A summary of the promise theory analysis of money as a network technology.
Earlier this year, I wrote a set of notes (something like a paper) on money as a technology, using the language of promise theory. As is often the case when you pull on a thread many details began to unravel, leading to a rather longer exposition than was intended. Even after more than a hundred pages of simple matters, the notes only scratched the surface of money and its basic functions. For some, this is no doubt too much to swallow. After all, how hard could it be? The answer is that money is not all that hard, but that people have made it harder than it needs to be, and therefore it is worth writing down the basic insights in a formal way. Economists are just terrible at doing that, often grandstandong without ever even defining their assumptions.
