For most of human history, money & currency were transacted through memory. Long before coins, before kings, before banks, people kept track of who owed what to whom, in their heads, and in their relationships (in the form of favours, not coins). Can you imagine a society who is constantly helping each other, because helping and giving favours is the exact form of currency that people transact with? Sounds perfect, and anthropologists who study the earliest economies have fou

Somewhere in 13th century Bohemia, a single monk sat down and began writing the largest book the medieval world would ever produce. Three feet tall. Two feet wide. 165 pounds. You need two people to lift it. The pages are made from the skins of 160 donkeys. Originally 320 pages. Ten are now missing. Nobody knows what was on them. It would take one person working continuously, day and night, five years just to recreate the text by hand, excluding illustrations. Realistically,