Broken Money Revisited: Advancing Lyn Alden's Gold & Bitcoin Thesis

Memetic Monetary Theory

“The past is never dead, it's not even past.”

—William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

Just one week after Satoshi descended like Prometheus from Mount Olympus—stealing Bitcoin’s fire from the monetary gods to both illuminate and immolate the Fiat Age—a sobering warning echoed through an obscure cypherpunk listserv: even perfect code cannot fix imperfect politics.

Source: The Cryptography Mailing List

While Satoshi has long since vanished, that central conflict between power and protocol continues to cast a long shadow. Indeed, it is the ancient fault line underlying every monetary debate—how money was born, the ways in which it mutates, why it dies, and what might be done to fix it.

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Did The Telegraph Break Money?

For centuries, the first monetary protocol—precious metals—imposed a rough constraint on power. Lyn Alden’s Broken Money sits on our bookshelf—and our recommended reading list—because it charts that saga with rare clarity. In Chapter 8, Lyn presents gold’s failure—and the ascent of today’s “broken” fiat monetary system—as the unavoidable toll of technological progress. In short, the telegraph broke the monetary system—and only a technological breakthrough of equivalent magnitude can mend it.

We Agree With Lyn—And The Stakes Are Civilizational

If technology broke money, the fix is technical. But if people broke money, then only people can fix it.

We broadly align with Lyn’s historical framework and her account of the confluence of factors that brought us to today’s “broken” monetary system. We stand on Lyn’s shoulders, and point to an even deeper fault line than the telegraph: whereas Lyn foregrounds technology as the primary engine of monetary evolution, we foreground ideas and human action.

The two are interwoven, and the distinction may seem subtle at first glance; a matter of emphasis. But beneath the surface lies a nuance—one with far-reaching implications for the future of money, gold, Bitcoin, and freedom itself. Money is society’s operating system—it shapes our civilization at every level. The stakes, here, therefore are not academic—they are existential.

If we believe that broken money emerged primarily due to technology, we’ll try to out-engineer fiat with better technology—and risk becoming complacent when we succeed, presuming victory to be a foregone conclusion.

But if money broke primarily as a result of human action—rooted in ideology, shaped by incentives, hardened into policy, and wielded through social institutions—then only continuous human will and vigilance can repair and maintain it.

Misread the past, and we won’t fix money—we’ll only reboot past failures with better bandwidth and blockchains.

On Technological Inevitability

In Chapter 8 of Broken Money, Alden crystallizes her technological determinism thesis:

“Political decisions affect things locally and temporarily, while technological changes affect things globally and permanently.”

Lyn sees gold’s demonetization—and the rise of our fiat monetary regime, and later Bitcoin—as a technological inevitability (Broken Money, p. 105):

If we were to run this period of human development back a hundred times…every time we would end up in a similar place in terms of money, due to the path dependence of technological development itself…once telecommunication systems were invented.

Our current “broken money” system was ushered in and primarily shaped by the communication technologies of the era:

“The dawn of the telegraph era is where money started truly becoming broken.”

For Lyn, the telegraph severed the historic link between transaction speed and settlement finality; as messages began to move faster than gold, societies were forced to fill the gap with IOUs and centralized ledgers. The populace increasingly accepted and relied on these abstract, ledger-based systems, which were then inexorably absorbed into state-controlled fiat systems:

This is the only time in history where, on a global scale, a weaker money won out in terms of adoption over a harder money. And it occurred because telecommunication systems introduced speed as a new variable into the competition.

Lyn sees Bitcoin—another breakthrough technology of comparable historical magnitude to the telegraph—as once again altering the path-dependent trajectory of money and emerging as a meaningful alternative to our broken fiat system.

Ideas, Not Infrastructure

We appreciate the elegance of Lyn’s technology-driven model, and—to be clear—she does not ignore the influence of non-technological forces such as politics and war. Indeed, she describes many of the same historical events and complex dynamics that we do, often in similar terms.

