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Collecting metal: the inner and outer worlds of jewelry, coins, bullion bits, and odd shiny things

Millions of millennia ago, in our own Milky Way galaxy, but far upstream of where we are today, two neutron stars spiraled around each other, each embodying the mass of a sun but smaller and faster than a speeding planet. Each of these tiny gigaworlds, millions of times denser than our sun, had been produced, not by a mere exploding star, but by a far more powerful supernova. Each supernova, burning a nuclear fire with a far greater power density than a normal star such as our sun, had besides a neutron star also produced a cavalcade of new elements. For elements lighter than iron, this nuclear fusion releases energy; but for elements heavier than iron, including copper, silver, and gold, nuclear fusion requires a net energy input as well as astronomical power densities. Our supernovae were powerful enough to create many metals, including copper and silver, from the fusion of lighter elements. But they were not powerful enough to create gold. Gold awaited the current, far more powerful and rarer event.

Our two stars, fortuitously set into collision course by two separate supernovae, approached each other and then, captured by each others’ gravity, entered a death spiral. They collided in an unimaginable explosion, unleashing a power density far greater than that of a mere supernova and trillions of times greater than if a mere mountain-sized asteroid had hit the earth. The collision was so intense that it created a black hole and a burst of extremely high energy light called gamma rays. Escaping the black hole along with the gamma rays was a spray of new, heavier metals, including gold. This gold-rich cloud in part expanded and in part coalesced, participating in the subsequent formation of new solar systems, including our own. Due to this collision of rare intensity, our unusual solar system was seeded with astronomically rare heavy metals such as gold along with the more common supernova products such as copper and silver. [Source]

Copper (Cu), Silver (Ag), and Gold (Au) sit on top of each other on the periodic table, sharing many electrical, chemical, and material properties that enhance their durability and divisibility. Gold, the heaviest, required the most extreme conditions and energy to form, as all elements were generated, from lighter elements. Copper required easier conditions to form and is thus much more common, with silver in between.

Billions of years later, naked apes evolved with hypertrophied brains and clever hands, living on a planet in this gold-dusted solar system. They dug out the gold and silver they could find and separated it from the more common earth. Other more common metals were more useful for concretely usable tools; instead they fashioned the precious metals into what looks to our eyes like jewelry. They formed these precious metals into shapes both repetitive and unique, bragged about them, displayed them, stored them as “treasure”, “wealth”, and “money”. They fashioned gold and silver into wearable objects, transferred them to each other or stole them, even injuring or killing each other in pursuit of them. They used the gold and silver to pay each other compensation for those and many other injuries. People transferred gold and silver to each other in order to satisfy important obligations as well as to obtain items of more direct and obvious use. Since the most important such obligations happened at many of the most fitness-critical junctures of life – marriage, death, injury, war – gold and silver, as treasure and as money, came to be greatly desired.

Some metal collectibles came in a wide variety of artistically skilled forms. Others came in the form of coins: labeled, mass-produced pieces of metal stamped by the blow of a hammer or cast in molds, whereby a mostly-trusted brand named their alleged value. Still others came in forms that look odd to us, resembling neither coins nor fancy jewelry, but rather utilitarian-looking pieces that manage to make precious metals ugly, and that might have been worn but that look, long before the era of factories, like they were mass produced. . People around the world wore gold jewelry proudly, and globe-straddling monetary systems, on which economies were said to be based, were defined around gold and silver objects and debts denominated in weights of those metals.

We can think of collectibles as coming at us at two levels, like railroads and trains, or like pipelines and the oil they carry. At the most basic or “inner layer” is the metal itself that constitutes the substance of the collectible: occasionally iron, more typically copper or bronze for the less valuable collectibles, and the precious metals, especially gold and silver, for the more valuable money and treasure.

The “protocol stack”, or distinct layers of cultural understanding, for objects made out of precious metals: the natural, rare, and durable substance itself, versus the particular forms given to it as artwork, jewelry, coins, etc.

So important is the “lower layer” of the traditional cultural understanding of gold and silver, the natural substance itself, evaluated by its weight rather than by any value added via the craftsmanship or its form, that Europeans of earlier generations evolved a word for it: bullion. Bullion is the metal itself, considered and valued only for its substance. Jewelry, coins, and other ways of shaping precious metals are just various forms of the underlying bullion.

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The famous gold/silver ratio (exchange rate) operates at this basic level. The cost and supply of precious metals, given the technological similarity of the means for mining and processing each, are dominated by their natural origins in the stars above and the geology below.

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Viking hoard unearted in Watlington, Scotland: silver coins, small ingots, and jewelry. Why were were coins (“money”) so often stashed with jewelry (“ornament”)? And what is up with those lumps? [Source]

Besides their different origins in neutron star collisions and supernovae respectively, once our solar system had formed, the way our earth and its moon were formed may have also been important: when another planet collided with an earlier form of the earth, and the resulting debris clouds reformed into the earth and moon as we know it, heavier metals tended to stick with the heavier body while the lighter ones (which don’t include precious metals) tended to stick with the moon. Another theory holds that this collision did not matter: practically all the mineable concentrations of gold sunk to the center anyway; the gold we mine today came from a spate of later asteroid bombardment, said asteroids also being formed in the gold-rich dust of our early solar system.

More local geology also played a role in where we have found gold and silver: equatorial Africa was formed with more gold than Europe, and Europe and Bolivia with more silver than China. As a result, the value (in terms of other kinds of goods) of gold and silver could vary significantly across the planet, as well as the exchange rate between the two precious metals. Only with modern transportation and ubiquitous markets has the gold:silver price ratio, as well as the exchange rates between precious metals and other goods, converged on ratios that hold the world over.

Spheres of transfer and local distinctions

In 1959 Paul Bohannan [1] coined the phrase “spheres of exchange” to refer to moral or legal distinctions made between different types of exchange. Often one set of collectibles was expected to be used in one kind of exchange, and another distinct set in another. Since there are several important kinds of wealth transfer besides exchange, we can generalize Bohannan’s idea to the concept of spheres of transfer. In Western cultures (and many other modern cultures under their influence), for example, we make a strong distinction between money, meant for the rapid turnover of earning and spending, and heirlooms that are expected to stay in the family for generations, with feelings of guilt or shame occurring if we have to sell a family heirloom. But it’s fine to use an heirloom ring for a marriage. Similarly, we make a strong distinction between stocks and bonds on the one hand and decorative wealth objects such as jewelry and artwork on the other. So strong is our taboo that if a Western archaeologist finds a wearable (as in forager days they mostly were) collectible, it is automatically and dogmatically labeled “ornamental” or “symbolic”, with wealth-related uses seldom considered. (It also doesn’t help that shells, often scarce and precious treasures in indigenous environments, look like cheap tourist knick-knacks to modern eyes).

