Ben--there has to be an easier way! I'm interested but got intimidated as soon as I saw the list of steps I'd have to understand first and then take act on.
I think it's going to have to become much easier before crypto as money moves beyond a (male) minority.
By the way--I owned Bitcoin but eventually moved it out of my wallet to an ETF because I kept wondering how my heirs would access my Key. They'd be pissed to have to go through all that hassle, I thought.
Money should be simple. This does not simple to me. Am I missing something?
I get what you're saying, Houston - money feels simple. However, calling money simple is a bit like saying the air is uncomplicated just because we breathe it unconsciously. Conventional currency systems only appear straightforward because we marinate in their logic, generation after generation. The familiarity can be deceiving - underneath, they are shaped by layers of extractive incentives and hidden gatekeepers. If you’d grown up navigating crypto’s landscape, it would be “money” that looked arcane. The complications within decentralized approaches aren’t there solely because of technical novelty or some intent to confuse us. They arise because, unlike tradition’s Big Brother, each participant must safeguard their own value, identity, and agency. That’s a trade-off I’m willing to make, especially when open source AI’s survival depends on escaping legacy systems built to extract rather than to enable connection and flourishing. Crypto has plenty to fix, but its decentralized nature is a prerequisite for any generative system robust enough to foster truly open AI. Familiarity breeds comfort - but comfort can breed complacency. I think that discomfort is a sign we’re reaching for something new. I'd say, embrace it.
Isn't money just kind of a little more abstract trade? you give me X and I give you money? Anything can act as money--match sticks, rocks scratched in a certain way, paper with a signature? That's pretty straightforward logic, seems to me.
RE: Commodity Money: Societies began using items with intrinsic value—like livestock, grain, salt, and cowrie shells—as money. These were widely accepted and useful, but often bulky or perishable.
Money of Account: Long before coins, ancient civilizations like Mesopotamia used tally sticks and clay tokens to record debts and transactions. This abstract form of money allowed for more complex economic systems.
Coinage: Around 600 BCE, Lydia (modern-day Turkey) introduced stamped metal coins, standardizing value and simplifying trade. Coins spread rapidly across cultures due to their durability and portability.
--Guess what I'm saying is that something that is has been around for 2500 years, coinage, seems to work pretty well. Creating 26 character Bitcoin keys, and keeping computers running to store them seems to require a lot of personal bookkeeping to remember the Key and also keeping entire complicated electrical grids and electronic devices manufactured and repaired. I kind of think in a few centuries electrical grids and electronic devices that can read Bitcoin keys might not still exist. Gold and silver will, though, right, and property? (Tho I know of course that today's money not backed up in precious metals!)
If I’m looking at today’s architectures with the eyes of tomorrow, I see two fractures that history papers over.
First, there's a shadow built into every system’s foundation: who bears the burden of resilience? Sure, grains and gold feel solid, but their stability wasn’t just inherent. It was scaffolded by centuries of protection, exclusion, and coordinated effort - a whole machinery to keep the storehouses standing and the “value” legible. Crypto does bring friction and risk, but it also surfaces who actually manages the ledger and who pays the ongoing toll. The challenge isn’t just can we build something lasting, but can we make its survival mean agency for more than a select, supposedly ‘savvy’ minority?
That brings me to tech fragility. I get the skepticism of entrusting generational wealth to clusters of hard drives and fallible electrics. But our “simple” past wasn’t so impervious either. Empires rose and coinages collapsed on the back of social and material fragility - crops failed, codes lost, ledgers burned, and the common people were left to pay the bill. The question is how to distribute resilience so that everyone stands a chance when the bridge shakes.
I’m not necessarily advocating for a future where crypto replaces coins, but rather, for one where the value-exchange system itself demands transparency and fosters reciprocal trust. Right now, the closest thing we have to that is crypto, which is why open-source leans on it so heavily.
