We recently had @buchmanster join us at a Kernel fireside to discuss his deep study of money, starting with Perry Mehrling, going back to the medieval money of the 1500s, and his current focus on multilateral clearing (the core insight behind @cyclesmoney). Ethan speaks often about ‘respecting the graph’, a nod to the graph theory of money, the correct theory of money that replaces the “quantity” theory (per the @MimbresSchool). “ By being able to represent arbitrary assets and arbitrary kinds of credit within a common graph within all the existing debts, trade credit obligations, interest payments, rents, wages, whatever, you can start to do incredible things.” “You can run multilateral settlement operations that clear the most debt for the most people using the least amount of money.” The future of money may not be more money. It might be loops (cycles) that close so fast, money barely needs to exist at all. 01:28 - Where did central banks come from? 02:11 - Medieval bankers gathered at trade fairs to fix rates 04:30 - 1570s banking crisis led to the rise of central banks 06:00 - Economy is not a spot market but a network of balance sheets 08:30 - Money as response to imbalanced payment graphs 10:50 - Keynes's Bancor proposal: balance payments through multilateral clearing 11:30 - US made dollar reserve currency, creating permanent imbalance 13:00 - European Payments Union: multilateral netting drove 1950s recovery 14:30 - “Velocity” reflects payment graph structure 15:50 - Slovenia's 30-year government trade credit clearing system 17:30 - Sardex mutual credit: collateralized by future goods and services 21:00 - Combining mutual credit with clearing: 50% liquidity coverage 00:27:50 - Liquidity is a topological property of the graph 00:33:20 - Going bottom-up where Keynes failed top-down 00:39:30 - Beautiful money flows in loops (or cycles) 00:46:20 - Don't need money as long as debts balance over acceptable time