in time where the record of property for the ownership of the agricultural surplus happened in “virtual coins” which meant receipts created that represented the amount of coins an individual were to be given, so instead of the person receiving the actual coins, they were given a receipt that represented the coins that they had. The interesting thing here is that many times the coins didn’t even exist, they were utilized as a representation of value, or they were just too heavy to be carried around. When this happened, most of the transactions in ancient markets occurred in function of these “virtual coins”. This is where things get tricky, there was a lot of value being transacted and no proper way of validating that this new monetary unit was actually valid in each transaction or if it was just counterfeit money, so the need for a central authority was created. This central authority is what we call state, which back then simply meant a collective institution that outlived the death of individuals managing central crop warehouses, one which people could, with time, trust that they were going to be able to access their value of agricultural surplus. This is how debt, trust, money and state are tied. In modern decentralized markets: Is value still derived from tangible assets? Who is the state? Why can we trust one another? How is debt created? What is needed to permeate centralized markets? And why do they still predominate? Thanks for reading 🫡

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