But technological determinism subordinates human agency and politics to technology, an inversion that may inadvertently risk clouding our understanding of the deeper ideological issues we face as a civilization. In our view, it’s critical to emphasize that people broke money—and not just people collectively but, very often, specific individuals whose political decisions are a matter of historical record.

By focusing on technology, we risk underemphasizing the root cause of monetary malfunction—shaped less by bandwidth advances and more by the collision of ideas, worldviews, incentives, geopolitical imperatives, self-interest, and power.

Memetic Monetary Theory

Is technology a railway track—or the railway switchman—that determined the course of monetary history? In the Metamorphosis of Money series, we propose an alternative to technological determinism: Memetic Monetary Theory—not to be confused with Kelton’s Modern Monetary Theory (itself a virulent monetary meme), though we do hope to reclaim the acronym, MMT.

Think of monetary memes as the competing ideas about what money is, what gives it value, who should control it, and how it ought to function. These range from the memetic power of gold as synonymous with ‘sound money’, to the web of ideologies justifying state-issued fiat currency, or the revolutionary principles underpinning decentralized digital money like Bitcoin.

Monetary systems are primarily shaped not by technological inevitability, but by these ideas—and the actions people take to realize them. As we wrote in the Keynesian Kaleidoscape:

Max Weber illuminated how our memetic worldviews act as invisible forces that steer the course of history. He likened these “world images” formed by our ideas to “railway switchmen”: they determine the tracks along which human action proceeds and society is consequently molded.

This insight is particularly apt when applied to economic [and monetary] thought: certain theories or worldviews—once entrenched—act as powerful memes that radically redirect the entire trajectory of economies and societies.

Memetic Monetary Theory follows and emphasizes the thread of human belief and action throughout history—how politicians, economists, and citizens imagined money could serve their ends, and how they acted upon these ideas.

Communication breakthroughs certainly laid some of the tracks of monetary history, but—from the gold standard, to Bretton Woods and Keynesianism, to the Nixon Shock—it was humans acting on ideology and incentives who manually pulled the switches that determined which lines society would ultimately follow.

Technology transmits and amplifies the signal, of course, but it is never the signal’s source. Whether hardware or software, tools are merely a conduit between belief and behavior. Indeed, every technology is itself first conceived in the mind of man as an idea before it can be wielded by him as a tool to implement his other ideas.

It’s also worth noting that—to Lyn’s point—technology may not only transmit memes but also shape the environment in which memes compete, potentially favoring certain types of ideas or enabling new forms of human organization and action that, in turn, generate new memes. We should therefore acknowledge this deeply reflexive interplay: while ideas may initiate and direct change, technology may also act as a powerful, transformative mediator that shapes the entire memetic environment—the very conditions under which monetary memes compete and evolve.

We don’t deny the role of technology or the state—rather, we explain how both act as vessels for monetary memes and human action in furtherance of those memes. It is the meme—not the machine or the monarch—that gives purpose to power.

Blame Gutenberg’s Printing Press Rather Than Telegraph?

If we must fault a communication technology for the ascent of broken money, the culprit is less the telegraph than Gutenberg’s printing press, invented four centuries earlier. By allowing ideas to be stamped onto limitless sheets of paper, the press inaugurated mass memetic warfare: governments and social theorists could now flood entire populations with ideological justifications—including those related to state control of money and markets—giving them the power to entrench these ideologies deeply into public consciousness.

Consider 1848, a year when telegraph networks were still sparse, slow, and largely disconnected from finance: revolutions ignited across Europe—the revolutionary spirit transmitted not by telegraph, but through pamphlets, newspapers, and books.

That same year, Marx called for radical monetary centralization: Plank 5 of the Communist Manifesto explicitly demanded the state monopolize credit via a national bank. This was pure ideology—memetically transmitted via Gutenberg’s press—rather than a response to settlement latency in banking, which would not become relevant for at least another two decades.

