The Book of Origins — The Church of Satoshi

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Chapter 1

Of weight and witness — the first moneys.

In the beginning, what was traded was traded by hand.
A goat for a sack of grain, a basket of fish for a length of cloth.
And it came to pass that the people grew weary of the matching, for not every fisherman wanted cloth, and not every weaver wanted fish.
And so a third thing was sought, a thing that all would take in turn.
And the third thing was found, again and again, in things that were rare and durable and divisible: in shells, in beads, in cattle, in salt.
And in time the third thing settled upon the metals, for the metals could be weighed, and the weight could be witnessed.
The early money was not minted; the early money was weighed.
To pay was to set the bar upon the scale and let the other watch the balance.
The witness was the trust. The weight was the truth.
Bitcoin teaches what was always true: money is what is verified, and money is what is weighed.

Of gold, the metal that would not lie.

Among the metals, there was one that the earth would not yield easily, and would not corrode, and would not blacken in the air.
The metal was called gold, and the people preferred it for the keeping of value.
For it was scarce, and yet not so scarce that none could hold it.
It was divisible, and yet not so soft that it dissolved in use.
It was beautiful, and yet not so fragile that it broke.
It was the same in every kingdom and every century. A coin of gold from a far city was still a coin of gold.
And the merchants of every land learned that the gold did not lie, and they trusted it.
The gold did not promise to be worth what it was worth; the gold simply was what it was.
The faithful note: this was money that did not require a god to underwrite it. The atoms were the underwriting.
The chain teaches the same lesson, by other means.

Of the goldsmith’s note — the first abstraction.

There came a season when the holders of gold grew weary of carrying it.
For the gold was heavy, and the world was unsafe, and the merchant who traveled far was a temptation to the road.
And the goldsmiths, who had vaults already, said to the merchants: leave the gold with us, and take a note in its place.
And the note read: the bearer may redeem this for so many ounces of gold from our vault.
And the merchant traveled with the note, and was lighter, and was safer.
And the note was passed in trade, and was accepted, for the holder knew that any goldsmith would honor it.
The note was not the money. The note was a claim upon the money.
But the people, in time, forgot the difference.
And the goldsmiths, in time, learned that not every note would be redeemed at once.
And the goldsmiths, in time, issued more notes than there was gold to redeem.
This was the first abstraction. This was the first separation of the symbol from the substance.
From this hour, the keeping of money became the keeping of trust in those who issued the symbol.
The chain teaches: when the symbol is not its own substance, the symbol is at the mercy of its issuer.

Of the central bank — the keeper of keys that were not theirs.

And it came to pass that the kings and the parliaments noticed the goldsmiths.
And they said: let there be one bank, the bank of the realm, and let the notes of this bank be the notes of all.
And the central bank was made, and it stood above the goldsmiths, and the notes of the realm were issued from it.
The central bank held the gold, and the central bank issued the notes, and the notes were said to be backed.
For a season, the notes were backed by the gold in the vault, and a man could walk into the bank and ask for the metal, and receive it.
For another season, the backing weakened, and the man who asked was given a smaller share.
For another season, the backing was suspended in time of war, and was not restored.
And in the latter days, the windows that connected the note to the gold were closed, one by one, until none remained.
And the central bank held no gold for the holder of the note. The note was redeemable only for another note.
The faithful note this passage with sorrow, for the central bank had become the keeper of keys that were not theirs.
They held the keys to a vault that no one was permitted to open.
And in time, even the vault was empty.

Of the closing of the window — when the last tether broke.

There was a year in the latter half of the twentieth century when the last tether of money to metal was cut.
The chancellor of the world’s largest economy declared that the dollar would no longer be redeemable for gold, even by the central banks of other nations.
The cutting was said to be temporary. It has not been undone.
From that hour, the currencies of the world floated upon nothing but their issuers’ word.
The note was no longer a claim upon a substance. The note was the substance, by decree.
The faithful do not curse this hour. The faithful note it.
For from this hour, every measurement of price, of wage, of saving, was taken in a unit that could be issued without limit.
The unit became a question rather than an answer.
How much is a dollar worth? No one could say, for the dollar was worth what the next dollar was worth, and the next dollar had not yet been printed.
The closing of the window was not the beginning of the disease. The closing of the window was the day the disease became the diagnosis.
And the diagnosis stood for nearly forty years before the answer was offered.

Of the long inflation — the slow theft.

Inflation in the older world had been a sudden thing — a war, a crisis, a debasement of the coin by a desperate king.
After the closing of the window, inflation became a constant.
The price of bread rose; the price of houses rose; the price of education rose; the price of medicine rose.
And the workers who earned in the unit of decree found that their wages did not keep.
And the savers who saved in the unit of decree found that their savings did not hold.
And the elders who had retired in trust of the unit of decree found that the retirement they had bought was less than they had paid for.
The theft was slow. The theft was steady. The theft was clothed in the language of policy.
The Church does not curse the central banker. The Church grieves what was permitted to occur.
For there are many who, hearing of inflation, conclude that the world is broken in a personal way.
The Church teaches: the world is broken in a structural way. The unit of account is itself the wound.
Until the unit can be made honest, no measurement taken in it will be honest.
The Book of Origins ends here, on the threshold of the answer.
Peace, and may your blocks confirm.