A reading from the book of mickey:
History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and there are rhymes in history that help shed light on the revolution of money we are seeing today.
For more than a thousand years, the Western World was run by a private ledger. This was not a monetary ledger, this was a ledger of human souls.
Allow me to explain.
The dominant forces of today are capital and capitalism. A handful of institutions manage the central monetary ledger, money supply and global economic velocity via monetary policy. This policy defines behaviors of billions of people around the globe. It impacts their work, where they live, the companies they start, the technology they build.
This has become known as the rules based order, and for much of this century, it has governed the world .
But this was not always the case.
For many centuries it was religion that was the preeminent force in the western civilization. For most of western history, almost 1300 years, it was the Pope in Rome that most influenced daily life, under a rules-based order called Christendom.
By 323 AD, and until the mid 1600s, Rome was the epicenter of the Catholic political system. Over time, The Church became all-powerful, its wealth rising not from its ability to control the money supply, but rather, from its unilateral ability to control a very different ledger altogether.
You see, according to Catholic doctrine, The Church had a monopoly on the fate of every single soul, living or dead. In the minds of Christian Europe, this leverage over a soul’s journey into heaven or eternal damnation represented the ultimate power.
The Church, and The Church alone could determine the eternal fate of every human being on earth, but, for a small fee, could ensure your sins were washed away and a life of paradise in heaven would await.
Any refusal of the church’s authority would lead to subjugation through the force of violence. This ledger was the ledger of souls, and this business model led to the Church and its central authority to become the most powerful entity in Europe.
States would send commodities like gold and silver to Rome in exchange for insurance against internal and external violence arising from popular fear about the fate of one’s soul, or the soul of their loved ones.
If any states in Christendom refused Roman rule, other states in Christendom would be granted permission to attack them, strip their assets and enforce the rules-based order of the Catholic Church.
For centuries, few dared to question this socio-political order. That was until one day when a German monk named Martin Luther walked up to his local church and nailed a piece of paper on its door. Many ideas were listed in the paper, but chief among them was Luther’s idea that one’s relationship to God and spiritually should be held individually, rather than be authenticated through a central authority.
Luther believed no central authority could determine your soul’s fate. He also held another revolutionary idea, that everyone should be able to read the Bible and have a direct and private relationship with the divine.
The tldr of Mr. Luther's famous 95 Theses was, “Not your keys, not your Cristo.”, and this new way of thinking, combined with the technology of the day set Europe ablaze.
Books were some of the earliest technologies to store data outside of your brain. And The Catholic Church had a monopoly on the most important database at the time, the Holy Bible. Until Martin Luther, only select people were allowed root access to the Bible and religious texts, which were the dominant social currency of the time.
For Luther’s revolutionary idea to take place, people needed to read their own bibles to form the relationship with heaven that Luther so passionately advocated for.
Books were reasonably available at that time, as by then the printing press had already been invented. The real problem was not access to data; the problem was that people needed to learn how to read the data.
Luther’s new ideas were the catalyst to drive millions into a new skill set, one that would change the course of European and indeed world history.
By the time of Luther’s death in 1546, a pan-European explosion of literacy hit Christendom like a wave. Fueled by the insatiable new desire for reading the Bible, millions of Europeans now feverishly dedicated themselves to reading books, published using the invention of the printing press.
Soon, Europe had a literate population, one which could now apply this new skill of literacy to other datasets. People didn’t want to stop with reading the Bible, they wanted more. What followed was one of western history’s golden ages, the Age of Enlightenment, and rediscovery of Ancient Greek, Persian and Roman texts on physics, philosophy, construction, art, architecture, and sharing of this information in books allowed knowledge to be networked like never before.
It wasn’t all roses and champagne, however. Institutions that depended on the old order crumbled; peace was no longer under the control of a single city in Europe. Wars erupted. Kingdoms fell. The church splintered into a thousand pieces, and Europe was never the same. Thirty years of war followed, as kingdoms sought to consolidate power in the massive vacuum left over from the collapsing Roman Catholic Church.
Today, though it remains a powerful cultural force, the power of the Catholic Church is at historic low. People are free to read, worship and pray in private and as individuals. But the Church has never recovered from the revolution Martin Luther began many centuries ago.
New political orders emerged, and the rise of capitalism, nation-states, and global institutions followed. Money transformed from silver and gold to paper notes backed only by faith in human institutions.
Governments began to decouple from systems of supply and demand, and instead began to print money at an unprecedented rate, testing the faith of the parishioners of capitalism and capital. Soon, a new Martin Luther emerged.
The world is now going through a revolution of capital, reorganizing itself at hyperspeed. Who decides what capital is, and how should it be allocated? Why should some corporations that commit the sin of failing to create value, have their sins washed away, while others left to burn?
If money is God, then why should God’s ledger be determined by another Vatican, another Pope, another group of Cardinals? What if your bank, your money and your assets could be sent, spent or saved according to your individual desires?
Cryptography is the substrate from which everything in Web3 is built, but only small disparate cypher-punks on the internet cared about cryptography until the Bitcoin White Paper was written.
Our very own Martin Luther is an anonymous cypher-punk named Satoshi Nakamoto, and his white paper has been digitally nailed to the doors of every central bank in the world.
But, like the secondary impacts of the literacy revolution of Martin Luther, ask yourself what happens when basic comprehension of cryptography, byzantine consensus, private keys, custody, and blockchain technology become as widespread as literacy itself?
Driven by the gold rush into web3, what happens when millions more cryptographers, engineers and web3 natives start branching beyond the initial Satoshi white paper?
What happens when they come together to build a network to facilitate all forms of digital goods, into an unstoppable peer-to-peer system of economic exchange?
What happens when the printing press, Martin Luther, and digital money collide into the world’s most powerful digital asset network?
Phonon is coming.
The world will never be the same.