same government abstracted into a currency.

You also run into the origins of taxation in the post-Roman world. How villages accepted the nobility and crown to rule on disputes about who owned what, but once they had given the power over the ledger away to said nobility – meaning they had surrendered the authority to say who owned what – that nobility would also start saying that they should have some of the dispute proceeds. Indeed, in the ancient laws of Æthelberht (“Noble Bert”), we find that the original taxation in the UK was a cut of all dispute resolution payments. Later English taxation to afford “protection money” to Viking raiders – to pay the Danegæld – was through a tax on land, again falling back on governmental controlof the ledger.

We see similar records in France, even though all pre-1789 taxes were abolished and most records lost in the process de la République: there are records of a land tax known as the taille in the Ancien Régime, imposed on each household based on its land ownage – as determined by the government ledger of land ownage, of course.

Governmental control of the ledger, of dispute resolution, was and is the key to governmental taxation, at least post-Rome. This brings all kinds of interesting understanding to just how big a game-changer bitcoin is.

This also leads to curiosity about how things worked before Æthelberht and in Rome. We find immediate lessons of history to apply to the modern era: part of the reason why Rome collapsed was that