The transition from shell to metal: beads fashioned from copper (dark) and from Spondylus (spiny oyster) shells (light). The shells, transported by foot (probably by many feet and many hands) hundreds of miles from the Aegean Sea, had for thousands of years been popular in the Danube river basin when the world’s earliest metal artifacts were invented there. The first copper and gold artifacts were beads fashioned to substitute for the Spondylus beads in Danubian jewelry. [Source]

Legal or moral sanctions discourage transfer of objects from one sphere to another. In feudal European societies it was shameful and often even illegal to sell or mortgage land: a lord’s duty was to preserve his land and devise it intact to his eldest son. In modern Western society, weddings are one sphere of transfer (where a gift of a finger-ring is expected, as well as some household items from the guests and a feast or party thrown by the parents), whereas commerce and legal remedy in civil law is another (where payment of money is expected). Some aspects of our bodies (such as ownership of humans or payment for sex or body organs) are off limits to monetary compensation – one is expected to donate an organ, not to sell it – while many others are not (most health care, for example). All of these spheres can involve transfers of objects of substantial value, but it is disgraceful and/or illegal if they are the too obviously the wrong ones for the given sphere.

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The world’s oldest gold artifact – a small bead from the lower Danube river basin (4,600-4,500 BC). [Source]

In the modern West, we consider the realm of jewelry and the realm of money to be very separate spheres of transfer. It is considered either a shameful betrayal or a grim necessity if the winner of an Olympic or Nobel Prize medal or a Super Bowl ring sells it to raise money. The finger-ring is a central feature of modern weddings, but few things would offend a typical modern bride more than being paid a bride price, she or her kin being indemnified by money as if she, as we would see it, were a prostitute on long-term contract. Meanwhile, our economists obsess over money while touching on the subject of jewelry hardly at all, and certainly not as any sort of form or variant of money. We moderns can hardly imagine confusing such seemingly very different things, and indeed the very idea offends our sensibilities. But in many non-Western and earlier Western cultures this was far from the case. For them the fundamental protocol layer, the substance itself, is cherished for its own sake, and forms the great majority of the value of the item, while its protocol layer two, the “outer layer”, the particular form it has been fashioned into, while often of considerable interest, is usually quite secondary in determining its value for purposes of the display and transfer of wealth.

Recycling of gold jewelry in the United States: usually to be recast as bullion bars for central bank and gold exchange-traded-fund (ETF) reserves, or for export to Asia for making jewelry for which the gold content is far more important than in the West. Occasionally cast into gold coins for “gold bugs” and collectors.

This modern Western restriction involves the more culturally local aspect of gold and silver, namely the particular form it takes (jewelry vs. coin), even though these objects are made out of the same underlying substance, and traditionally were mainly prized for the content by weight of that substance. Even in our own culture we have businesses that serve to transfer gold and silver from one sphere to another. Nevertheless, economists and other academicians often act as if money and jewelry are scientifically and objectively very distinct objects, when in fact this is a cultural convention that is largely confined to the modern West.

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Globe-trotting gold dealer Roy Sebag has [described] the differences between Asian and Western views of jewelry. As he describes it, over $2 trillion worth of jewelry is owned by about 2 billion people in India and China alone, constituting a much larger fraction of their wealth on average than in the West. The metal content of the gold jewelry constitutes the vast majority of its sales price and its assessed value as collateral, as it also does in Brazil, Russia, and most other countries outside of Western Europe, the British Commonwealth, and the United States. In the latter countries, precious metal content constitutes only a small fraction of the sales price or pawning value of jewelry. “Jewelry is money” is how Sebag summarizes his observations of the modern Asian jewelry market.

In cultures without a strong distinction between decorative jewelry and money, they often didn’t even bother melting it down to switch from coins to lower velocity but more displayable forms of wealth. Roman gold coin minted c. 400 AD, converted in the 7th century into an Anglo- Saxon pendant: [Source] [See also]

While the “lower” or “inner” layer of the metal collectible “protocol stack” is its natural substance, its “upper” or “outer” layer is the particular form it takes. Sometimes it is mass produced (as in coins and common bead shapes) and sometimes it is a unique work of exquisite and rare craftsmanship. Form and style is the “protocol layer” of gold artifact most highly valued and distinguished in modern Western jewelry; but it is far less valued, compared to the natural substance itself, in the vast majority of Asian and pre-modern Western jewelry. As with [pre-metal forms of collectibles], the form of metal collectibles can be sub-divided, in a way generalizable across nearly all known cultures, into treasure (typically of high value and not as an object fungible or divisible, unless melted down destroying the particular object) and money (objects such as coins that are meant to be efficiently transferred and combined with other such objects to create the particular amount of value needed).

Metal or metaled treasure has taken the form of gilded objects, sculptures, various utilitarian objects enhanced artistically and made out of the scarcer metals, as well as jewelry. Treasure was, and sometimes still is, typically used for heirlooms, displays of wealth, as collateral for loans of money, and for large wealth transfers. In traditional societies these wealth transfers usually accompanied fitness-critical events. They often occurred at marriages, deaths, to satisfy obligations entered into to end wars, and as compensation for major injuries, as well as in helping to facilitate trade.

The Stollhoff hoard – copper spirals and axe blades as well as gold discs from the upper Danube river watershed (modern Austria), c. 4000 BC. Spiral armbands were among the earliest large items worked from native copper, in the middle Danubian basin (modern Hungary) c. 5000-4500 BC.

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Money as this work defines it, on the other hand, can be distinguished from treasure by its fungibility and divisibility. In our Western tradition metal money and coins are practically synonymous, but with cross-cultural observations, as for example in [2] and [3], and even in modern Asia as Sebag has observed, the distinction between money and jewelry is far less clear-cut – with the proviso that in his mind, as well as in the minds of the jewelry customers and suppliers he observed, it is the divisibility and fungibility of the substance itself, not its form, that is paramount. Nevertheless, a significant fraction of the forms jewelry comes in, such as beads and constant-width wires, could be treated by their users if they so desired as fungible and divisible without destruction of even the form of the object. Indeed, such forms in jewelry, especially in the archaeological record, are more common than would seem likely if solely artistic and never monetary considerations had been involved in their original design. As a result of bringing their cultural assumptions to bear, endless energy has been wasted by Western observers trying to distinguish non-Western “money” or “primitive money” from non-Western “jewelry”.