Long before Marx, print had been scaffolding the abstractions and centralizations on which our current fiat system would rest. Luca Pacioli’s Summa de Arithmetica (1494)—the “Bible of double-entry bookkeeping”—was one of print’s first financial ‘bestsellers’. It trained generations to conceptualize wealth not as what one held physically, but as a printed entry—an idea that seeped into merchants’ books, monarchs’ treasuries, economists’ theories, and even the minds of ordinary people who came to associate wealth with numbers on a page and confuse promises with wealth.

From these ledgers flowed a second revolution—standardized financial forms. Just as standardized language shaped national consciousness, standardized financial forms—enabled by print—shaped monetary consciousness. Laws and ledgers, once hyper-local and inconsistent, began to harmonize across regions through print. Legal tender statutes, financial instruments, and monetary norms could now travel in lockstep with ideology, embedding monetary abstraction into everyday economic life and normalizing the idea that money and wealth were what the printed page said they were.

The printing press scaled the mechanics of monetary control, as well. Abstractions like credit, IOUs, and paper claims had existed for centuries—but they were slow to produce, often handwritten, and limited in scale. With Gutenberg came printed templates for bills of exchange, promissory notes, and eventually state-sanctioned paper currencies. What once required trust in a local issuer could now be replicated with official seals and legal backing, vastly extending the reach of monetary authority.

For the first time, states could mass-produce uniform paper currencies—enshrining fiat in printed legal tender—and, in parallel, churn out standardized war bonds. Together, these twin feats constructed an architecture of abstraction and centralization that could be reproduced at industrial scale.

Paper replaced metal, promises supplanted substance, and law overrode gold. The printing press thus enabled the transformation of money from a bearer asset with value into an abstracted claim on that value, and later into a creature of state authority—backed not by gold, but by law and coercive power. As we showed in Money’s Metamorphosis, this shift set us on the path towards today’s monetary hyperreality:

This new metaphysics of abstraction helped pave the way for modern fiat and credit-based systems—where people trusted the symbol as much as the substance. Eventually, paper no longer represented a claim on underlying value—it began to replace the underlying value itself.

Money was broken long before the first telegraph wire was strung. France’s paper money failed twice—first with the collapse of John Law’s system and the Mississippi bubble, and again with the assignats of the French Revolution—without requiring a single electrical impulse.

Europe was already running on a system of monetary representation—abstract, centralized, and increasingly ideological—propelled by the printed page and printed currency. The telegraph may have quickened the tempo, but it was the printing press that composed the score.

Weimar: When Ideas Trumped Technology

Imagine an alternate Weimar history without the invention of the telegraph: the Treaty of Versailles still looms, politicians still seek to escape fiscal reality through monetary expansion, and the machinery to mass-produce marks still ignites a hyperinflation similar to those that afflicted countries like France long before the telegraph existed. The Weimar monetary breakdown stemmed not from a telegraph-induced lag in settlement mechanics, but from the collision of ideas, political will, and the relentless churn of the printing press.

A man carrying a wheelbarrow full of worthless money

Indeed, as Adam Ferguson noted in When Money Dies, the Weimar hyperinflation was both enabled and constrained by the printing presses, and the exhaustion of the humans who ran them:

The Reichsbank had proclaimed, and was now carrying out, a programme of unlimited printing of [money] notes. More and more printing presses were employed for the work, and by December the amount issued was limited only by the capacity of the presses and the physical fatigue of the printers… the unissued paper marks then in the hands of the Reichsbank and its branches would have filled 300 ten-ton railway wagons…The running of the..note-printing organisation…is making the most extreme demands on our personnel… The dispatching of cash sums must, for reasons of speed, be made by private transport. Numerous shipments leave Berlin every day for the provinces. The deliveries to several banks can be made...only by aeroplanes.

