The state of The State (History)

## Table of Contents 1. [Defining Our Terms](#Defining%20Our%20Terms) 2. [Zero-Entry Accounting – Tribes (Pre 10,000 BCE – 3,500 BCE)](#Zero-Entry%20Accounting%20%E2%80%93%20Tribes%20(Pre%2010,000%20BCE%20%E2%80%93%203,500%20BCE)) 3. [Single-Entry Accounting – Classical States (3500 BCE–476 CE)](#Single-Entry%20Accounting%20%E2%80%93%20Classical%20States%20(3500%20BCE%E2%80%93476%20CE)) 4. [Double-Entry Accounting – Nation States (500 – Present)](#Double-Entry%20Accounting%20%E2%80%93%20Nation%20States%20(500%20%E2%80%93%20Present)) 5. [Triple-Entry Accounting – Synchronized States (Coming Soon)](#Triple-Entry%20Accounting%20%E2%80%93%20Synchronized%20States%20(Coming%20Soon)) --- > Bitcoin and decentralization began as a movement to separate money from the State. We didn't realize that it had just invented the roots of a new form of State: the Synchronized State. ## Defining Our Terms Before proceeding, we must establish critical distinctions in our terminology: - **state** (lowercase): Society's current condition or status—the collective memory and context that forms our shared reality. - **State** (uppercase): The tribe, kingdom, or nation bound together by their shared state. The state is all around us. We exist within it, operate through it, and depend on its continuity. Should the state vanish, we would lose not merely information, but our identities, histories, status, nations, and the State. There are three distinct layers of state within a State. All of these delineations together encompass the **state**: - **Public state**: The public record, accessible to everyone, which the State propagates and uses to keep track of its current state. - **Semi-private state**: The non-public shared context within subgroups, such as: families, friends, or organizations. - **Private state**: An individual's current condition or status—the internal record unique to each person. ![[the state.excalidraw.png|]] The state is naturally subjective and in the eye of the individual (private state), mutating as it travels between perceptions—creating a shared (semi-private state) and eventually society wide (public state) out of subjective private states, is no small feat. It also does not remove the private or semi-private states. The State has evolved throughout three distinct epochs of how it creates, analyzes, updates, and removes the state throughout history — and is about to enter a fourth epoch — Synchronized States. **Epochs of state tracking** 1. **Zero-Entry: Tribes**: It must be co-accepted by multiple parties to form a Tribe. 2. **Single-Entry: Classical States**: It must be written to create a permanent record and State. 3. **Double-Entry**: **Nation States**: It must be transmitted and agreed upon by multiple parties to form a Nation State. 4. **Triple-Entry: Synchronized States**: It must be synchronized entirely across society to form a Synchronized State. * * * The state and The State are like heads and tails on the same coin, but what is that coin called? _I don’t know. Why did you think I would know?_ ### There is no state without history. Without time, the state would be frozen; nothing would move or transition. Where we have time, we have energy flowing and we have a past. If we are able to perceive these past states we have a current state. The past states are collectively referred to as **history**. Without history, the state of The State would be frozen. Fortunately, the only constant rule of the universe is: "_change is the only constant_." Each successive state builds upon its predecessor in time. Each current state is an evolution of the previous _past state_ after experiencing a “State Transition Function (STF)[^1].” **There is no state without the present.** All past states are actually encapsulated in the current state of the moment. Therefore, we perceive all past states through the lens of the current state. ![[are-the-past-states.jpeg|600]] Consider: what is the current private state in your mind as you process these words? What is your history? How do state transition functions in your mind work? > If history is fake and people still find it valuable enough to put millions of collective hours researching and writing it — imagine how valuable a real history of events could be. ### There is no State without the state. What is a State? It’s not just borders and laws. It’s a shared state, a collective story that gives a sense of identity and purpose. Collective identity and culture is stored in the state. A State is not its state — but without a state you cannot have a State (tribe bound together by the state). The bindings of a State is the state. It is the glue which holds societies together. Without this root, a State crumbles. If the state were to magically disappear today, your State would disappear along with it. It is _critical_ to maintaining the legitimacy (and therefore the continuity) of The State (such as legal traditions, status & authority, and relationships). At the bottom of every State (whether that is a Tribe, Classical State, Nation State, or Synchronized State) is always a social layer coordinating using the state. Leviathans are not bound by people, but rather what those people perceive as valuable: _the state_. ### He who controls the state controls The State. The state, in all its forms, is constantly evolving and mutating. It is constantly being created, analyzed (read), updated, and deleted. This is synonymous with the computer science acronym **CRUD** (_Create_, _Read_, _Update_, _Delete_). As the state is constantly mutating, the State is constantly mutating. To control the changing state between people and society, is _everything._ It’s powers beyond powers, it’s mind control of every individual and the whole State at once. Much of every individual’s energy in life is spent trying to create, read, update, and delete the public state. Since it is ever-changing, **the state faces persistent challenges in trust**. The Seven Byzantine Generals Problem is a great illustration of this—a group of leaders must agree on a plan to attack a large city they have surrounded, but needing to route messages through the city—traitors or interceptions can alter the semi-private state, leaving them unable to coordinate on the state, and therefore, the attack [@bitcoinmagazineWhatByzantineGenerals2023]. # A Journey Through Historical _state_ Tracking Let’s travel through history to see how society recorded it, what a state truly is, and how emerging technologies like Synchronized States will reshape society’s future. They say history is written by the winners, so let’s begin around pre-written history (which is also spoken by the winners). Over millennia, the way we track history and define the state of society has transformed. As we learned to store more state, and transmit it in more efficient, less malleable ways, humanity was able to form into bigger, more efficient civilizations. Starting from oral traditions (Tribes) to permanence in writing (Classical States), legal codes (Nation States), and soon digital ledgers (Synchronized States). History, and more precisely state, is the backbone of any society. Imagine if you could see how all money, assets, people, organizations, and relationships flow from the beginning of time throughout all of history. This will be possible once the state is synchronized and stored in a single verifiable timeline. _Will the histories of Synchronized States also be written by the winners?_ ## Zero-Entry Accounting – Tribes (Pre 10,000 BCE – 3,500 BCE) Envision a campfire flickering under a starlit sky, voices weaving tales of ancestors and battles into the night. This is where history began—not in books, but in the spoken word, carried by memory and shared by communities. Around campfires or during rituals, bards and elders recited tales of creation, migrations, and heroes. These weren’t casual stories; they were structured epics, memorized with rhythm and rhyme to ensure accuracy. Oral traditions were more than mere entertainment; they were the lifeblood of cultural memory of early tribes. These recitations served as educational tools and means of preserving the collective state of the tribe. **All ancient societies used oral traditions to pass on the state.** ### Ancient Mesopotamia > In ancient Mesopotamia, long before the consolidation of its earliest written records, oral tradition was the lifeblood of culture, religion, and statecraft. In the alluvial plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, communities transmitted epic narratives, hymns, and legal decrees through generations of skilled storytellers, bards, and priestly figures. These oral traditions provided a framework for understanding the cosmos and human society, legitimizing kingship and codifying moral and legal norms even before the advent of cuneiform writing. > > One of the most striking examples is the Epic of Gilgamesh. Although it is now preserved on clay tablets dating from around 2100 BCE, scholars agree that its origins lie in a much older oral tradition. Bards would recite heroic deeds and divine encounters in ritualized performances that both entertained and instructed their audiences, helping to forge a collective identity and sense of destiny among the early city-states. Similarly, creation myths such as the Enuma Elish—the Babylonian account of the origins of the world and the gods—were first conveyed orally, ensuring that the religious beliefs and cosmological ideas that underpinned Mesopotamian society were widely understood and shared long before they were committed to writing. > > Moreover, the oral recitation of legal proclamations and ritual formulas played a pivotal role in state governance. Divinatory practices, often performed in temples and royal courts, relied on the spoken word to interpret omens and communicate the will of the gods. Such ceremonies not only reinforced the divine sanction of a ruler’s authority but also maintained social order by integrating cosmic order with human law. The performance of these oral traditions became central to early identity and legitimacy in one of the world’s earliest civilizations. ![[bard-singing.excalidraw.png|80%]] Whoa, _I’m