Boringly standard, divisible, and fungible, in its particular form as well as in the underlying metal, but boasting neither the kings and dates on coins desired by historians nor the fine craftsmanship of unique work beloved of museums, and categorizable by the dominant academic ideologies as neither money nor art nor ornament, so it sits packed in boxes in the cellar of the Danish National Museum, like many other such mundane but important artifacts underneath museums around the world. About 2,000 small gold spirals were buried in a fur-lined wooden box in Denmark between 900-700 B.C. [Source]

Law and “money”

Western (roughly speaking, European-derived) law, which now dominates the world, can be very flexible when it comes to applying itself to money. When supporting money with legal institutions, it tends to take a definition far more narrow the “medium of exchange and store of value” definition beloved of economists. When discouraging undesired forms, amounts, or velocities of money, on the other hand, law sometimes takes in a far broader scope of objects than Western economists think of as money.

One of the more common modern legal definitions of “money”, used for laws that facilitate and support financial interchange (such as contracts for goods, checks, collateral for loans, etc.), is that money can only be an official government currency (see for example). By definition, no substance or form of matter or pattern of information of any kind, regardless of how it functions or how it is used, can be money, if has not been authorized or adopted by a government. You cannot write a legal check in any of the United States for ounces of gold or bitcoin, because gold and bitcoin are not, per the Uniform Commercial Code, “money”.

Such definitions, while quite necessary to understand if you hope to deal with money in the majority of modern countries with such laws, are hopelessly specific to a certain kind of culture and politics, as well as being scientifically unsound as a basis for reasoning about even just the role of money in exchange even in cultures living under such laws, much less its actual much wider role in wealth transfers and in other cultures without such laws. Thus outside of this section we will neglect such official definitions of money in this work. Instead we use the objective definition presented here. This is certainly not the only possible definition of “money”; many far wider, far narrower, and very conflicting definitions of this word have been used in the ethnographic, anthropologic, archaeological, and economic literatures, usually implicitly rather than consciously, thereby causing the reader to join the author in being hopelessly confused about the subject.

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Thus when enforcing rules for modern financial institutions, modern law uses a very narrow definition of money; the many other ways of storing and transferring wealth are not allowed to benefit from these advanced institutions. But when cracking down on alleged abuses of money, law often restricts a far wider array of objects used to store and transfer wealth. A great illustration of the monetary nature of jewelry is given by the current (as of this writing) Indian demonetization law. The crackdown includes gold and focuses on its natural substance, not its mere form as coin (“money” to modern Western eyes) as opposed to jewelry (supposedly “ornament” not “money”). Under Indian law it is all subject to stringent controls alongside the notes and coins:

…the rules governing when tax officials could seize gold: Nothing would happen “if the holding is limited to 500 grams per married woman, 250 grams per unmarried woman and 100 grams per male.” It also said that there would be no limits on jewelry “provided it is acquired… from inheritance.” [Source]

When Mongol conqueror Kublai Khan issued paper currency in late medieval China, to make this poorly trusted scheme work his government confiscated gold and silver, jewelry and coin alike, gems and pearls as well as gold and silver, in a forced exchange for the paper notes. [7]

Bullion bits and odd shiny things

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Divisible and fungible metal forms such as coins, small thin ingots (hack-silver), arm-rings and wire, and beads have to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the culture, been used for small or frequent payments made to people who commonly need to make small acquisitions (such as the wages of soldiers and laborers), as well as to round out a value of a large wealth transfer to a specific desired value, that otherwise mostly constitutes treasure, indivisible and of a unique value somewhat different than the value desired, via custom, law, or negotiations, for the wealth transfer.

W.B. Dickinson observed the ubiquity, both as archaeological artifacts in many far-flung parts of Eurasia and in widespread use in East Asia and Indian Ocean regions, of precious metals (bullion) in wire, coil, and arm-ring, in bullion forms that looked more utilitarian than decorative, and noted the wear on such artifacts indicating that at least some had probably passed from hand to hand with a velocity more coin-like than treasure-like. He observed that their existence extended

throughout countries extending from Syria, Arabia, Egypt, Socotra, the Persian Gulf to Ceylon, China, Japan, Siam, and the whole East, to the south-west coast of Africa, to the north of Europe, to England and to Ireland. That the people of so many places, and in so various ages, should have formed their bullion and other metals into this particular form solely for the purpose of barter, without attaching to it any monetary character, seems a conclusion very difficult to arrive at…these forms were to all intents and purposes the money of the respective lands.[4]

Larger ingots, and modern central bank gold bars, and ingots of intermediate value, such as the medieval Chinese silver sycee, also called 元寶: “primary treasure”. Originally “sycee” was Cantonese for “fine silk”, when that costly cloth was a main form of treasure; later it was superseded as treasure by the boat-shaped silver ingots, which inherited the word “sycee”, since it by then had become the generic term in Cantonese for “treasure”.

Even though large ingots come in a standard form, divisible and fungible at large granularities of value, they can by our organizational scheme more properly be categorized as treasure than as money, since they were typically used like treasure in larger wealth transfers and as collateral for loans or (during the recent historical gold standard era) issues of debt-money.

Silver stamped sycee ingot. [Source]

Our distinction between treasure and money, it should be apparent, is not clear-cut and is not of crucial economic or political importance. More important and much more scientifically observable is the distinction between collectibles like coins, beads, and works of laborious or uncommon craftsmanship on the one hand, and non-collectibles of concrete utility or trivial decoration on the other. I have described this distinction with many examples and much explanation in Artifacts of Wealth and Shelling Out: The Origins of Money.

The collectible continuum – more like money as we go towards the top left, more like treasure as we go towards the bottom right.

The main differences between ingots and traditional treasure were that the latter were also used as displays of wealth, whence their highly varied forms, which served to show off often high levels of craftsmanship as well as the precious metal itself. A great variety of very subtle and clever techniques were developed for maximizing the surface area covered by a given weight of gold or silver, more bling for the buck, since the metal was the main feature of the show.

A great many cultures were observed to use non-coinage metal objects as money (by our definition), or treasure, or both, and a great many more probable such cases are implicit in the archaeological record. We can only mention a fraction of these as examples in this work.

In Viking Iceland, silver rings (by weight) were used along with cloth and cattle to pay wergeld (compensation for injuries) and bridewealth, as well as a standard of value for exchange:

Frithof breaks his ring in pieces and distributes it to his followers, so that they shall not be impecunious in the underworld. Rings were used in marriage payments and wergeld, the latter being estimated by haugatal or ring tale. A silver ring weighing 12 ounces was the compensation for the loss of a thrall, 100 rings or 100 head of cattle for a freeman. ([2] p284)

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Ring-money and hack-silver were also made and used in the rest of the pagan European north, including Scandinavia and early Anglo-Saxon England. In Celtic Ireland, “rings” in the form of divisible coils of gold or bronze were used along with cattle and slaves in injury compensation and bridewealth. ([4], [2] p287, [3] p238).