2500 years of coinage has staying power, I grant you, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has worked well, especially not for all. Nor does it mean that it’s not high time for something better. If anything, those long-lived systems have often persisted precisely because they made themselves indispensable to a narrow class while rendering most people dependent and excluded from true agency. That condition exists to this day, and I think its time has finally come.
What I’m arguing for isn’t disruption for its own sake, but generative evolution - a move toward value systems shaped by common stewardship, not by the invisible hands of gatekeepers. If we're bold enough to rethink what’s possible, maybe we can build a future where value exists to be shared, not hoarded.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I support your work on developing this alternative vision for humankind. It goes so much deeper than money/currency, as you say.
Extractive systems—that began with agriculture, right? And continued with industrialization. So perhaps the problem is surpluses and specialization? In your vision, are there still surpluses, stores of goods more than subsistence? And are their specializations? Am I wrong to think that surpluses and specializations lead to hierarchies? Are there hierarchies in your alternative vision for the future?
Don’t expect you to answer all my questions—just telling you what your ideas are sparking in me.
I think those are great questions, Houston. I definitely don't have all the answers, and I wouldn’t call this my vision so much as a collective one I'm trying to encourage all of us to articulate together. But yes, you’re right that extractive systems really began when we started storing more than we immediately needed. From the first seeds of agriculture on into the digital age there has been surpluses, ownership, specialization, and hierarchy.
I think that what changes now is that AI upends the very meaning of those terms. “Surplus” and “specialization” as we currently define them only make sense inside an extractive economy - one that depends on scarcity and separation to define value. But in a generative system, those same concepts evolve. Surplus becomes shared capability rather than hoarded excess. Specialization becomes expression - individuality freely applied, not labor divided.
I think the bigger question AI forces us to confront is how to redefine culture once generalization replaces specialization. Because that's happening. Who gets to define value when everyone can build and share in ways that no longer require gatekeepers? But we're so focused on the question of retaining an extractive system that we can't see that far ahead.
Ben--there has to be an easier way! I'm interested but got intimidated as soon as I saw the list of steps I'd have to understand first and then take act on.
I think it's going to have to become much easier before crypto as money moves beyond a (male) minority.
By the way--I owned Bitcoin but eventually moved it out of my wallet to an ETF because I kept wondering how my heirs would access my Key. They'd be pissed to have to go through all that hassle, I thought.
Money should be simple. This does not simple to me. Am I missing something?
I get what you're saying, Houston - money feels simple. However, calling money simple is a bit like saying the air is uncomplicated just because we breathe it unconsciously. Conventional currency systems only appear straightforward because we marinate in their logic, generation after generation. The familiarity can be deceiving - underneath, they are shaped by layers of extractive incentives and hidden gatekeepers. If you’d grown up navigating crypto’s landscape, it would be “money” that looked arcane. The complications within decentralized approaches aren’t there solely because of technical novelty or some intent to confuse us. They arise because, unlike tradition’s Big Brother, each participant must safeguard their own value, identity, and agency. That’s a trade-off I’m willing to make, especially when open source AI’s survival depends on escaping legacy systems built to extract rather than to enable connection and flourishing. Crypto has plenty to fix, but its decentralized nature is a prerequisite for any generative system robust enough to foster truly open AI. Familiarity breeds comfort - but comfort can breed complacency. I think that discomfort is a sign we’re reaching for something new. I'd say, embrace it.
Isn't money just kind of a little more abstract trade? you give me X and I give you money? Anything can act as money--match sticks, rocks scratched in a certain way, paper with a signature? That's pretty straightforward logic, seems to me.
RE: Commodity Money: Societies began using items with intrinsic value—like livestock, grain, salt, and cowrie shells—as money. These were widely accepted and useful, but often bulky or perishable.
Money of Account: Long before coins, ancient civilizations like Mesopotamia used tally sticks and clay tokens to record debts and transactions. This abstract form of money allowed for more complex economic systems.