getting tired just from thinking about it_. That’s A LOT of work to store the mutable ever-changing state! Bards gotta work every day to sing it out! It’s also power. Remember, **he who controls the _state_ controls the _State_**_._ Storytellers, bards, and priests were probably pretty powerful figures—more powerful than history would have us believe[^2]. Each bard and storyteller functioned as an unreliable node in the world's first decentralized network, introducing their own creative "improvements" to the state with each retelling. Would you trust a storytellin’ bard to keep track of the money supply? The legal history of crimes? The property rights of our tribe? **_Probably not_**. * * * ### _Defining Patterns of Zero-Entry Accounting_ **Forms of State_:_** _Tribes_ **Accounting:** _Zero-Entries_ The absence of accounting created a fundamental void of accountability in early tribal societies. Without accounting mechanisms, societies operated without the bedrock of security, protection, or verifiable trust. The state existed solely in the malleable minds of tribal members. Consider the precarious position: what resides in the state of your tribal compatriots' minds today? Is there a way to verify? Should they decide to claim your possessions or family as their own, the state could be effortlessly altered through a carefully crafted heroic poem recited around the evening fire. **Public state contents**: _The pre-written tribal state contained the essential operating system for early civilizations._ Within this malleable cognitive patchwork resided the foundational elements of society: ancestral folk knowledge passed through generations, religious cosmologies explaining existence, epic narratives binding communities together, moral and legal frameworks governing behavior, sacred traditions imbuing tribal habits, collective histories establishing group identity, and perhaps most critically—the legitimacy of the tribal State itself. **Methods of state transmission_:_** _Spoken orally_ Tales, epics, poems, ritual ceremonies, and passionate rants served as the primary vehicles for transmitting the state. It contained all the status and belongings of the tribe, but none of it was written down—existing solely as subjective opinion passed from the speaker to listener. _Taxes probably existed, in the mind!_ **Effort to propagate and maintain the state**: _Impossible_ Without permanent records of preservation, the state had to be repeated simply not to be forgotten and it was always mutating in the process. **Mutability/permanence of state (trust)**: _Literally a game of telephone_ Without any permanence to anchor it, the state was mutating every time it was spoken. This degradation created a trust barrier that would remain unresolved until humanity's first recording technologies emerged in cuneiform. **Who controls the public state?** _The strongest males (__who controlled which stories were told__) and the best storytellers of the present moment._ **Synchronization**: _No centralized or decentralized record, only individual nodes with constantly mutating state. The state couldn’t be synchronized, as there was not a persistent verifiable public state._ **7-Byzantine Generals Problem**: _Not solved._ It wasn’t possible for 7-Byzantine Generals to surround a city and send messages through it at all. _They couldn’t write messages, dummy._ ### Illustration of Zero-Entry Accounting #### Part 1 ![[Zero-Entry Accounting Part1.png|90%]] *Caption: No common thread. Fuzzy zone changes everything. Time changes everything. Step into the fuzzy zone and state is mutated. Illuminated moments don’t last.* #### Part 2 ![[Zero-Entry Accounting Part2.png|90%]] * * * The absence of written state records imposed severe coordination limits on early societies. Societies remained fractured into small tribes precisely because they lacked the ability to permanently record, transmit, or synchronize their collective private and semi-private states. Without permanent records, each transmission ensured divergence, making larger kingdoms impossible to maintain. Ultimately, these early oral traditions laid the groundwork for the ideological and social structures that would later be codified in writing. The winners spoke history into eternity, with stories of their bravery, and the losers didn’t speak at all. ## Single-Entry Accounting – Classical States (3500 BCE–476 CE) The transition from zero-entry: **pre-written** to single-entry: **written** state occurred around 3500 BCE in Mesopotamia with the invention of cuneiform. In early civilizations such as Sumer and Egypt, writing systems like cuneiform and hieroglyphics were initially developed to record the inflows and outflows of grain, livestock, and other commodities. The earliest cuneiform tablets[^3], known as proto-cuneiform, were pictorial and inscribed on clay tablets. Cuneiform evolved from simple pictographic records to sophisticated logograms and phonetic representations. It became the cornerstone of power, allowing temples and early bureaucracies to manage communal resources and establish the first permanent written state—a revolutionary technology that transformed how States controlled their populations. Hieroglyphs emerged around the same time in Egypt. The Ancient Egyptians called hieroglyphs "the words of God," and the pictorial writing system was used mainly by priests to inscribe the walls of tombs and temples of royalty. The ornate symbols took effort to create—the mediums of the time (clay tablets, stone, marble) were not exactly user friendly. The lack of duplicatable medium, complete illiteracy in the population, and the complexity of early writing systems, naturally restricted record-keeping to the domain of pharaohs and their dedicated scribes, who alone possessed the resources to **CRUD** (_Create_, _Read_, _Update_, _Delete_) the written state. Pharaohs immortalized their decrees on monumental obelisks and pyramids, creating enduring state records, but hieroglyphics remained impractical for ordinary record-keeping. The permanence of the medium became synonymous with the permanence of power. > “Cuneiform writing expressed in tangible form the whole of the human experience for the first time in history. Cuneiform can be understood, in fact, as the beginning of human historical documentation [@markCuneiform2022].” ![[cuneiform.webp|700]] **Single-entry accounting was the first step towards a permanent state.** An elite professional class named scribes emerged from an entirely illiterate population. Scribes functioned as **gatekeepers of the state**. Often part of the elite or priestly class maintained written records for the ruling elite[^4]. **Literacy was a tool of power**, it was entirely concentrated among the scribes who alone had access to CRUD the written state—at the command of the kings and pharaohs—who had full control of the public state. What did the kings and pharaohs choose to do with control of the state (reality)? They often wrote “_I am god.”_ * * * > “When the ancient cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia were discovered and deciphered in the late 19th century, they would literally transform human understanding of history. Prior to their discovery, the Bible was considered the oldest and most authoritative book in the world and nothing was known of the ancient Sumerian civilization [@markCuneiform2022].” _You see young grasshopper, how easily the state can get lost, updated, or be deleted?_ ### Alphabetic Systems (2000–1000 BCE) Writing evolved into more complex forms over time. Initially, writing was used exclusively for accounting until the third millennium BC, when the Sumerian concern for the afterlife paved the way to literature by using writing for funerary inscriptions. The evolution from tokens to script also documents a steady progression in abstracting data, from one-to-one correspondence with three-dimensional tangible tokens, to two-dimensional pictures, the invention of abstract numbers and phonetic syllabic signs and finally, in the second millennium BC, the ultimate abstraction of sound and meaning with the representation of phonemes by the letters of the alphabet \[@jameswrightEvolutionWritingDenise2014\]. Alphabetic scripts were adopted due to their ability to reduce a reliance on scribes (due to the sheer technical depth of pictographic systems, which contained thousands of pictographs). People wanted access to read the state. The Proto-Sinaitic script (c. 1850 BCE) and later Phoenician alphabet (c. 1200 BCE) simplified writing by using fewer symbols—making it more accessible. > “Because the alphabet was invented only once, all the many alphabets of the world, including Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Brahmani and Cyrillic, derive from Proto-Sinaitic [@jameswrightEvolutionWritingDenise2014].” In ancient Mesopotamia (c. 2000–1000 BCE), laws like the Code of Hammurabi were publicly displayed on stone slabs in city centers, suggesting rulers wanted citizens to know the laws, though input was minimal. These inscriptions weren’t distributed as copies but were accessible to those who could read or hire scribes. Similarly, in ancient Egypt, pharaohs’ decrees were sometimes inscribed on monuments, but citizens had no formal role in shaping them. This is the epitome of single-entry accounting: rulers inscribe the state on durable materials, and no other voices are considered. ### Imperial Recordkeeping (1000 BCE–476 CE) As the single-entry accounting period progressed, the written state expanded from pharaohs painstakingly etching “I am god” in temples to the Roman Empire, which conducted regular censuses of its citizenry for taxation and military conscription purposes across its vast empire. Centralized empires grew incredibly powerful due to the written state accumulating in their power centers (this can almost be compared to data centers accumulating the state today). **This transition allowed complex legal and political knowledge to be standardized and disseminated more widely**, reinforcing social hierarchies and state authority across diverse linguistic and cultural groups. These written records