In Homeric Greece, injury compensation, slave sales, and bridewealth often included gold by weight. ([5] p27, [11], [3] p91). In Rome before the introduction of coinage, bronze or copper ingots were used, per the Twelve Tables, to pay compensation for injuries.

Non-coinage silver was also common until recent times in the vast Indian Ocean trade region as well as a number of inland cultures of south Asia. In Burma silver by weight was used for exchange and bridewealth:

anybody wanting to transact business on the market must be provided with a lump of silver, a hammer, a chisel, weighing scales and weights.. he then quotes a price in weight. Thereupon they proceed to cut off from the lump of silver a corresponding piece which is then weighed. Often the operation has to be repeated several times until the correct weight is achieved. ([3] p95)

In Siam, gold and silver “flowers” and “leaves” were used for bridewealth and tribute. ([2] p215, 219); various weights of silver “lumps” (small ingots) were also in widespread use ([3] p93).

In the Hormuz and Lars in the Persian Gulf, and in some other parts around the Indian Ocean, were made the “fish-hook money” or silver larins used widely in the far-flung Indian Ocean trade. Such silver wires were accepted by weight across a dizzying variety of cultures. [2] p192-196

Larins, or silver wires bent double, and often stamped by maker; current in the very extensive Indian Ocean trade before and during the Age of Exploration. “If any suspect the goodness of the Plate it is the Custom to burn the Money in a fire red hot, and so put it in water; and if it be not then purely white it is not Currant Money.” ([2] p196) Such a technique would have worked for assaying a wide variety of wire-, coil-, or ring-like silver objects.

Bronze bells manufactured in China were used to make high-value payments in several parts of the Chinese trading periphery, such as the Philippines. ([3] p84). In the Philippine lowlands, metal luxury goods (kettles, gongs, and jars) as well as gold beads were used for a variety of wealth display and transfer purposes ([2] p265). In China bells were the first objects that were uniquely metallic; other early metal objects such as knives, beads, etc. had been made out of other materials much earlier. Thus the Chinese adopted the word and pictograph of a bell 金 for metal (and even for gold in particular). Metal spades were styled 錢, which, via the spades that became stylized and stamped to invent early coins, became the Chinese term for “money”. [Source]

Among the early coins – defined as standardized metal objects stamped with a standard value — were the Chinese bronze spade money, c. 475-221 BC [Source]

Copper crosses, rods, and similar shapes were popular forms of bridewealth and payment for exchange in the many cultures of the Congo ([2] p78-80). The Thonga, in what was then Portuguese East Africa, used brass rings along with mats, baskets, cattle, and beads for bridewealth, injury compensation, and fines. ([2] p104-5). The Ndebele and Nguni of Zimbabwe used brass rings and cattle for bridewealth and exchange. ([Source1], [Source2], and [2] p105)

The people of Alor, a small island north of Timor in Indonesia, used brass gongs, pigs, and (for small change / rounding out of a specific value) arrows for exchange, bridewealth, burial feasts, and “complicated financial transactions” to build large clan houses. ([3] p84-6). Brass gongs and beads were also used for bridewealth by some cultures in nearby Borneo ([8] p10). Such gongs were used for injury compensation, bridewealth, large exchanges (memorialized in ceremony), and in peace-making payments also among the hill tribes of Siam, Burma and India ([2] p204-6, ) Brass pots and metal knives, axes, and hoes formed the largest part of the bridewealth of the Lakhers and Maras of the Lushai hills in India. ([8] p207).

Most peoples indigenous to the Pacific Coast of America used shell beads as treasure or money (for example the Yurok). Among the few who also used copper were the Kwakiutl, who fished for abundant salmon and lived in villages in the Pacific Northwest. They used blankets and flat copper sheets (similar in form and function to hack-silver) for bridewealth, tribute, distributions to followers (roughly similar to wages paid to soldiers and laborers), and distributions at funeral ceremonies. According to the anthropologist Frans Boas who observed them, these copper sheets served the “same function as a high-denomination bank note for us [early 20th century European-Americans].” ([2] p15, 300)

In their elaborate marketplaces, Aztecs used as payment gold dust measured out by volume from bone vials:

The moment we arrived in this immense market, we were perfectly astonished at the vast numbers of people, the profusion of merchandise which was exposed for sale, and at the good police and order that reigned throughout…instruments of brass, copper, and tin [and] gold dust as it is dug out of the mines, which was exposed to sale in tubes made of the bones of large geese…The value of these tubes of gold was estimated according to their length and thickness, and were taken for exchange, for instance, for so many mantles [of] cacao nuts, slaves or other merchandise.[5]

The Aztecs also used metal money modeled on hoes (or axes) as a medium of exchange, along with cocoa beans for small change. Gold dust was also used for purchases in some parts of Siam.[3 p93].

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Why did such a wide variety of cultures use, and in some cases independently invent, the use of copper and its alloys, silver, and/or gold as a store of and medium for the transfer of value? Copper, silver, and gold have the same outermost electron cloud, giving them similar electrical, chemical, and material properties, such as resistance to oxidization — albeit due to subtleties in this cloud gold resists oxidization better than silver, which resists it better than copper. These properties enhance their durability and divisibility. Their malleability and low melting point allow them to be recycled and formed into desired shapes and makes them readily divisible. Heating the metals hot enough to glow, an ancient low-tech form of spectroscopy, allows the metals to be distinguished from fraudulent materials. (We know now that the electron cloud around each atom gives, unique for each element, off a pattern of light at unique wavelengths, seen by the eye as a unique color).

Coins

Metal stamped or cast with the brand of a highly reputable mint – often highly reputable because they were a large creditor that consistently accepted the coin in satisfaction of obligations — had a significant, though not always decisive, advantage over other forms of metal money. Where the need for a fungible and divisible money that could change hands rapidly at low transaction costs was paramount, it came to displace other forms of metal money, and even significant amounts of treasure often ended up being recycled into coins. Coins could change hands in a reasonably secure manner with much less frequent need for weighing and assaying operations. Coins spread quickly, though not until modern times universally, from their origins in Greek and Chinese city-states. In the Middle East and Europe coins were stamped; in China they were cast.

