A Brief Look at Alexander’s Cryptocurrency Records
Written by Mykola Babiy, reviewed by Callum McDonnell and Garry Tiscovschi
“The technology behind Bitcoin isn’t a fad, or a bubble, or a scheme; it’s a fundamental paradigm shift, and will eventually change everything.” (Mezrich, 2019)
What’s truly fascinating about money is that we don’t know how old it is. No matter how far into the past civilisations we go, we have failed to find one that didn’t use some form of money. What this means is that money is as old as civilization itself (Antonopoulos, 2016). Studying transaction records is a powerful new method of getting a deeper view into a historical civilization and would work well alongside the historical fascination associated with money. It goes without saying that the amount of wealth and money one possesses is an information web that can be deployed strategically. Given the individual with the money understands its value and the objectives they can achieve with it, places them in a powerful position.
Surely commanding an army as large as Alexander The Great’s with such a vast amount of resources would be expensive. ATG’s ledgers must have been an interesting sight to see. As lay-people-historians it would have been nice to have a validated track of all his expenditures and revenue sources. Unfortunately, there was no decentralised system for money transfers that we could have access to even today. Having such decentralised ledgers as a way to create historical records for studies and data analysis would be a great perspective to have on events that occur. The analysis we could do on every single battle fought in terms of monetary value would be fascinating. It would also be interesting to be able to see where the bulk of transactions were happening during ATG’s time. With such data it would be possible to delve deeper into the monetary and fiscal strategies that were deployed under his leadership. This would then give us insight into how Alexander leveraged the wealth that he had accumulated during his conquests. This could also be done in modern times. Decentralised ledgers for land trading, bond purchases, or even public budget expenditure ledgers could lead to higher data value for todays and future generation data analysts.
The importance of communication and information cannot be overlooked, especially during a time of conquering and war. The nature of money presents itself as a way of communication value and as an information source. It is a language, or for use of a better word “signalling”. Money can be used to communicate value to each other and to genuinely and clearly express how much we value a product, a service, or even a gesture (Antonopoulos, 2016). More data regarding money flows and transfers will undoubtedly be an asset to have in a world that is increasingly becoming more and more fascinated by the wonders of data analytics.
Bibliography
Antonopoulos, A. (2016) The Internet of Money. Merkle Bloom LLC.
Mezrich, B. (2019) Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption. New York: Flatiron Books.