ensured that rulers could feed armies, reward loyalty, and maintain economic dominance. It allowed rulers to extend control beyond their immediate presence, preserve decisions across generations, and manage growing complexity as societies transitioned from tribes to States. A tribe with zero-entry mutating state, could not, at any level, compete against a Classical State with a centralized repository of permanent written state. Tribes were absorbed or conquered into centralized empires, single-entry state **allowed civilization to scale** and centralized powerhouses emerged—the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman empires were all products of this period. As writing evolved, cursive scripts, which were easier to write, were developed for everyday use and the mediums of state transmission became more accessible through parchment and later paper. The written state became more widespread and accessible each successive year. In Western Europe, this period culminated in the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire’s fall at the end of this period can reasonably be traced to a failure of single-entry written state (decree) to scale and propagate throughout a vast empire. Under attack from multiple sides; they couldn’t coordinate the state of The State. **The state had become too centralized**. * * * Governments didn’t even try to print fiat currencies during this age; instead, they used commodities such as gold and silver—this was the coinage age. In a single-entry state, there simply wasn’t enough trust. All the state was controlled top-down, from one party, the ruler at the top of the State. Giving citizens fiat currency would have seemed like a laughable concept, when the rulers can just change the supply (without state transmission methods to even inform all the other parties involved) at any time, without any of the counterbalances of a **double-entry state**. The citizenry could hardly trust their rulers not to forget or erase their land, status, or taxes paid. Each centralized government had full control of the accounting and essentially no accountability. Early written state focused on elite activities rather than the everyday life of ordinary people. **It was expensive to CRUD**. It was a technology that grew cheaper with time. The higher ranking you were in society, the more chance that you had some state stored. Gas fees were expensive! Peasants couldn’t afford to store any state 🥲, _just like they can’t afford to store any state on Ethereum now!_ The written state needed to be protected and enforced. _Unless you had the power to enforce the state, what good was having some written state_? Private written state could serve as a very crude and expensive memory extension device, but that’s about it. What good is recording single-entry state, if you don’t have the power to enforce it? _It was hard to learn to become literate, and even you did…your single-entry written state doesn’t accomplish anything without the power to enforce it_. _Might as well not record it at all._ **Peasants at the bottom of society did not have the luxury to record much state.** ### _Defining Patterns of Single-Entry Accounting_ **Forms of State**: _Early States, City States, Classical States_ **Accounting:** _Single-Entry_ Now we have one-sided accounting and no accountability! These centralized Classical States imposed some accountability on the citizenry, while keeping the rulers free of accountability. The ruler directed the scribes to write what he wanted, and that state was unquestioned. **Public state contents**: _Writing was limited to essentials—administration, propaganda, and religion—since literacy was rare and these systems were new._ - **Laws and Edicts** (Code of Ur-Nammu & Hammurabi Code: laws on clay tablets). Early laws, like Ur-Nammu’s code (c. 2100 BCE), were recorded to enforce state authority. - **Land Ownership** - **Taxation**: Lists of tribute and land ownership. - **Religious Texts**: To align the king’s rule with divine will, a key source of legitimacy. - **Military and labor records:** Sumerian Kings (c. 2500 BCE): Tablets from Girsu list workers conscripted for canal-building or soldiers for campaigns, often by name or group. - **Roles**: Royal Titles and Proclamations (only for higher ranking people, no records or ID for most) - **Censuses**: The Roman Empire conducted regular population counts for taxation and military conscription. The state contains the power center's laws, regulations, history, not really any identity documents for the masses, until later during the Roman Empire (that's still verbal at best, the king can't even identify most of his constituents. The delegation of taxes is easier if we narrow the band down to lords (lords collect from peasants, trickle up economics)) **Methods of state transmission:** _Written._ _Clay tablets, stone, marble, papyrus scrolls, parchment, codices, and eventually paper._ The progression of writing surfaces directly shaped how States recorded and transmitted power. Beginning with clay tablets in Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE, where cuneiform marks were pressed into soft clay and then hardened, civilizations established the first permanent records. Stone and marble followed, with Egyptian hieroglyphics and Greek inscriptions projecting State authority through their permanence and public visibility. The development of papyrus in Egypt around 3000 BCE marked a revolutionary shift toward portable, lightweight writing surfaces. Made from pressed reed strips, papyrus enabled longer texts and greater information density, supporting expanded bureaucracies across the Mediterranean while still remaining largely in elite hands. Parchment and vellum (prepared animal skins) emerged around 200 BCE, offering greater durability than papyrus and enabling the transition from scrolls to bound codices, though their resource-intensive production maintained barriers to widespread literacy. Paper, invented in China around 105 CE and slowly spreading westward, finally democratized writing by combining affordability with practicality. Reaching Europe by the 12th century, paper's relatively simple manufacturing process gradually transformed access to written records, laying the groundwork for the print revolution and the transition to more distributed state-keeping systems. Each successive medium not only stored information more efficiently but progressively widened access to the state. **Effort to propagate and maintain the state:** _Very High_ The state wasn't really meant to be duplicated; the duplication qualities of it were very low: carving it into stone was hard, few people were trained to write and read, the materials to duplicate it were non-existent (paper wasn't invented until the 1st century CE), and it was unenforceable anyways. Whatever state you marked down wasn't enforceable without power. - **Readability was an issue:** literacy was limited (estimates at 1-25% of the population during these periods). - **Writability was an issue:** most people who needed documents written would employ professional scribes to write on their behalf. - **Updating was an issue:** changing state etched in marble is a lot harder than using cntr+z/x/c/v to copy and paste. - **Deleting was an issue:** _I don’t envy the scribe who misspelled the pharaoh’s name_. Society needed to teach these skills to everyone who wanted to interact with the system[^5]. **Mutability/permanence of state (trust)**: _In some ways, the state became a lot more permanent (etched in stone will last forever). In other ways, very brittle (can be changed anytime by a single party without oversight)._ Despite its permanence, the written state remained fundamentally untrustworthy—etched in stone yet vulnerable to manipulation by those who controlled the chisel. States using the single-entry written methods weren’t able to maintain trusted state agreements such as fiat currency, identity documents, or legal contracts, in the state. Marcus Aurelius could afford to write a small book called _Meditations_, but how many non-elite Roman authors do you know? **Who controls the public state?** _The rulers and their scribes._ The written state records of this era weren’t objective chronicles—they were subjective States histories. Each clay tablet and stone inscription was carefully crafted to glorify the ruler, deify their actions, and justify their conquests. With so few actors having access to CRUD the state, they didn’t produce exactly democratic viewpoints. **Synchronization**: The single-entry written state could not be synchronized across the kingdom because it could not be easily duplicated (CRUD). The prerequisite to synchronization is CRUD. **7-Byzantine Generals Problem**: _Not solved._ Seven generals could surround a city and write permanent tablets of their intent, but had no way of transmitting them safely through the city (without information loss or mutation). ### Illustration of Single-Entry Accounting #### Part 1 ![[Single-Entry Accounting Part1.png|90%]] #### Part 2 ![[Single-Entry Accounting Part2.png|90%]] * * * Writing enabled more complex and accountable bureaucracies, allowing rulers to tax, regulate, and enforce laws over larger territories and populations. It also facilitated long-distance trade, diplomatic correspondence, and the codification of laws and religious texts, which in turn strengthened the authority of kings and centralized states. The societal impact was profound: writing increased state power, enabled the rise of bureaucratic classes, and laid the foundation for legal and literary traditions that shaped cultures for millennia. The written state was written by the winners; state of the opposing conquered tribes was destroyed. The losers became stateless slaves assimilated into the winning States, unable to write the state. We will never know or learn about their States. ## Double-Entry Accounting – Nation States (500 – Present) ### Medieval Europe (500–1500 CE) Sometime after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the centralized single-entry state fractured into a patchwork of feudal States in Medieval Europe. It was a period of volatility; both States and their states were mutating and diverging. Without a powerful centralized single-entry state in Rome, three effects occurred simultaneously: 1. There was a power vacuum (without a centralized source of power to propagate and enforce the state throughout the empire, smaller States ended up with diverging states. They had the same Roman culture but it was rapidly diverging due to a lack of single-entry state. 