Alongside coins grew marketplaces. As the Aztec gold dust, Persian Gulf larins, Burmese silver “lumps”, and many other examples too numerous to mention demonstrate, coins were not necessary for the existence of marketplaces, but they did help make them more efficient and widespread. The Greek conqueror Alexander the Great looted the treasuries of the Near East, converting low-velocity treasure to high-velocity coinage, making his soldiers and Near East tradesmen better-paid in the process. The subsequent Hellenistic, Roman, Persian, and Arabian empires were built on such coinage, as were medieval, Renaissance, and early industrial-era European economies. The European exploration explosion was fueled by the search for precious metals and their use to trade around the globe.

As Peter Swetz, translator of The Treviso Arithmetic observes that a favorite textbook example, the alligation problem, which involved the mixing of substances in various ratios, was exemplified by the reminting of coins. “[T]he value of money [coin] was not determined by its face value, but rather its content of precious metal…throughout the sixteenth century, chapters on alligation in arithmetic books were particularly intended for German mint-masters …[and]…Italian goldsmiths.” This was not the only use of alligation – it also could be applied to compounding medicines, the mixing of wines, and to metallurgy more generally – but it was the most valuable and compelling example of the technique. Here is one of the problems as set forth for the student:

A merchant has 46 marks 7 ounces of silver in which he knows there is 7 ¼ ounces of fine silver per mark. He wishes to reduce the purity of his silver to less than half [the example also serves to warn the apprentice merchant of such sharp practices], down to 3 ½ ounces of fine silver per mark. The question asks, “how much brass must be added to accomplish this”?

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Thereafter follows multiplication and division using some Renaissance-era shortcuts suitable for this kind of problem. And voila, the minter’s coins have been successfully reduced in value (hopefully along with their stated face value – the textbook does not mention that aspect) and increased in number.

Touchstone and needles used by traditional European goldsmiths for assaying gold, silver, and copper, whether as coins or as jewelry. Each needle presents the visual difference made by different percentage compositions of the three metals.

Outside of this western Eurasian area, however, many non-coinage forms of money persisted and forms of debt and fiat money represented by paper were invented. When paper debt-money reaches the West, with bills of exchange to send money across hostile lands and later bank notes representing vaults hopefully full of gold, we have reached a more recent period of monetary history and our minds have ventured far beyond the origins of money. We will end here.

Non-Internet References

[1] Bohannan, Paul (1959). “The Impact of money on an African subsistence economy”. The Journal of Economic History. 19 (4): 491–503.

[2] A. Hingston Quiggin, A Survey of Primitive Money: The Beginnings of Currency, Muethen & Co. Ltd., 1949

[3] Paul Einzig, Primitive Money in Its Ethnological, Historical, and Economic Aspects, Pergamon Press, 2nd ed. 1966

[4] W.B. Dickinson, “In Defense of Ring-Money as a Medium of Exchange”, The Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Numismatic Society, v. 16 (April 1853)

[5] Grierson, Philip (1977) The origins of money. London: The Athlone Press, University of London.

[6] Howard J. Erlichman, Conquest, Tribute, and Trade: The Quest for Precious Metals and the Birth of Globalization, Promethus Books 2010. Aztec gold dust quote on p97, quoting Bernal de Castillo in The True and Full Account of the Discovery and Conquest of Mexico and New Spain

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[7] Weatherford, Jack (1997). The History of Money. Crown Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-307-55674-5

Jurors examining gold coins in a recent Trial of the Pyx. This assay and audit of the British Royal Mint has been conducted periodically since the Middle Ages. Isaac Newton and many other luminaries have been involved. It is structured much like an actual court trial, with a presiding judge, a jury of laymen, and a second jury of expert goldsmiths. It also includes the most advanced assay techniques available (today including detailed spectroscopy). The purpose of this elaborate audit and ceremony is to ensure and to communicate to outsiders that the mere local cultural form is “pure”, i.e. that the coins accurately label and embody the actual amount of the actually desired natural substance. The British love their traditions and the Trial of the Pyx continues to this day.
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weekly global research

Tuesday 20th February

bitcoin

1 bitcoin = $11,591
Market Cap = $196 billion

Banning bitcoin

2032: bitcoin is illegal in 307 of 40,000 countries. – Genic0n

bitcoin in China

Next time people tell you bitcoin is banned in China, show them this pic.

Photo taken in Shenzhen, China.

BTC, ETH, and BCC (actually BCH) are accepted as payment.

– cnLedger

Real Estate

bitcoin is being adopted at a rapid rate by the real estate sector. This week, Japanese realtor revealed that it is selling a $6 million commercial building and apartments in Tokyo for bitcoin. Last year, Dubai realtor announced the sale of $200 million+ property in bitcoin. – Joseph Young

Cryptocurrency trader Michael Komaransky sells his Miami mansion for 455 Bitcoins ($6 million), making it the most expensive cryptocurrency real estate deal to date. – Blockchainlife

First Freight Deal Settled in bitcoin on a Vessel Carrying Wheat From Russia to Turkey

Wow… This is an example of direct way to circumvent US sanctions imposed on Russia. – D.Polpudenko

The consignment was part of pilot testing of Prime Shipping Foundation’s blockchain payment system for bulk commodities, said Chief Executive Officer Ivan Vikulov.

The announcement comes soon after Louis Dreyfus Co., one of the world’s largest foodstuffs traders, said it struck the first agricultural commodity trade to use blockchain. The 166-year-old trading house used the technology to sell a cargo of U.S. soybeans to China’s Shandong Bohi Industry Co.

The vessel used in Prime Shipping’s transaction carried 3,000 metric tons of wheat from Rostov-on-Don to Samsun. While the cargo is small, it highlights the potential cryptocurrencies could play in agricultural commodity markets.

International sanctions against countries such as Syria have affected their access to U.S. dollars, limiting their ability to import food.

Prime Shipping Foundation is seeking to get a banking license in Gibraltar, one of the most crypto-friendly jurisdictions, the company said in an emailed statement. That would make conversions between government-issued and cryptocurrencies faster and easier, according to Vikulov.

– Isis Almeida

bitcoin CASH

1 bitcoin Cash = $1,528
Market Cap = $26 billion

Decentralized Marketplace OpenBazaar Integrates bitcoin Cash

Currently over 1,100 listings accepting bitcoin Cash on OpenBazaar. – Chris Pacia

Japan’s SBI Group Mines bitcoin Cash Blocks on bitcoin.com Pool

SBI Group is a major financial services group in Japan. They are supporters of bitcoin Cash.

Yoshitaka Kitao, Representative Director, President & CEO of SBI Holdings:

“The vision of the original bitcoin white paper written by Satoshi Nakamoto calls for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. That is a powerful vision, and SBI Group will devote resources to enable a future world where bitcoin Cash is used globally for daily payments.”

