"It is not markets that made money possible. It is collectibles, which we now call money, that make markets possible."
~ Nick Szabo
What if everything we've been told about how money emerged is backwards? Nick Szabo's first article in nearly a decade tells the story of a stolen canoe, a tribal feud, and a string of shells – and uses it to challenge one of the most repeated ideas in economics. Did money come from barter, or did it come from something far older and far more human?
Check out the original article: The Fabric of Desires by Nick Szabo (Link: https://jan3.com/blog/the-fabric-of-desires)
References from the episode
- Nick Szabo's blog, Unenumerated – where so much of his foundational writing lives (Link: https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/)
- Aqua Wallet, the superapp by Jan3: Bitcoin, Lightning, and Liquid all in one, with USDT on Liquid too (Link: https://aqua.net/)
- The Nakamoto Institute: the best archive there is for Szabo's work and early Bitcoin thought (Link: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/)
- Carl Menger's On the Origins of Money – worth reading even where I think it falls short (Link: https://www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/menger/money.txt)
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“There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.”
~ Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