2. These parties needed to make agreements and transmit their state to their neighbors, in order to survive and coordinate as a patchwork of smaller kingdoms in a hostile world. The need to coordinate defenses, form alliances, and manage resources against these threats arose. 3. The state became more transmissible: literacy increased, state transmission materials improved (paper had made its way to Europe from China), the absence of single-entry “words of god” also made the state more update-able. All three contributed to the development of a more sophisticated and transmissible **double-entry state**. The defining feature of this period is: duplication. _Multiple parties tracked and updated the same state, to ensure verifiability._ The Church’s spread reinforced its role as a record-keeper, a continuation of Roman archival practices. Bishops and monks documented ecclesiastical and secular affairs, from tithe ledgers to royal charters. This was critical in post-Roman Europe, where secular bureaucracies were weak. By the 9th century, parish registers and monastic archives were widespread, laying the groundwork for later medieval legal and administrative systems. The Church, as a record-keeper, facilitated access to laws. Monasteries and cathedrals stored copies of royal charters or statutes, and clerics often read them to illiterate populations. **The churches became the decentralized nodes as repositories of the state in a fragmented period during Medieval Europe.** ![[cathedral.jpg|700]] ![[cathedral.avif|700]]_We’re talking about cathedrals that took centuries to build – their function was to_ preserve the state. _The church should really be thought of as the early double-entry accounting age’s data centers._ By the medieval period in Europe (c. 500–1500 CE), the Church and secular notaries played a key role in contract duplication. Charters and indentures—named for their “indented” edges, which allowed matching copies to verify authenticity—were common. These were written on a single parchment, then cut irregularly so each party held a matching half. The Church’s scriptoria often produced these documents, as monks and clerics were trusted scribes. The practice of duplicating contracts was driven by the need for mutual trust and dispute resolution in societies with growing trade and literacy. It became standard as writing materials (papyrus, parchment, and later paper) became more accessible and legal systems emphasized verifiable agreements. ![[indenture.webp]]*This “indenture” contract is named after its indented edges, which were cut in a way that duplicated the state to enhance verifiability. Multiple parties started demanding shared ownership of the state.* **Communal Movements (11th–13th Centuries)**: In Italian city-states like Florence and Siena, urban citizens (merchants, artisans) formed communes that negotiated charters with rulers or bishops, granting local governance rights. These charters were duplicated, with copies held by communes and sometimes posted publicly. Citizens demanded access to these written agreements to ensure rulers honored them. By the 13th century, notaries in Italy and France standardized duplicated contracts, with copies for each party and a register kept by the notary. ### The Magna Carta (1215) The Magna Carta, signed in 1215 CE, marked a pivotal moment in recorded history, influencing how writing was used for governance, legal documentation, and societal organization in England and beyond. While it did not revolutionize writing systems or technologies overnight, it catalyzed changes in the purpose, accessibility, and impact of written records—particularly in the context of legal and political history. The Magna Carta established the principle that even kings were subject to written law, shifting the role of written records from mere royal decrees to binding agreements between rulers and subjects. The Magna Carta was not a single document but a widely circulated text. This document, recorded on parchment in Latin, was copied, distributed, and preserved in multiple locations (e.g., cathedral archives), setting a precedent for written charters as tools of accountability. This practice of disseminating legal texts to local communities encouraged literacy and public awareness of written law. It was read publicly in courts and by the late 13th century, copies of the Magna Carta and related statutes were sent to sheriffs and posted in public spaces. It established key principles, such as limiting the king's authority, guaranteeing certain legal protections, and ensuring that justice could not be sold, denied, or delayed. **The Magna Carta inspired accountability**[^6]**.** - **Rule of Law**: The Magna Carta asserted that even the king was subject to the law, a revolutionary idea in a feudal context where royal power was often absolute. _The king no longer had the sole hierarchical authority to control the state_. - **Elite Focus**: Like earlier periods, recorded history post-1215 focused on royal, noble, and ecclesiastical activities, with limited documentation of commoners’ lives, though manorial court rolls began capturing peasant disputes. It ensured the public state of society was accepted by all parties with power (the elites). - **Duplication of state:** Copies were made and sent to cathedrals and shires, with some read aloud to the public. This marked an early instance of broader access to a “law” document, though not yet for common citizens. It took time (a few centuries) for peasants to truly gain access to the public state. - **Common Law:** The Magna Carta catalyzed the development of English common law, which became a global legal framework. Unlike Roman civil law’s reliance on codified statutes, common law emphasized judicial precedent, but both systems valued consistent legal processes. - **Rights and Obligations:** Legal records became more central to governance, with scribes and clerks documenting agreements to limit arbitrary rule. This marked a shift toward constitutionalism, where written documents defined rights and obligations, influencing later medieval parliaments. - **Double-Entry Bureaucracies:** The Magna Carta’s clauses, such as those on taxation and justice, required detailed records to enforce compliance (e.g., tracking feudal dues or court proceedings). This spurred the growth of bureaucratic systems in England, with royal chanceries and exchequers producing more systematic written records. The volume and organization of public records increased, with dedicated officials (e.g., clerks of the rolls) ensuring permanence and accessibility. This professionalization of record-keeping laid the groundwork for modern archival systems. - _It scaled well (multiple parties were incentivized to transmit and attempt to synchronize the same public state). Instead of just one party ramming it down everyone's throats._ - **Scientific and Administrative Documentation**: Universities and royal courts recorded scientific treatises (e.g., Roger Bacon’s works) and administrative manuals, reflecting the bureaucratic precision spurred by legal reforms. ![[magna-carta.png|600]] While many of its 63 clauses dealt with feudal issues specific to the time, such as land rights and taxation, its broader significance lies in the concept that even the king was subject to the law, laying a foundational idea for constitutional governance. Its importance grew over time, evolving from a practical resolution of a political crisis into a symbol of liberty and the rule of law. The Magna Carta influenced later legal documents, including the English Bill of Rights (1689) and the U.S. Constitution (1787), particularly in establishing principles like due process and trial by jury. Though only a few clauses remain in effect today, its legacy endures as a cornerstone of democratic ideals, inspiring movements for individual rights and legal accountability worldwide. It marked a critical step toward curbing absolute power and fostering the idea that governance should be based on mutual obligations between ruler and ruled. The Magna Carta was the defining document of the double-entry period. Its legacy—written accountability—persists in constitutions, open government data, and freedom-of-information laws. Within 1215–1500, its immediate effect was to formalize and expand legal and administrative writing. This democratization of access to legal texts foreshadowed the later use of printing for mass communication. ### The Print Revolution (1500-1600s) In the mid-15th century, Johannes Gutenberg's printing press ignited the Print Revolution—a technological leap that would democratize knowledge and fundamentally reshape human civilization. Few innovations have had such profound consequences for the course of history. By transforming how information was duplicated and distributed[^7], Gutenberg set in motion changes that would echo through centuries, permanently altering the relationship between populations and power structures. ![[print-revolution.webp|600]] While the Magna Carta democratized access to the state for the elites, the printing press democratized access to the state for the masses. **It enabled the trivial duplication of the state**. The printing press is the first time in human history when the masses were able to share their thoughts as semi-private written state. For the first millions of years of evolution, this wasn’t accessible. Until the 1500s, ideas of almost the entire global populace were unable to be captured and shared. Meanwhile, the church’s official doctrine—its public state—dominated medieval life. #### Duplication of state The Print Revolution enabled a cheaper create function, changing the dynamics of CRUD access to all written state: create became trivial, read became easier (as literacy increased), update became easier (create an updated copy), but delete became relatively more difficult (due to the trivial ease of create). This enabled the mass production of texts; making written records cheaper, more standardized, and widely accessible. > _“__One hand-copied book in the 14th century cost as much as a house and libraries cost a small fortune. The largest European library in 1300 was the university library of Paris, which had 300 total manuscripts. By the 1490s, when Venice was the book-printing capital of Europe, a printed copy of a great work by Cicero only cost a month’s salary for a school teacher_ \[@roos7WaysPrinting2019\].” The printing press also eliminated the erroneous mutations in duplicate copies. The create function became effectively lossless. The accuracy and rapid speed with which ideas could be duplicated and transmitted created a powerful combination. It wasn’t necessarily the speed at which books could spread, but the accuracy with which the original data was copied. With duplicated printed formulas and mathematical tables in hand, scientists could trust the fidelity of existing data and devote energy to breaking new ground. Lossless trivial duplication increased trust in the data and accelerated the Renaissance — enabling the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. **The combination of trivial and lossless duplication increased information velocity.