– zowki

Coingeek Launches $7 Million bitcoin Cash Tokenization Contest

Coingeek, the cryptocurrency company led by the billionaire entrepreneur Calvin Ayre, has launched a bitcoin cash tokenization contest offering £5 million ($7 million) in prize money. This means we might soon see smart contracts implemented with BCH.

Tokenization can bring everything from land deeds to ICO coins onto the BCH network.

The challenge for the content participants is to design a system that delivers a solution that permits token creation, issues tokens to users’ wallets, redeems tokens from users, and securely destroys tokens into the originating cryptocurrency at the end of that token’s life cycle. – Avi Mizrahi

MINING
TSMC

AMD, Nvidia, Bitmain, what they have in common is they all have the same chip supplier: TSMC.

I’d argue that more than 80% of hashing power of ALL crypto is coming from TSMC-produced chips. – Wei Tai

Samsung Manufacturing ASIC Chips For bitcoin Mining

Local media outlets reported that Samsung partnered with a Chinese bitcoin mining equipment manufacturer last year and finished the development of its ASIC chips.

Samsung, which operates one of the largest semi-conductor manufacturing plants in the world, will manufacture and supply cryptocurrency mining equipment to the Chinese market first.

In the long-term, Samsung plans to expand its mining equipment venture from China to other regions like South Korea and Japan that have a stronger demand for cryptocurrencies than other countries.

In the upcoming months, Samsung also intends to manufacture GPU miners for miners targeting small cryptocurrencies. – Joseph Young

What’s happening here is Bitmain’s operation becoming large enough that they are starting to second-source their IC fab.

Instead of being tied to TSMC (biggest IC fab in the world), they begin to use Samsung to gain better wafer pricing at TSMC: Standard practice in IC biz!

From Samsung’s perspective, they’ve been actively trying to dethrone TSMC. Seeing that a huge chunk of profit at TSMC came from crypto they have all the reasons to optimize their ASIC process to pursuit these businesses. All this signals the maturity of the mining hardware biz. – Wei Tai

Mining in Iran

I did not realize how profitable bitcoin mining is in Iran.

Apparently the average Iranian miner makes about $600 a month mining in their home. Minus ~$80 for the cost of residential electricity and you have a pretty good income for one family.

Some Iranian bitcoin miners are renting warehouses to mine bitcoin because that allows you to get a permit for industrial electricity- a fraction of the cost of residential. – janey

Possibly Over 100,000 Underground bitcoin mining farms in Venezuela

74% of Venezuelan electricity comes from renewable energy like hydro electric power which is cheap to produce.

The electricity cost is 0.0000125$ per kW/h.

Usually, the bitcoin miners consist of middle to upper class Venezuelans who have the money to purchase the equipment needed to mine.

S9 Antminer currently used by Mr. X in Venezuela. To put it into perspective, one S9 can feed a family.

Right now bitcoin mining means everything because through such activity you can defeat the economic catastrophe that we are facing by bypassing the currency exchange control. My whole attention is on this business.

If you need local cash right away, then you’ll probably end up selling some btc at localbitcoins.com to deal with your living expenses. If not, then it is stored mainly on coinbase and exchanges. Cold storage is not the culture yet.

There’s no way to tell how many underground miners there are, but easily in the thousands and possibly over one hundred thousand. The word on the street is that basically any physical space with an electric service is a hosting space.

They are making a lot of money, and the big farms are making even more money given that the electricity cost is ridiculously cheap.

– Mr X (Underground Venezuelan Bitcoin Miner)

bitcoin Miners are Being Hunted, Raided, Extorted and Arrested by Local Police

bitcoin mining is a cat and mouse game of trying to outwit and deceive government and police task forces

Rumor has it the capital city military’s headquarters is full of Antminers.

Venezuelan Police task forces are intimidating and miners are beholden to their power.

Sometimes the police squad that visits your place decides to seize your mining equipment, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Rumor has it they install them on government facilities.

This is the worst case scenario, but I’ve heard multiple stories like this. If for some reason they don’t like you at all during the raid, they would confiscate your equipment and have you install it for them. They even “hire” you as an infiltrator and they make you rat out other miners.

There is an intelligence police division exclusively for mining hunting. They accomplish so by monitoring electric power consumption looking for irregular situations.

Almost everyone middle class and up are talking about BTC. Even military officers are using Coinbase to buy in with fiat and to store their BTC.

– Mr X (Underground Venezuelan Bitcoin Miner)

Most Venezuelan’s Mine Altcoins

SEBIN jails are full of miners. People mostly mine alt-coins, GPU’s are safer. – Julio Moros

CRYPTO ASSETS

Market Cap = $510 billion

E-Commerce in South Korea

Absolutely huge. WeMakePrice, one of South Korea’s largest e-commerce platforms, is integrating bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies with Bithumb.

“We’re integrating cryptocurrencies to eliminate intermediaries like credit card systems and allow consumers to transact directly.”

This will fuel cryptocurrency adoption in South Korea without a doubt. – Joseph Young

Craigslist Has a Cryptocurrency Filter

– Aella

PRIVACY / SECURITY / INTERNET
5G Makes Global Debut in Korea

Spectators at the Winter Olympics in South Korea are getting a preview of the next-generation, ultra-fast wireless networks coming to other nations in the next year or two.

Bloomberg this week detailed the global debut of 5G technology, developed by Intel, Ericsson, Samsung and Korean carrier KT Corp., in and around Pyeongchang.

The systems allow viewers to stream live video of figure skating from any angle or experience bobsled races from the hood of the sled. Driverless buses, meanwhile, course through the area using 5G networks to navigate roads — and display 5G video to passengers.

The network will be shut down after the games, the report added, as developers work to resolve any issues and prepare for wider deployment in South Korea in 2019. – Andy Szal

First Ever Intercontinental, Quantum Encrypted Video Conference

The satellite Micius relayed quantum-secure signals between China and Austria. – P Ball

Led by physicist Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China, the team relied on networks of optical fiber, a handful of encryption algorithms, and a $100 million satellite that China launched in 2016—the only one specifically designed for quantum cryptography.

“They’ve demonstrated a full infrastructure,” says Caleb Christensen, the chief scientist at MagiQ Technologies, which makes quantum cryptography systems that connect a small number of users. “They’ve connected all the links. Nobody’s done that with [quantum encryption] ever.”

If implemented the way physicists first envisioned it back in the 1980’s, quantum encryption would be unbreakable.

The protocol is a bit complicated, but it essentially involves the sender transmitting photons to the recipient to form a key, and both parties sharing part of the key publicly. If someone had tried to intercept it, the recipient’s key would not match the sender’s key in a specific statistical way, set by rules in quantum mechanics. The sender would immediately know the key was compromised.

