Nick Szabo  🔑

The exploration explosion took European navigation from the stay-on-known-routes affair common since ancient times to discovering new routes across the world's oceans & recording them for posterity. https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2012/10/dead-reckoning-and-exploration-explosion.html … It gave them access to almost every culture on earth.

Europe's advanced metallurgy, glass-making, and precision techniques allowed them to mass produce things that in most other cultures were far more scarce. Their tools and techniques would become even more advanced during the subsequent centuries of the industrial revolutions.

Traditional money & collectibles were valued for a supply curve secured by a costliness that was effectively unforgeable under traditional conditions. This allowed them to be used as stores & displays of wealth & media of wealth transfer. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/ 

https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/1159909123128877056 …

Money and collectibles, and Veblen goods generally, are a perpetual contest between people trying to make unforgeably scarce goods and people trying to knock them off. When costliness becomes forgeable, collectibles become inflated and degraded.

Technology can cheapen a form of collectible or money by spoofing indicia of scarcity, the sensory and cognitive means by which members of a culture judge the scarcity of their collectibles, or simple via increasing the production of otherwise genuine articles, causing inflation.

Shininess (which occurs for example from the wear of long-worn shell beads) and other visual or tactile indicia were often, in pre-Columbian indigenous environments, secure and reliable indicators of the costly history of an object, and thus its constrained supply.