** Knowledge is power. The Print Revolution really democratized access to the state—especially semi-private state. Everyone had access. It helped disseminate knowledge wider and faster than ever before. > Interestingly, accurate duplication with less malleable copies of the semi-private written state made the public state more malleable (it changed quicker and more rapidly as the information velocity increased). When people started printing their own versions, it splintered the widely accepted stranglehold of the public state by the Catholic Church. #### A battle of “he who controls The State controls the state” vs. “he who controls the state controls The State” ensued. Whereas, before 1450, the church and its nodes throughout Europe had a stranglehold on the public state, the only dominant voice. The invention of the printing press drastically changed these dynamics in favor of semi-private state disseminated widely by the masses. Knowledge could no longer be contained, the masses had control of the state for the first time in history. After the printing press — **people no longer needed to rely on the church to store the public state, it became widely duplicated**. **The Empire Strikes Back: Censorship** As critical and alternative opinions entered the public discourse, those in power tried to censor it. Before the printing press, censorship was easy; all it required was killing the “heretic” and burning his or her handful of notebooks. Before the printing press, semi-private state couldn’t spread, because it couldn’t be easily duplicated. The Church maintained control over the public state precisely because dissenting voices couldn’t effectively propagate their ideas—any potential heretic would be silenced before they could assemble the small army of scribes necessary to challenge the dominant narrative. The Catholic Church and European monarchies waged a desperate battle against the democratization of knowledge unleashed by the Print Revolution. In 1559, the Vatican established the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books), a comprehensive catalog of texts deemed heretical, immoral, or dangerous to faith. Monarchs across Europe similarly established printing privileges, licensing systems, and royal censors. Yet these institutions found themselves in an unwinnable war against an exponentially expanding universe of texts; for every book they banned or burned, printers produced thousands more copies that circulated through underground networks. This battle for control of the state revealed a fundamental shift in power dynamics—the technology of information distribution had outpaced the institutions of information control. All the suppressed voices, the “radicals” and “heretics,” came out at the same time. The Print Revolution enabled all these voices to be heard for the first time. Mass movements against the singular church controlled public state by "heretics" and “radicals” toppled the church’s staunch monopoly on information. The Church's response—burning books, excommunicating authors, and expanding the Index—proved futile against this tide. This transformation marked the beginning of the end for monarchical and ecclesiastical monopolies over the public state, ultimately paving the way for The Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. Ironically, a machine that was first used to duplicate bibles ended up toppling the church’s hold over society[^8]. > After the Print Revolution, it became nearly impossible to destroy all copies of a dangerous idea…and the more dangerous a book was claimed to be, the more the people wanted to read it. Every time the Church published a list of banned books, the booksellers knew exactly what they should print next \[@roos7WaysPrinting2019\]. Society transformed from a heavy emphasis on transmitting identical public state (allowing social cohesion) to the mass transmission of semi-private state (allowing for new ideas to flourish without needing the entity of the State onboard). He who controls the state controls The State had defeated he who controls The State controls the state. _It’s arguable that this is what differentiated Western Europe around this time, enabling its dominance in the upcoming centuries._ #### Information Powered the Scientific Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution (1700-1800) > “For millennia, science was a largely solitary pursuit. Great mathematicians and natural philosophers were separated by geography, language and the sloth-like pace of hand-written publishing. Not only were handwritten copies of scientific data expensive and hard to come by, they were also prone to human error.With the newfound ability to publish and share scientific findings and experimental data with a wide audience, science took great leaps forward in the 16th and 17th centuries \[@roos7WaysPrinting2019\].” The duplication, transmission, and sharing of the semi-private state enabled progress and advancement like never seen before. With the newfound ability to inexpensively mass-produce books on every imaginable topic, revolutionary ideas and priceless ancient knowledge were placed in the hands of every literate European, whose numbers doubled every century. _Since then, uncountable world wars and technological innovation. The quicker the state propagates, the quicker it mutates. This made the world fundamentally more unstable. Increasing democratization of knowledge during the Enlightenment led to the development of public opinion and its power to topple the ruling elite._ **The impact of the Printing Press cannot be understated.** It accelerated the Renaissance and was responsible for the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment Era. It unlocked widespread literacy and introduced machines stealing the jobs of humans, foreboding the Industrial Revolution. Rapid dissemination of the state unlocked the Modern Era. The Print Revolution paved the way for the rise of Nation States, which are distinguished from the Medieval Period before then by who controls the state. During the Medieval Era, **he who controls The State controlled the state** — when the masses took control of the state from the elites during the Print Revolution, it flipped the paradigm to **he who controls the state controls The State** and paved the way for modern media in newspapers, radio, television, and social networks. That made all the difference in the transition from a medieval world (dim) to the en(light)enment and our current world—culminating in the invention of electrification (light). ### The Modern Era (1850–1980) #### Electrification We consider the greatest invention in the history of mankind to be electrification—electricity powers everything in our world. Gaining control of it was more than momentous. We could now transfer state through channeled electricity, at nearly the speed of light, all around the world. The Modern Era was born. Electricity allowed the state to be illuminated and expand beyond writing. The modern era rapidly expanded the speed and mediums of state storage: brilliant photographs, audio recordings birthed hip-hop, video recording captured 3-dimensional life in vivid detail. Electricity itself was also state. Your house lighting up with power when you turn on the lights, duplicated across all of society, is state. The light itself changed the status of society. Along with natural resources, electricity powered everything. This new ability to power state changed everything. The state powers everything. There is no such thing as a rich low-energy country. ![[no-rich-low-energy-country.jpeg|600]] States which learned to channel this new-found state of electricity and natural resources in the most efficient manner grew faster and prospered—conquering rivals. The most illuminated states created the most illuminated States. ### The Digital Age (1980–Present) Digital data has emerged as our latest state evolution born of electricity (each past state gives way to the current state). Our world has radically changed since 1980 with the advent of personal computing and the internet, data centers, and now AI. **Personal Computing:** Allowed the masses access to CRUD digital data. **The Internet:** While the printing press enabled trivial duplication of the state, and gave the masses access to CRUD the state, the internet enabled trivial worldwide transmission of all the state forms enabled by capturing electricity. **Disseminating and sharing data became trivially easy**. Search engines allowed us to find any knowledge or information available in the vast human libraries of knowledge. **Data Centers:** 45 years after the advent of personal computing, the state of society has become overwhelmingly stored as digital data. Technology has eaten the world and data has become the single most valuable resource in society. Data Centers store most of our state today. The state became captured in data centers, exactly the inverse of single-entry accounting—when the masses couldn’t gain entry to the state. The masses have transitioned through the period of the Print Revolution, where they controlled the state, overpowering centralized control, and now back into a feudal setup where the owners of the data centers control and manipulate the state. Corporations and governments can stop & start riots, protests, and control the shared reality using the data everyone depends on, stored in their data centers. **He who controls the state controls the State.