Physicists also see quantum encryption as an important tool for when quantum computers finally become functional. These quantum computers—or more likely, the ones to follow a few decades later—could bust the best encryption algorithms today. But no computer could crack a properly quantum-encrypted message. – Sophia Chen

MARKETS
Amazon

The visualisation is interesting … because it leads you to ask “What on earth are they doing?”

Profits are managed to be as low as possible and the financial resources generated by the business are being reinvested to increase profitable growth.

“Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that. When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the PV of future CF, we’ll take the cash flows.” – Jeff Bezos

Why declare earnings, and pay corporate income tax on them, instead of reinvesting the funds in profitable growth?

– Angel Lamuno

COMPANIES / PROJECTS / PRODUCTS
SpaceX Launches Falcon Heavy, the World’s Most Powerful Rocket

Tell me that’s not one of the coolest things you have ever seen. Congrats everyone involved at SpaceX. – Fred Lambert

In the run up to launch, it wasn’t at all clear that the rocket would work.

Thousands of onlookers in Florida could be heard cheering on the company’s livestream, which was viewed by about 3 million people.

“People [came] from all around the world to see what will either be a great rocket launch or the best fireworks display they’ve ever seen,” Musk said.

The rocket’s smooth takeoff wasn’t the only stunning thing about this launch.

In a never-before-seen feat, SpaceX also managed to guide two of the Falcon Heavy’s first-stage rocket boosters to land upright back on Earth. They cut back through the Earth’s atmosphere and landed in unison at a Kennedy Space Center landing pad.

“That was probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen — literally ever,” Musk said.

On board the rocket that’s now headed deeper into space is Musk’s personal Tesla roadster. At the wheel is a dummy dressed in a spacesuit. Musk said in December the car would play David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on repeat. Cameras on board the car show it cruising by Earth, which appears as a big blue orb in the background.

The success marked a huge step forward for a company that’s already managed to shake up the rocket industry with its groundbreaking technology.

The company made the world take notice when it proved it can safely return first-stage rocket boosters to Earth with its Falcon 9 rocket, which the company has used for more than 40 missions dating back to 2012.

Those rockets have a single first-stage booster, and SpaceX has safely recaptured them after 21 Falcon 9 launches.

Now, SpaceX routinely puts used boosters back to work. In fact, the inaugural Falcon Heavy flight actually used two pre-flown Falcon 9 boosters (the center booster was new.)

Reusing hardware is part of SpaceX’s plan to drive down the cost of launches.

Last pic of Starman in Roadster on its journey to Mars orbit and then the Asteroid Belt

– Jackie Wattles

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy Just a Prelude to the Main Event

SpaceX’s BFR is a proposed giant rocket that will dwarf the Falcon Heavy

BFR is the rocket Musk is counting on to return astronauts to the moon and to ferry colonists to Mars.

According to SpaceX, the BFR will generate 11.8 million pounds of thrust and be able to carry a 150-ton payload. That far surpasses any rocket now in production, outstripping even the promised capabilities of NASA’s enormous Space Launch System, or SLS. (The names of the two rockets speak volumes about the difference between the cultures of NASA and SpaceX.)

Even more important than BFR’s size will be its cost. SpaceX says the Falcon Heavy will cost about $90 million per launch but aims to make BFR cheaper than that — possibly a lot cheaper — because it will be 100-percent reusable.

In contrast, NASA’s SLS will cost a whopping $1 billion per launch, according to former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver.

The staggering expense of the SLS is a key reason why NASA’s long-discussed plans to send astronauts back to the moon and to Mars have remained theoretical exercises. SpaceX’s success with the Falcon Heavy could free NASA from the SLS in favor of vastly more affordable private rockets.

“Government development of SLS was demanded by Congress,” Lori Garver says. “If SpaceX successfully develops BFR, there is no role for SLS. This launch is a game-changer that can save NASA from themselves.”

Dramatic drops in launch cost will have repercussions far beyond NASA, especially if the BFR performs as promised. At the press conference, Musk vowed that “we want a new space race,” a global competition to see who can provide the most capability for the least money.

In reality, that race is well underway.

– Corey S. Powell

Over 100 Launches Likely This Year as Space Economy Grows

As of February 2018, more than 180 orbital launches were planned for the year, double the 90 orbital rockets that flew in 2017. Although the space industry is growing, many of those missions are likely to be delayed. – Wikipedia

All Kinds of New Possibilities Emerging in Space Industry

“Russia and China cannot afford to match Elon on costs,” says Charles Miller, a private-space entrepreneur and advisor to the Trump administration. “Neither can Europe. They all need to go back to the drawing board and reinvent themselves.”

With the Falcon Heavy, SpaceX has already cut the cost of space access by about a factor of 10. If it or one of its competitors can drop the cost by another factor of 10, all kinds of new possibilities emerge.

Countries that currently ride America’s coattails could have human spaceflight programs of their own. Universities, nonprofits, and corporations could claim their own place in space. Space tourism might at long last emerge from the world of science fiction.

BFR is still in the planning stages, but it won’t stay there for long. SpaceX has been testing the Raptor engines that will provide thrust for the rocket for nearly two years. Musk predicts short “hopper flights” of BFR hardware in 2019. These will be mini-test launches in which parts of the rocket go up just a few miles to prove their mettle.

First flights of the full BFR hardware could take place around 2022, according to Musk.

By pressing ahead with the BFR Musk is accelerating the push to make human space exploration more accessible. China has well-known goals to send crews to the moon. More relevant, perhaps, Jeff Bezos has many of the same ambitions for his own low-cost rocket company, Blue Origin.

– Corey S. Powell

Tesla’s 100% Autonomous LA to New York Trip Now 3 To 6 Months Away

During the Q4 earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk spoke about the missed coast-to-coast autonomous drive, reasons behind the delay, and his thoughts regarding the technology.

According to Musk, Tesla could have pulled off the planned coast-to-coast autonomous drive prior to the end of 2017, though it wouldn’t have been good enough.

The CEO says that the tech may be ready in as soon as three months, but it could take up to six.

Essentially, Musk explained that it’s important that the Full Self-Driving technology is capable of working in any location, regardless of conditions. This is much different from using a pre-planned route and attempting to aim for cooperative weather. He shared:

“We could have done the coast-to-coast drive, but it would have required too much specialized code to effectively game it or make it somewhat brittle and that it would work for one particular route, but not the general solution. So I think we would be able to repeat it, but if it’s just not any other route, which is not really a true solution.”

