How money is just a multiplayer abacus.

Also: why BTC (or at least blockchain) is nothing new, just a recent incremental upgrade of an age old trope.
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In the beginning, there was Debt - its usage predates both money and barter, as a matter of historical record.

Various things were used to account for debt, and this was cumbersome.
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If I owe someone one chicken, specifically, things can get awkward if the chickens I’m raising encounter a fox.

And so money was invented to normalize the settling of debts. Not for barter (which came later), but to settle debts.
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We can think of money as a “hive abacus” - it’s a way to track and settle a bunch of debts that are in play across N participants.

Money was never developed as a store of value. It was intended to be an accounting convenience for settlement of debt.
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In fact, as @profplum99 pointed out yesterday, this is still written directly on our abacus beads for the avoidance of any doubt.

Some people are sad that it's not a store of value (we call them "the Austrian School), but it wasn't built for that.
5/ https://twitter.com/profplum99/status/1319126776941932544?s=20

Anyhow, this hive abacus has taken many forms, but the kernel remains the same: it is a complex intra-species convenience used for accounting purposes.

Every time there is a major advance in technology, new implementations of societal tropes emerge.

Recently: blockchain.
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Let’s take a step back: humans, like most hive creatures, favor distributed implementations of social constructs.

This is why money is cool! It allows broader participation in the debt system by giving participants physical control over settlement tokens.
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Prior to money, you were at the mercy of the local lord who (if you had no chickens, ‘cause of those damn foxes) would dictate how your debt might be alternately settled.

Because lords don’t like having to mediate, participants would generally be assessed a “mediation tax.”
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Now, with money, the citizens could resolve “outta chicken” style problems without having to do so in the Lord’s Chambers.

This was better for both parties, as it removed the risk (for both) of being subject to the Lord’s fickleness or mediation tax.
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Put another way: money solved a prisoner’s dilemma problem that looked something like this:
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And that’s very cool! Quite empowering (and, like, flat out cheaper) for economic participants to be able to self-mediate in the settlement of debts without the lord.

BTC aspires to be another evolution of the distributed intra-species abacus.
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What problem does blockchain solve? Well, I’d frame it as “variance of the spreadsheet”

Another form of argument that happens inside the intra-species abacus is a disagreement over the ledger. Via either mistakes or malice, participants can disagree over how much is owed
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Right now, of course, we solve this by suing the shit out of one another because that’s the American way.

Note how, with both cost and risk, this has the same prisoner’s dilemma issues as the chicken problem.
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So all blockchain does here is, once again, decentralize the solving power to participants - and it does this by giving everyone a copy of the ledger, and then keeping all the copies current so that it becomes very hard to inflict mistakes or malice upon the ledger.
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What a fantastic evolution!

So next time you hear a guy like Saylor talk about a “digital hornets nest,” instead of thinking he’s getting fancy with metaphors consider: this is a hive solution to a hive problem

Bees and such are, indeed, a very tidy way to think about it
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