Conjecture

This is the sentence that connects Part I to the internet finance chapter, and it is already written. Part I argues that the transfer and storage of value, the commoditisation of utility, was a key inhibitor at the three main stages of our development: constraints on transferring value prevented our social groupings from growing beyond a certain size until each constraint was bypassed. The three unlockings are named. An intersubjective concept of value with flexible language in the Cognitive Revolution raised our capacity to coordinate and plan ahead, and we overran the globe. Money and writing in the early Agricultural Revolution enabled more complex government and larger trade networks, driving density and empire. Credit and an atemporal conception of value let people borrow from the future to finance the present, fuelling the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. On Part I's own account the binding constraint on human scale has three times been the technology of value transfer, which is the strongest available argument that programmable money is the fourth instance rather than a product category.

Capital mechanisms