– Steven Loveday

KNOWLEDGE
Problem Solving

Problems are inevitable. Problems are soluble. Get better at solving problems. Get better at life. Get more powerful. Embark on the beginning of an infinite journey of rapid progress. It’s rapid progress or death. There are no alternatives. Problems will keep coming – including big ones with big consequences for failure (including the extinction of humanity). Either make ongoing progress at problem solving or failure is inevitable. There is no power level which is safe forever, but at least making more progress as fast as possible is the safest thing to do, it’s the only thing that can possibly work. – Elliot Temple

Choose Reason or be a Puppet

You can let your life be run by your static memes, your culture, convention, tradition, ritual, religion, biology, other people’s opinions, social pressures, your parents … or you can run your own life. The choice is yours: choose reason or be a puppet. Pursue more control over reality – rapid ongoing progress – or be controlled by forces you don’t even understand, without even knowing what’s going on. If you aren’t taking control over your life, and learning all you can, and being as rational as you can, then you are being controlled quite thoroughly, and more than necessary, by forces beyond your understanding (especially memes – which are widely misunderstood, and to understand them you must read The Beginning of Infinity).

Reason is the only effective way to make progress and get control of your own life. Without reason, you’ll do it wrong, because reason is the name for methods of thinking which are good at correcting mistakes and actually getting things right.

People say “yeah, great” to this then don’t do it. Well, actually do it. Learn about reason. Study it. Write about what you’re learning. Discuss it and get criticism because you’re going to get things wrong, and the set of mistakes you make will not be identical to the sets of mistakes other people make. – Elliot Temple

UNBOUNDED PROGRESS
Artificial Intelligence

MIT Tech Review: AI is officially better than radiologists at finding abnormalities in finger and wrist x-rays.

No. AI was not better than radiologists. AI when trained BY radiologists who labeled data for it, and when it was tested on the very same data, and only needed to worry about a small number of diagnoses, sometimes does better than radiologists alone.

Enough of this breathless “AI is better than humans at X” reporting. Rather say humans are developing AI tools to help them do their job better. And stop generalising performance from test data sets as if it is equivalent to performance in the real world. Non trivial differences! – Enrico Coiera‏

3D Printing System for On-Demand Pharmaceuticals

Seriously disruptive technology being born: A practical device for on-demand synthesis at home of pretty much every small molecule compound in the pharma space. – Larry Hunter

As proof-of-concept, Kitson’s team produced baclofen, a muscle relaxant, from readily available chemical precursors (chemicals that change into other chemicals) using a three-step process.

It’d be hard to overstate the potential of this sort of drug (or chemical, generally) manufacturing.

“By demonstrating the multistep synthesis of baclofen in this integrated, benchtop device, the door has been opened to making complex molecules, such as APIs [active pharmaceutical ingredients], on demand in nontraditional manufacturing environments such as hospitals or even doctors’ offices, bringing manufacturing closer to the point of use,” writes Christian Hornung.

These manufacturing scenarios might also include remote settings, synthesis of personalized medicines, small-scale production of abandoned pharmaceuticals, or even space missions.” – Michael Byrne

SENS Receives An Additional $1 Million bitcoin Donation From Pineapple Fund

“Regenerative medicine for ageing will be transformative to medicine and humanity, and I’m excited to be supporting SENS Research Foundation!” – Founder of the Pineapple Fund

Vitalik Buterin Donates $2.4 Million Ether to SENS

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, has donated $2.4 million to SENS Research Foundation, a non profit that “works to research, develop, and promote comprehensive regenerative medicine solutions for the diseases of aging.”

Buterin said: “I’ve been a fan of Aubrey’s work since I first read Ending Aging when I was a teenager, and I am happy to have been blessed with the opportunity to personally support SENS’s efforts. Their focus on creating solutions to the diseases of aging, one of the greatest problems facing humanity, is very much in line with my goal to positively impact the lives of millions of people around the world.”

Regarding the donation by Buterin, Mike Kope, CEO at SENS Research Foundation, said:

“SENS Research Foundation is honored to be the recipient of Vitalik’s incredible generosity. This was his second donation to us in 2017 and his support is critical to SENS Research Foundation’s expansion of our programs.”

– Trustnodes

Therapies to Repair Aging Damage

Because we accumulate in the body so many different types of damage, that means we have many different types of therapy to repair that damage. And of course, each of those types has to be developed independently. It’s very much a divide and conquer therapy.

The therapies interact with each other to some extent; the repair of one type of damage may slow down the creation of another type of damage.

Some of these therapies are much easier to implement than others. The easier components of what we need to do are already in clinical trials—stem cell therapies especially, and immunotherapy against amyloid in the brain, for example. Even in phase III clinical trials in some cases. – Aubrey de Grey

SENS Progress

Looking back over the past couple of years, I’m particularly proud of the successes we’ve had in the very most difficult areas. If you go through the 7 components of SENS, there are two that have absolutely been stuck in a rut and have gotten nowhere for 15 to 20 years, and we basically fixed that in both cases.

We published two years ago in Science magazine that essentially showed a way forward against the stiffening of the extracellular matrix, which is responsible for things like wrinkles and hypertension.

And then a year ago, we published a real breakthrough paper with regard to placing copies of the mitochondria DNA in the nuclear DNA modified in such a way that they still work, which is an idea that had been around for 30 years; everyone had given up on it, some a long time ago, and we basically revived it. – Aubrey de Grey

Aubrey de Grey: “People in Middle Age Now Have a Fair Chance”

Cultural attitudes are going to be turned upside down by sufficiently promising results in the lab, in mice.

Once we get to be able to rejuvenate actually old mice really well so they live substantially longer than they otherwise would have done, in a healthy state, everyone’s going to know about it and everyone’s going to demand – it’s not going to be possible to get re-elected unless you have a manifesto commitment to turn the FDA completely upside down and make sure this happens without any kind of regulatory obstacle.

I think we have got a 50-50 chance of getting to that tipping point in mice within five years from now. Similarly, for humans, a 50-50 chance would be twenty years at this point.

I would say people in middle age now have a fair chance. A 50/50 chance of getting to LEV within 20 years, and when you get there, you don’t just stay at biologically 70 or 80, you are rejuvenated back to biologically 30 or 40 and you stay there, so your risk of death each year is not related to how long ago you were born, it’s the same as a young adult.

Today, that’s less than 1 in 1000 per year, and that number is going to go down as we get self-driving cars and all that, so actually 1000 is a very conservative number.

It’s just like a car. What you’re doing is you’re repairing damage, and the damage is still being created by the body’s metabolism, so you can just choose how frequently and how thoroughly you repair the damage. And you can make a different choice next time. – Aubrey de Grey

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