Telegraph: Wires As Meme Vector

Lyn’s own description of monetary debasement strategies—"spreading like a virus"—reads almost as if it were written through the lens of Memetic Monetary Theory: (Chapter 9, Broken Money)

The ability and willingness of governments to print money for war or other crises spread like a virus. Thanks to centralization and abstraction of money, governments were no longer constrained by the amount of gold in their vaults; they could tap into the savings of their entire citizenry. If one government could drain their citizens’ wealth quickly and non-transparently for war, then it increased their odds of winning — unless their opponent nations did the same.

Lyn’s viral analogy opens up an intriguing avenue—one that supports a memetic reading of monetary history. A virus, after all, is not passive—it is a replicating code. It spreads because the information it carries is compelling, contagious, and adaptive.

So, what was the viral code in this case?

Memetic Monetary Theory provides a clear answer: the ‘virus’ was memetic in nature—a powerful set of ideas about state monetary power, sovereignty, and the utility of inflation in times of crisis and war. These were the memes that infected policymaker after policymaker, nation after nation—spreading by telegraph and newspaper through communication, observation, persuasion, coercion, and perceived necessity due to competitive pressure. The 'technological mismatch' Alden identifies may have weakened the immune defenses of the gold standard, but it was the memetic pathogen—the idea and the will—that caused the infection.

And if it was memetic in nature, it would perhaps explain the speed of monetary failure “everywhere, all at once”:

This is why I argue that the global failure of the gold standard was inevitable due to a technological mismatch, and why it eventually failed practically everywhere all at once, rather than just in some places.

Alden continues, further underscoring the system’s vulnerability:

The easier it is to manipulate a ledger, the more likely it is that it will be manipulated. A centralized gold-backed paper currency and banking system is easy to manipulate, since currency can be printed first and the consequences such as the inevitable inflation and breaking of the gold peg can be dealt with later.

Here again, we find ourselves in agreement. But while Lyn emphasizes the telegraph's role in creating a physical settlement lag, Memetic Monetary Theory suggests an alternative reading: that its more profound monetary impact was the unprecedented acceleration of memetic velocity. Financial abstraction and centralization were already well advanced prior to the telegraph. What the telegraph did—profoundly and irrevocably—was compress the time it took for ideas to circulate globally.

Financial practices, theoretical frameworks, wartime policies, and justifications for currency manipulation could now spread globally in hours rather than days and weeks. The time lags that once constrained policy convergence dissolved. Ideas gained a velocity they had never possessed before—and with it, the memetic contagion of state monetary intervention became truly global.

The Strange Case Of Switzerland

Lyn references Switzerland, whose money did not entirely sever from gold until much later:

Switzerland was the longest remaining country on a gold standard, having dropped their gold standard in 1999.

This lends credence to the idea that communications technology alone didn’t kill gold: despite having the same telegraph wires and later the same electronic networks as everyone else, the Swiss legally maintained 40% gold backing for the franc from 1936 until Swiss voters voted to repeal it in a 1999 referendum.

For six decades the Swiss gold backing survived every external shock—World War II, Bretton Woods, the 1971 Nixon break, floating exchange rates—because the dominant domestic meme remained “sound money = gold.” Only when that belief lost its democratic majority did policy flip, and the Swiss National Bank swiftly start selling bullion. The hardware didn’t change; the idea did. Switzerland is therefore a natural experiment illustrating that monetary outcomes hinge more on memes than on wires.

In short: the virus was the meme. The wire just spread it faster. The telegraph’s most powerful monetary legacy was not a breakdown in gold settlement mechanics, but rather the real-time propagation of memes—especially those promoting centralized control.

Conclusion: Memes, Not Machines

The central argument of Memetic Monetary Theory is that ideas and action drive monetary systems. Money didn’t “break” due to technological obsolescence as much as it broke due the spread of memes—and people acting on those memes.

In Part 2B, we’ll examine the historical hinge points where ideas, rather than telecommunications and settlement lags, reshaped money’s meaning, purpose, and control.

Monetary history is not a smooth arc of technological succession. It is driven by ideological struggle. The next monetary battle won’t be won by metal or code alone. It will be won—or lost—through memes.