** _Individuals depend on the algorithms with their lives and livelihoods, but have no control over the algorithms._ While not giving the masses access to the state has become untenable and sub-optimal, control of the state once again belongs to the elite elements of society who work in conjunction to manufacture the truth. The masses have entered into a trap where their own semi-private and private state is being used against them. **_Individuals depend on the algorithms with their lives and livelihoods, but have no control over the algorithms._** 1. _Who controls the feed of news and social media that you see_[^9]_?_ 2. _Who owns your personal and identity data?_ 3. _Who owns the connections between you and your friends and family?_ 4. _Who controls your monetary supply and property deeds?_ **AI** has made it such that humans don’t need to create or duplicate the state, it has created the state altering the state itself. AI takes a mashup of the state, and artificially creates more state out of that. It fucking duplicates! The state is unstoppable, we need to control the state from duplicating itself! Somebody please help us stop the state!!! _AI slop is sloppening the world!_ **Hint: He who controls the State controls the state**. So to regain control of AI, and the state, we need a State which can control this digital state. Our current State structures do not allow us to do this: a Nation State cannot innately: perceive the digital state, synchronize it, track its history, or trust it (every document must be treated with distrust until verified). * * * The entire **double-entry** accounting period is marked by: _a duplication of state which enables greater verification_. By the end of the **double-entry** period: society had mastered state storage from the **single-entry** period, along with state duplication. Greater _verification_ enabled greater trust, supporting the evolution of complex social contracts. This afforded the Nation States the ability to print paper currencies (double entry accounting made sure they were **almost** always backed by trusty gold in the coffers), have court systems (two parties fight over the state), and democratic decision making systems (multiple parties form a consensus about which state to adopt). ![[evolution-indenture-democracy.png]]*The duplicated state of the indenture scaled into the duplicated state of modern democracy (social contract).* The state required less protection compared to the single-entry period because of its duplication. These days, society trusts essentially all of its state storage (private, semi-private, and public state) to data centers owned by corporations and Nation States (_humans have made the decision that duplicated state owned by the data center is more beneficial than single-entry state made by the data center about them)_. These entities have been given god-like power that pharaohs could only write about. Each subsequent stage of human history has added more permanent and less mutateable state to our collective shared context. We have arrived at an overflow of state. Duplicated everywhere needlessly, not synchronized. Owned by "god-like entities" who manipulate it to control the State and manipulate the truth of society like feudal lords. By the end of the **double-entry** accounting era: all functions of CRUD (create, read, update, delete) and transmission became trivial. What's not trivial? Synchronization, and _verification_ of the lifetime of the state (where did it come from, who made it, who has held it, how much did it cost—the past state of the current state). Society still views its state as individual pieces of content, instead of a singular unified whole. ### Problems of Double-Entry Accounting #### Forgeries There is no single source of truth for the state, and so forgeries were/are easily created. Stories like these from the early in the Medieval age still crop up today as notaries fraudulently change land records across most of the civilized world a millennia later. > “When some powerful monarch made difficulties, there was a strong inducement to produce the required ancient-looking documents. The borderline between justifying legitimate possession and culpable attempts to gain extra territory or privileges, however, is ill-defined. Monks occasionally descended to falsifications of title deeds and charters of exemption. About 1125 a monk of Soissons on his deathbed confessed to a career of professional forgery for gain and admitted fabricating charters for various monasteries, including Westminster Abbey.” From Paleography by \[@williamg.urryPaleographyDecipheringAncient\]. #### Corruption of the state The problem of state corruption happens when a duplication of the state isn’t precise. Once the state is corrupted, it can corrode further and impact all the states duplicated from it. > “If a scribe made a mistake in copying, future scribes using his version are likely to reproduce the error and add others. Sometimes the same muddled passage in a group of manuscripts of a given author can be traced back to damage in an earlier copy, say a section eaten by rodents or impenetrably stained.” \[@williamg.urryPaleographyDecipheringAncient\] It was reduced over time with duplication during the Print Revolution, but remains very relevant today with purposefully created alterations in duplication (since state version changes aren’t tracked). In modern society, a millennia later, we face problems of misinformation and disinformation, as relevant as ever from the trivial use of duplication, worldwide information velocity, and AI’s ability to create state. state corruption imposes very real costs on society: untold wars, ruined relationships, quests for knowledge, and friendly fire have been triggered by a piece of corrupted state, which was simply inaccurately translated somewhere along the chain. The worst part is: individuals don’t even know who to blame for the corrupted state, each piece and update exists in isolation from previous creations. Society cannot scale trust further without identifying the parties responsible for state. A great example of a corrupted state transfer is the United States’ war on Iraq, which started in 2004, and was based on the false pretenses that Iraq had WMDs. - Do we know where those false pretenses came from? No. - Do we know who presented those false pretenses to our leader? No. #### Duplication of the state (lacks Synchronization) A lack of “golden records” doesn’t allow for coordination. For example: society can’t coordinate all the cash in the world, because it isn’t digitally tracked in the public state. We can’t coordinate on where individuals have been or what they’ve done because it’s siloed in the private state of corporations. Individual actors can’t trust each other, because we are separated by corporate entities between us controlling and manipulating the state (and the State). Agreements are ideally stored in one central and secure place and then duplicated between all parties involved—but these records are not automatically updated everywhere upon updates. Disputes are resolved by referring to this central book (which itself can become corrupted). If a law changes in the central record book, that does not change it in all the other sources. When cathedrals stored the public state during medieval times, it was most likely damn near impossible to change the public state in one place and have that information transferred across the Christian world in an effective lossless manner. If a law book or religious text is updated by the central authority, it doesn't necessarily update the copy you have at home. Disputes are restored by referring to this central book, assuming it remained rigid (and there are receipts with signatures to prove if its state changed). Power & informational advantage always stays with those who have access to this master record. Let’s examine the story of someone who would like to do a name change, step by step: 1. Go and file a motion to change the master record of your name stored by their government. 2. Go and change each duplicate record stored by everyone you’ve ever come across and all the thousands of entities where you have recorded the previous name. 3. _Good luck with step 2 buddy!_ 😉 It’s a bit of a mega-step! 😂😂😂 In the current paradigm of duplication, without synchronization, it’s often very difficult or impossible to update the state everywhere. #### Translation of the state state is often stored in multiple languages and forms of measurement. Interfacing with these is not always easy. > A historical example: “Dating of books and documents also offers problems. Even when a precise date is given, the dating system of a given time and a given area must be checked because the year began at different times in different territories, and there were even variations in the same country. Calendar reforms initiated in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII, for example, were not adopted in Protestant England until 1752. If a year of a monarch’s reign is given as a date, it is necessary to determine whether the reign is counted from his accession or coronation. Moreover, few books were dated, the dated title page being nonexistent in medieval works, though sometimes a final paragraph, the colophon, supplies a date with the scribe’s name and place of work. Important documents, such as English 12th-century royal charters, are undated \[@williamg.urryPaleographyDecipheringAncient\].” #### Conflicts over the state Without a single golden record, conflicts over what the state is naturally arise. These are often legitimate conflicts of differing perspectives, as we mentioned in the beginning of the article: combining multiple private and semi-private states into a public state, is no small feat. Here, the process must be repeated from two fractured versions of the state. This comes up often in court cases. #### History of the state There is nothing in any piece of state that innately ties it to any other piece, or to its own past history. Every book written or JPEG created exists as its own standalone object. The state can appear and disappear, past states are not tracked (tracking is enabled by constant synchronization). Innately, there are no signs in the written, audio, video, or digital state if it contains inaccuracies, where it came from, who it belongs to, or what state it’s linked to. * * * ### _Defining Patterns of Double-Entry Accounting_ **Forms of State**: _Ecclesiastical States, Nation States_ **Accounting**: _Double-Entry. Duplicated accounting + Some accountability!