Twelve long reads
Essays
Twelve essays in three parts. Together they tell one story: how societies have tried to keep an honest record of who owes what, and who gets to keep it.
Part I
Before machines: records, coins and paper
From clay tablets and tally sticks to coins, banknotes, ledgers and the gold standard: how societies learned to keep a trusted record of value.
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1
Before Coins: Credit, Tallies and Clay
The first money may not have been a thing you could hold at all. Long before coins, people in Mesopotamia and medieval England kept careful records of what was owed, in clay and in wood. Those records are the oldest ancestors of every ledger since.
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2
The Invention of Coinage in Lydia
Some time around the late seventh century BC, in the kingdom of Lydia and the Greek cities near it, someone began stamping lumps of precious metal of a fixed weight. The coin was born. Its real novelty was not the metal but the mark.
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3
Paper Money, from Song China to Europe
Paper money began as a convenience for merchants tired of carrying heavy iron coins. Within a few centuries it had become a tool of empire, and its history became a long lesson in what happens when the power to issue is not matched by restraint.
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4
Double-Entry Bookkeeping and the Merchants of Venice
Every transaction written down twice, once on each side, so that the books must balance. The idea sounds dull, and it changed the world. It was worked out by Italian merchants, printed by a Franciscan friar in Venice in 1494, and it still sits underneath every company and every bank.
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5
The Stones of Yap and Money as Memory
On a small group of Pacific islands, people used great discs of stone as money, and ownership changed without the stones moving an inch. One of them lay at the bottom of the sea and still counted. Economists have argued about what the stones of Yap mean for more than a century.
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6
The Gold Standard and Its End in 1971
For roughly a century, much of the world tied its money to gold. The rule promised discipline: no government could issue more than its gold allowed. The story of how that rule was adopted, suspended, rebuilt and finally abandoned in 1971 is the background to every argument about money since.
Part II
Digital cash: from blind signatures to the whitepaper
Cryptographers, a mailing list and three decades of experiments that led to a nine-page paper in 2008.
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7
Chaum, DigiCash and the First Digital Cash
In the early 1980s, a young cryptographer at Berkeley foresaw that electronic payments would let anyone with access to the records follow a person’s life in detail. His answer was a new kind of digital signature, and a company that tried to bring private electronic cash to the world a decade before its time.
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8
The Cypherpunks and the Dream of Private Money
In 1992 a handful of programmers and cryptographers in California started meeting and then a mailing list. They called themselves cypherpunks. Over the following decade they argued, coded and campaigned for strong encryption in everyone’s hands, and some of them dreamed of money that no one could watch.
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9
Hashcash, b-money and Bit Gold: the Precursors
The Bitcoin whitepaper of 2008 was short, and it did not come from nowhere. Its pieces had been invented over the previous thirty years by researchers working on junk mail, document timestamps, fault-tolerant computers and digital cash. This essay follows those pieces to the point where someone put them together.
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10
Reading the Bitcoin Whitepaper, Section by Section
On 31 October 2008, a message to a cryptography mailing list announced a nine-page paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. It is short enough to read in an afternoon and dense enough to reward several readings. Here is a guide to it, section by section.
Part III
Institutions: the response
How regulators and central banks answered a system designed to need neither.
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11
From Code to Institutions: How Regulators Responded
Bitcoin was designed to work without institutions. Within a few years, institutions had begun to respond. This essay follows that response from the first cautious reports of 2012 to the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, which took full effect at the end of 2024.
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12
Central Bank Digital Currencies: an Old Idea in New Form
Central bank digital currencies are often presented as a reaction to Bitcoin. In fact, the question behind them, whether the public should hold money directly with the central bank, has been debated for nearly a century. What is new is the technology, and the urgency created by the decline of cash.