The Original Protocols of Money
The Money Stack — Episode 1 of 10
In October 1834, the British Parliament burned down.
The fire started in the basement of the House of Lords, where two workmen had been ordered to dispose of several cartloads of old wooden sticks. They stuffed them into the furnaces, closed the doors, and went for a drink. By morning, the medieval Palace of Westminster was gone.
The sticks were tally sticks: the accounting system of the English Crown for seven hundred years.
Here is how they worked. A debt is recorded by cutting notches into a length of hazel wood. The stick is split lengthways into two pieces. The creditor keeps the longer half; the debtor keeps the shorter. The grain of the wood is unique. Two halves match each other and nothing else in the world. You cannot forge one. You cannot alter your half without the mismatch showing the moment both pieces are brought together.
A tamper-evident, unique, distributed record of obligation. Carved into a stick. In 1150.
We did not invent financial technology. We inherited it.
The Real Problem Money Solves
Most textbooks say money solved the inconvenience of barter. That is too small an answer.
The real problem is this: how do you record who owes what, at scale, between strangers?
In a village, everyone knows. Memory and reputation do the work. Scale that up to a city, a trading route, an empire, and human memory breaks down entirely. You need a system. You need a record that strangers will trust without having to verify everything from scratch.
Money, in every form it has ever taken, is a technology for storing and transmitting that record. A cowrie shell, a gold coin, an entry in a database: all the same thing, at different levels of the stack.
Every financial system ever built is an attempt to solve that problem more efficiently.
The Cowrie: Fixed Supply, Broken by a Supply-Side Attack
For centuries across West Africa, in Nigeria, Ghana, Benin and beyond, the cowrie shell was money. Not metaphorically. Legally, commercially, officially. The shells came from the Maldives, thousands of kilometres away, and that distance was precisely the point. Supply was constrained by geography. You cannot flood a market with shells when the shells live on the other side of the Indian Ocean.
Then the nineteenth century arrived with European trading ships. They sourced a cheaper, more abundant species from the East African coast and flooded West African markets. Within decades, currencies that had been stable for generations collapsed into worthlessness.
A fixed-supply token, whose scarcity was enforced by geography, was broken by a hostile actor with a better supply chain.
If you are familiar with token economics, you will recognise this failure immediately. The attack did not break the protocol. It broke the assumption underneath it. That distinction will matter again in Episode 7, when we get to Bitcoin.
Coins: The First Trusted Issuer, and the First Exploit
Coinage appears around 600 BCE and solves a genuine problem: you cannot easily verify the purity of raw metal on the spot.
The solution is elegant. Stamp the metal with a face. The stamp says: this has been weighed and verified by an authority you already trust; you need not check it yourself. The coin is metal plus a promise, and the issuer's reputation is the security layer.
The exploit arrives almost immediately. If you control the mint, you control the composition of the coin. Reduce the silver content, recall the old coins, issue new ones at face value. You have created money out of thin air, invisibly, before the phrase "printing money" existed. Debasement is the first monetary exploit. Every Roman emperor who needed to fund a war and could not raise taxes understood it perfectly well.
The pattern this establishes will repeat in every episode that follows: a protocol solves a trust problem, creates a new attack surface, gets patched, and the patch introduces the next problem.
Hawala: A Distributed Ledger Running Since the Eighth Century
Here is a system that deserves to be more famous than it is.
A merchant in Baghdad needs to send money to a partner in Basra. Crossing the desert with gold is slow and dangerous. Instead, he visits a local broker, a hawaladar, hands over the gold, and receives a note. He takes the note to Basra, presents it to the corresponding broker there, and collects the equivalent sum in local currency.
No gold crossed the desert. Two ledgers were updated. Periodically, the brokers settle their accounts with each other, netting the flows in both directions and physically moving only the remaining balance.
No bank. No central authority. No state guarantee. Only reputation, trust, and the certainty that defaulting means you are finished in the network entirely. That consequence is so severe and so certain that it functions as a better enforcement mechanism than most legal contracts.
Name the data structure: a distributed ledger, trust-based consensus, deferred net settlement. Running since the eighth century. Still moving billions of dollars annually, because it remains faster and cheaper than formal banking in the corridors it serves.
Every fintech company claiming to disrupt cross-border payments is competing with a thousand-year-old system that has never had a major incident.
Double-Entry: The Invariant That Still Runs Everything
In 1494, a Franciscan friar named Luca Pacioli published a mathematics textbook in Venice. Most of it is forgotten. One section is not.
He documented double-entry bookkeeping: every transaction recorded twice, once as a debit and once as a credit. The two entries must always balance. If they do not, something has gone wrong.
In engineering terms, that is an invariant: a condition that must always hold, and whose violation signals a fault in the system. Every reconciliation job, every balance assertion, every database migration you have ever written for a financial system descends directly from Pacioli's Venice.
The ledger is not merely a record of what happened. It is a proof that the system is consistent. That distinction matters, and we shall return to it in Episode 6, when we examine what it actually takes to make payments reliable at scale.
What None of This Could Do
By 1500, civilisation had assembled a serious financial stack. Tamper-evident records, portable trusted-issuer tokens, distributed settlement networks, transferable obligations, a self-checking ledger. These were not primitive arrangements. They were engineering solutions tested over centuries of genuine failure.
But every single one of them shared the same hard constraint: value could only travel as fast as a human being could carry it. A payment from Lagos to London in 1600 took months. The ledger was everywhere. The settlement was local.
The thing that would break that constraint was already sitting in laboratories by the time Parliament burned. It had been demonstrated across short distances to increasingly astonished observers.
It had simply not been pointed at money yet.
In 1871, that changed.
Episode 2: The Wire — how money learned to travel at the speed of light. Coming 26th August, 2026.
The Money Stack is a ten-part series on the history and technology of how money moves.