_ A key characteristic of double-entry accounting age is accounting + accountability. This differed drastically from the single-entry accounting age and facilitated the steady rising of information velocity and trust in society. **Public state contents:** _Everything_ The state could be stored about every individual and the immense knowledge of the world and its history. By the end of this age, we are overloaded with information. Data is everywhere about everything publicly accessible with the internet (just about all sorts of data, including too much private state is in the public state). Every kind of data, at this point we all have access to all the world’s library of data. - Medical research, people’s blogs, people’s life events, etc... - Democratic elections, Treaties between countries - Fiat Currency, Legal Proceedings - Encyclopedias of knowledge, news, social media - Identity and history records (crime records, donation records), Credit reports, Crime records - Photographs of the wonders of the world, Movies, Recorded Music _What is really left out of the public state these days? Private moments, informational advantages, and crime?_ **Methods of state transmission**: _Written, Photography, Audio, Video, Digital Data_ **Effort to propagate and maintain the state**: **_Medium_** _at the beginning during the Medieval Period,_ **_Easy_** _during the Print Revolution, and_ **_Trivial_** _in_ _the Modern Age._ The ability to propagate and maintain state expanded every year since the double-entry period started—to where are now in the digital age—overflowing with all forms of duplicated, trivially transmissible data. **Mutability/permanence of state (trust)**: _With multiple copies, the state became more permanent and less malleable than ever before._ Mutating the state became harder because of multiple duplicates, but it still mutates. Duplication does not prevent mutation nor does it ensure permanence. It only creates more copies, which helps with verifiability and preservation. **Who controls the public state?** _Many entities_ Throughout the multiple epochs of this long era, many entities have had control of the public state: scribes, the church, printing press operators, governments, media, social media, data centers, and even democratic citizens through voting: are all correct answers. **Synchronization**: _Not Synchronized_ Instead, it's duplicated all over the place and can still mutate as it duplicates without a verifiable known root or end. The public cannot easily verify where the state comes from or has been—we cannot effectively track the history of the state (it can disappear and reappear in our systems). **7 Byzantine Generals Problem**: _Not Solved_ The generals can send messages attempting to synchronize the attack utilizing centralized data servers, owned by one or more of the generals, but these messages hold no true weight. These messages are communication—not coordination. The generals committing the messages do not commit any verifiable resources to an attack, their communicated messages can also be edited or censored by the general(s) owning the centralized server. ### Illustration of Double-Entry Accounting #### Part 1 ![[Double-Entry Accounting Part1.excalidraw.png|90%]] #### Part 2 ![[Double-Entry Accounting Part2.excalidraw.png|90%]] The defining feature of the **double-entry** age was **duplication**: multiple copies and multiple accounts of events enabled more verification, transmissibility, and permanence in the state. Comparatively, documents during the single-entry period were hard to copy (clay tablets), less transmissible, and easier to destroy. As we progressed from Medieval Europe through the Magna Carta, the Printing Revolution, and into the Modern Era, the state evolved from a guarded resource to a widely accessible utility. Creating, reading, updating, deleting, and transmitting the state became increasingly trivial. This widespread duplication fundamentally transformed society by distributing verification power among multiple parties, establishing unprecedented trust through shared records. The resulting stability enabled revolutionary social contracts—democratic governance, fiat currencies, identity systems—that collectively elevated both the legitimacy and trust in the State and the permanence of the state. History is still being written by the winners, those who can duplicate their state the fastest and destroy others’ copies propagate. Memetics have become a weapon of war. _How many copies of your enemies’ state have you destroyed today?_ Tech corporations are very selective about what data they train AI models on. Social media companies destroy state at the behest of corporate and government interests. The winners duplicate, and the losers’ stories are drowned out of the state—until they don’t exist. ## Triple-Entry Accounting – Synchronized States (Coming Soon) Humanity is about to enter a new epoch in state tracking, which will radically alter the nature of States. We are about to transition from the double-entry age of duplication to the triple-entry age of synchronization. This will start a new age, **The Age of Synchronicity**. _All of society will move as one_. We refer to triple-entry States as Synchronized States because they effectively synchronize the entire state of the system globally, at nearly the speed of light, using distributed systems and algorithms. Society Protocol is a Synchronized State. Triple-entry accounting is an evolution born of blockchain technology. Bitcoin, launched in 2009, aimed to free money from State control, using a decentralized ledger where every transaction in the state is verified by all. It created a synchronized "historical ledger," a transparent record of value flowing through time. Synchronized States like Society Protocol scale this to society itself: where money, identities, relationships, property, and laws are tracked quasi-immutably, not by one ruler or court, but by a network. In a Synchronized State, the state is simultaneously _duplicated widely_ and _stored in a singular chronological Timeline_—propagating a permanent singular shared state across all of society. Only one chronological golden record exists at each point in Time, and this golden record is permissionlessly accessible to all participants to CRUD worldwide. The state is immutable[^10], a significant portion of society is incentivized to remain duplicating and synchronizing it in unison. The individual actors of Synchronized States themselves uphold the state and subsequently, their shared reality and its State—anyone with an account can participate. ![[uphold-the-state.jpg|80%]] The state exists on a singular _Timeline_, including all past states and a current state. It transitions from one _time_ to another across all of society simultaneously via an algorithm known as a State Transition Function (STF). The STF defines the algorithmic rules for state transitions. ![[STF.excalidraw.png|90%]] Synchronized States are data societies bound by what people perceive as valuable: the state and the algorithms governing it. Unlike the past ages, when the state was stored by gatekeepers: in temples by scribes, cathedrals by monks, or data centers by nerds—the state of Synchronized States is stored as a _duplicated computer program_. **History:** Due to this synchronization, we can see where the state came from, where it’s been, and where it’s going. This observability, accessibility, and auditability creates a new level of automated trust in the state—and therefore, the State. More trust than has ever existed during the single-entry period, when rulers etched whatever they desired into the state or the double-entry period, where those who controlled the church or data centers controlled and manipulated the state. We can observe and analyze how the state has evolved and mutated at every past state throughout the _Timeline_. All events in the past are permanent (not malleable at all), trustable, auditable and observable. Observers can replay any event or a group of historical events from the past in the Timeline with perfect fidelity—these are known as _flashbacks_. **Agency:** Synchronized States fundamentally rewrite the power dynamics of human society. For the first time in history, individuals possess true censorship resistance—the ability to create, read, update, and delete their own piece of the public state without permission from centralized intermediaries. No longer must society depend on privileged scribes carving tablets in temples or technology companies controlling our digital existence via data centers; individuals worldwide interact directly with a globally synchronized timeline, modifying the state according to their identity and algorithmic rights. In this new paradigm, each individual becomes sovereign and has agency over their identity, property, and data—a revolution in human agency unparalleled since the birth of democratic governance. **Geographic Location:** The state of Synchronized States will no longer be bound by a single geographical location, it will be _synchronized globally_. This enables globalization in the true meaning of the word: where the State is a network rather than a physical territorial location—allowing for two important effects: 1. Multiple States can exist and overlap in the same territorial boundaries. 