Coinage: Around 600 BCE, Lydia (modern-day Turkey) introduced stamped metal coins, standardizing value and simplifying trade. Coins spread rapidly across cultures due to their durability and portability.
--Guess what I'm saying is that something that is has been around for 2500 years, coinage, seems to work pretty well. Creating 26 character Bitcoin keys, and keeping computers running to store them seems to require a lot of personal bookkeeping to remember the Key and also keeping entire complicated electrical grids and electronic devices manufactured and repaired. I kind of think in a few centuries electrical grids and electronic devices that can read Bitcoin keys might not still exist. Gold and silver will, though, right, and property? (Tho I know of course that today's money not backed up in precious metals!)
From cattle to code. 😊
If I’m looking at today’s architectures with the eyes of tomorrow, I see two fractures that history papers over.
First, there's a shadow built into every system’s foundation: who bears the burden of resilience? Sure, grains and gold feel solid, but their stability wasn’t just inherent. It was scaffolded by centuries of protection, exclusion, and coordinated effort - a whole machinery to keep the storehouses standing and the “value” legible. Crypto does bring friction and risk, but it also surfaces who actually manages the ledger and who pays the ongoing toll. The challenge isn’t just can we build something lasting, but can we make its survival mean agency for more than a select, supposedly ‘savvy’ minority?
That brings me to tech fragility. I get the skepticism of entrusting generational wealth to clusters of hard drives and fallible electrics. But our “simple” past wasn’t so impervious either. Empires rose and coinages collapsed on the back of social and material fragility - crops failed, codes lost, ledgers burned, and the common people were left to pay the bill. The question is how to distribute resilience so that everyone stands a chance when the bridge shakes.
I’m not necessarily advocating for a future where crypto replaces coins, but rather, for one where the value-exchange system itself demands transparency and fosters reciprocal trust. Right now, the closest thing we have to that is crypto, which is why open-source leans on it so heavily.
2500 years of coinage has staying power, I grant you, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has worked well, especially not for all. Nor does it mean that it’s not high time for something better. If anything, those long-lived systems have often persisted precisely because they made themselves indispensable to a narrow class while rendering most people dependent and excluded from true agency. That condition exists to this day, and I think its time has finally come.
What I’m arguing for isn’t disruption for its own sake, but generative evolution - a move toward value systems shaped by common stewardship, not by the invisible hands of gatekeepers. If we're bold enough to rethink what’s possible, maybe we can build a future where value exists to be shared, not hoarded.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I support your work on developing this alternative vision for humankind. It goes so much deeper than money/currency, as you say.
Extractive systems—that began with agriculture, right? And continued with industrialization. So perhaps the problem is surpluses and specialization? In your vision, are there still surpluses, stores of goods more than subsistence? And are their specializations? Am I wrong to think that surpluses and specializations lead to hierarchies? Are there hierarchies in your alternative vision for the future?
Don’t expect you to answer all my questions—just telling you what your ideas are sparking in me.
I think those are great questions, Houston. I definitely don't have all the answers, and I wouldn’t call this my vision so much as a collective one I'm trying to encourage all of us to articulate together. But yes, you’re right that extractive systems really began when we started storing more than we immediately needed. From the first seeds of agriculture on into the digital age there has been surpluses, ownership, specialization, and hierarchy.
I think that what changes now is that AI upends the very meaning of those terms. “Surplus” and “specialization” as we currently define them only make sense inside an extractive economy - one that depends on scarcity and separation to define value. But in a generative system, those same concepts evolve. Surplus becomes shared capability rather than hoarded excess. Specialization becomes expression - individuality freely applied, not labor divided.
I think the bigger question AI forces us to confront is how to redefine culture once generalization replaces specialization. Because that's happening. Who gets to define value when everyone can build and share in ways that no longer require gatekeepers? But we're so focused on the question of retaining an extractive system that we can't see that far ahead.