This piece made me think of the erosion of US-dollar hegemony as a kind of modern reverse of the Ming “single whip一条鞭法” reform. Instead of forcing everyone to convert local resources into a single dominant currency, the global system seems to be drifting back toward a more plural settlement regime, where countries can pay and clear in multiple currencies without routing everything through the dollar. (in the case of single whip, silver was the dominant currency to pay taxes)
So, I've been a crypto reporter for a decade now. I've quietly become convinced that crypto has a very bright future, but I loved this post because it helped me realized that I've been operating under an assumption (that there would always be one form of money that would rule the world) that was constraining my thinking unnecessarily.
This post was so helpful in cracking that assumption that I hadn't even really fully articulated to myself. Now that I say it, it's obvious, but I hadn't seen it as a kind of myopia.
The parts where you talk about how a layered stack actually makes it feasible for parts of the system to adjust for stress without it rippling out further than it needed to is an especially powerful image.
Yeah this thing gets a full chapter in 1493. I’m still digesting it. I think the diversity of coincident systems is the right key idea to focus on. The part that struck me most is how silver was largely smuggled in and deployed bottom-up and the state fiat paper and coins eventually adopted it. The idea that different Song coins went in and out of credible circulation as “sound money” locally centuries later is just bizarre. But then like Spain they didn’t adjust for inflation caused by a commodity glut. I never thought about how commodity moneys have their own liquidity irrationality because in our time the main one is gold and all gold is basically above ground and in fixed circulation now, so Potosi type events can’t happen modulo a gold asteroid crashing into earth. My intuition of commodity moneys having lower volatility than mismanaged fiats is way off. Looks like historically, commodity moneys required a whole sub-monetary economy just to ensure their supply. Like the silk and ceramics trade. It’s bizarre that an irrational amount of farmland had to be devoted to mulberry to ensure money supply just because they couldn’t figure out a stable alternative to silver. It’s a bit of a modern miracle that we now know how to do this reasonably well purely with numbers tuned in response to data. An unclear lesson in all this for crypto.
This reads like a recovery of structural memory. Money reverting to layered coordination once scale overwhelms singular standards. What’s striking is how the mixed standard cuts through the the illusion that one abstract unit can faithfully represent everything; by letting different instruments do different kinds of work. In that sense, it reframes today’s monetary confusion more as filter fatigue finally forcing the system back into a form that can actually breathe.
Great article, with a lot of data for understand the fiscal future. The photograph really says it all.
This piece made me think of the erosion of US-dollar hegemony as a kind of modern reverse of the Ming “single whip一条鞭法” reform. Instead of forcing everyone to convert local resources into a single dominant currency, the global system seems to be drifting back toward a more plural settlement regime, where countries can pay and clear in multiple currencies without routing everything through the dollar. (in the case of single whip, silver was the dominant currency to pay taxes)
So, I've been a crypto reporter for a decade now. I've quietly become convinced that crypto has a very bright future, but I loved this post because it helped me realized that I've been operating under an assumption (that there would always be one form of money that would rule the world) that was constraining my thinking unnecessarily.
This post was so helpful in cracking that assumption that I hadn't even really fully articulated to myself. Now that I say it, it's obvious, but I hadn't seen it as a kind of myopia.
The parts where you talk about how a layered stack actually makes it feasible for parts of the system to adjust for stress without it rippling out further than it needed to is an especially powerful image.
Yeah this thing gets a full chapter in 1493. I’m still digesting it. I think the diversity of coincident systems is the right key idea to focus on. The part that struck me most is how silver was largely smuggled in and deployed bottom-up and the state fiat paper and coins eventually adopted it. The idea that different Song coins went in and out of credible circulation as “sound money” locally centuries later is just bizarre. But then like Spain they didn’t adjust for inflation caused by a commodity glut. I never thought about how commodity moneys have their own liquidity irrationality because in our time the main one is gold and all gold is basically above ground and in fixed circulation now, so Potosi type events can’t happen modulo a gold asteroid crashing into earth. My intuition of commodity moneys having lower volatility than mismanaged fiats is way off. Looks like historically, commodity moneys required a whole sub-monetary economy just to ensure their supply. Like the silk and ceramics trade. It’s bizarre that an irrational amount of farmland had to be devoted to mulberry to ensure money supply just because they couldn’t figure out a stable alternative to silver. It’s a bit of a modern miracle that we now know how to do this reasonably well purely with numbers tuned in response to data. An unclear lesson in all this for crypto.
This reads like a recovery of structural memory. Money reverting to layered coordination once scale overwhelms singular standards. What’s striking is how the mixed standard cuts through the the illusion that one abstract unit can faithfully represent everything; by letting different instruments do different kinds of work. In that sense, it reframes today’s monetary confusion more as filter fatigue finally forcing the system back into a form that can actually breathe.
what a great article,do you have chinese version post on other platform,can i repost in chinese?
Go ahead and repost! Leave the link here :) I used to do reader’s digest in Chinese a while ago.
银堆与混合本位制—— 中国分层货币史揭示的未来世界启示 - 解虫的文章 - 知乎
https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/1979970990206363503 here is the link
Also, little wonder that the modern Chinese term for 'bank' literally has the word silver in it.
https://www.currencyofpower.co/p/barrels-to-bytes – some people are clearly rather bullish about the petrodollar and its hegemony
hah! but what a coincidence of themes