2. Previous aggregators of States such as race and creed become significantly less important. ### Society Protocol Society Protocol is a framework to create Synchronized States. The first of its kind, it contains all the essential building blocks to make a Synchronized State optimal for the modern age. Society Protocol is designed from first principles, combining universal laws and societal organizational patterns with the technological capabilities afforded to us today. Between 2030-2100, humanity will witness the most profound societal transformation since the birth of writing itself—the emergence of Synchronized States. This transition represents not merely technological evolution, but civilization's deliberate step into a new epoch. The Age of Synchronicity begins with Society Protocol—a framework that doesn't just enable coordination; it fundamentally rewrites the social contract that has bound humans together for millennia. This isn't incremental change—it's a complete reimagining of how humans organize, coordinate, and create value together at planetary scale. ### Private, Semi-Private, and Public state The line between private, semi-private, and public state has blurred and changed over time. With Synchronized States, we have the ability to delineate exactly where that line should be. Not everything belongs on the public _Timeline_. The wonderful thing about cryptography is that we can attain true verifiable bearer ownership of a piece of private or semi-private state—without ever revealing it, or choosing to reveal it at a point in time of our preference by signing it with our sovereign identities. **Private state** is private data belonging to an individual. It is signed by their identity and can be revealed at any moment in the future to become semi-private or public state. _Items such as journaling, predictions, and proofs naturally belong here_. **Semi-Private state** is encrypted and verifiably shared between a group of individuals, such as a family or corporation, privately. It can later be shared with other individuals or everyone to become a part of the public state. _Things such as group chats and company business plans belong here_. **Public state** is verifiable data signed by sovereign individuals that is publicly accessible on the _Timeline_. _Data such as identities, status, family trees, property ownership, and shared history are stored here._ Throughout humanity's journey—from tribal oral traditions to digital data centers—each evolutionary leap has expanded our capacity to capture, transmit, and secure the state of our collective existence. The emergence of Synchronized States represents not merely the next step, but a quantum leap in this direction. Synchronized States will track more state than during the past human epochs. It will be less mutateable, and more permanent. ### The Benefits of Triple-Entry Accounting for Society **Golden Record** (single source of consensus)**:** - Clear sourcing of all public state data from one central place. - Instantaneous updates to the single source of truth. Governance decisions, such as laws or taxes, propagate instantaneously throughout the entire State. - _Algorithmic accountability_: We can act on the public state algorithmically in ways which weren’t possible before. - Unlike the Founding Fathers of the USA, who simultaneously wrote “All men are created equal” in the Constitution, yet possessed slaves—constitutions can be automatically algorithmically enforced in the Synchronized State. Documents are no longer empty words—up to a judge to interpret—they are solid code acting on objects in the system[^11]. - _Lowering bureaucratic costs_: All the state data which previously needed to be maintained, gate-kept, and controlled by bureaucrats is automatically handled by algorithms. _Creating a more fair, cost effective, and verifiable system for everyone._ - Legal deals, money transfers, laws, and taxes are all completed and algorithmically automatically enforced without intermediaries. _No middle-men, no counterparty liability, no bureaucratic costs_. - Immutable records eliminate state corruption, state duplication, and state conflicts. **Clear Historical Record:** - Tracking of all state, including: identity, money, status, relationships, property, governance, laws, organizations, and more—accurately throughout the entire lifetime of a State (and _beyond_ as data). - Enables transparency of all government actions: governance decisions, court systems, laws, constitutionality, and taxes are all immutable and observable—increasing transparency and lowering informational advantages. - Historical transparency of all parties wasn’t possible during the single-entry or double-entry accounting epochs and its lack has caused countless absolutely catastrophic incidents like this: [UK Government Fraud](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/20/infected-blood-scandal-cover-up-inquiry-concludes). - Observability, analytics, and auditability of where deepfakes (and other forms of harmful state) enter society from, where they propagate, and which actors are responsible. **Agency:** - Each individual actor is able to own their identity, property, and data as bearer instruments, without centralized intermediaries. - Equalizes access to the state. Everyone can participate in creating the state at simultaneously, as equals: with no specialized gatekeepers or innate class advantages. **Automated Trust:** People are the most valuable asset - Humans spend a lot of their energy establishing social protocols for hierarchy...automating this saves the human race a tremendous amount of energy in a fair way to pursue more valuable things. Right now, we have millions of people keeping social status aligned throughout our society—each one acting as a gatekeeper. Society Protocol keeps it all in one place, with minimal human effort in a fair and transparent architecture. - Trust of individual actors and groups in the system is based on their clear immutable historical state: reputation. This allows all individuals to extend the appropriate amount of trust to the actors around them, based off their historical reputation, individuals’ reputation precedes them more than ever. - For example, ten pirates who found a chest of gold on an isolated Caribbean island won’t opaquely turn on each other and kill each other: because others can see their whole history in the state. Immutable transparent state creates better people. _Society Protocol helps solve the problem of_ **_trust_** _for the world._ - The ability to economically stake reputation on individuals, property, and organizations enables global _verifiable_ **curation**. This is especially important for valuing crucial and high value but risky offerings, such as: stem cell therapy, an expensive surgeon, or LASIK eye surgery. **Automated Global Coordination:** - _The sky is the limit_: all of this global synchronized state is algorithmically programmable to algorithmically incentivize and de-incentivize anything and synchronized globally instantly. Using algorithms agreed to by the social layer of the Synchronized State (via initial parameters, constitution, governance), we can mold and shape society in a very cohesive way. _Society will be able to coordinate people at levels never dreamed of before_ Society Protocol uses this to align each individual actor’s explicit status to their value to the State at each point in _time_ on the _Timeline_. **AI**: - Synchronized States contain a vast repository of authentic human interaction—a living archive of verifiable social data that serves as the ideal foundation for training AI systems. - Allows AI agents to interact with the state—in both an economic system and language which AI can natively understand and interact with_—computer code_. - Synchronized States establish sovereign identities for both human and artificial intelligence—transforming AI from mere tools into first-class citizens with verifiable histories, accountable actions, and governable identities. For the first time in history, intelligent machines can exist as distinct entities alongside humans in the social fabric, participating in and being bound by the same social contract and synchronized reality. **Metaverse:** - Allows metaverse implementations with a single root of identity, and an overlay over life interactions; transforming life into something very similar to a MMORPG. **Downsides:** - The downsides of triple-entry accounting for historical ledgers as compared to how we do things now are only: computing power and security risks (which both decrease in obstacles over time)—therefore Synchronized States are inevitable. ### The Requirements For Synchronized States to transcend potential and emerge as an evolution to Nation States, they must fulfill all the fundamental requirements of Statehood. **Security:** *A State must provide security to its constituents, protecting them from the threat of other States.* Society Protocol provides security using cryptography, distribution, decentralization, and coordination. **Coordination:** Every State must coordinate (align) its citizens around a shared identity and establish hierarchies suitable for that purpose. Society Protocol coordinates its participants by incentivizing only actions which combine the survival and interest of the Synchronized State as a whole together with each individual participant’s selfish interests. **Group Decision Making (Governance):** Each State must be able to make and propagate good decisions for the group—to survive in a competitive environment. Society Protocol algorithmically facilitates many forms of direct global governance, including all those which came before and other forms which weren't possible during previous ages due to technological limitations. **Roles** (Accreditation): The State must be able to differentiate between every individual’s status, accreditations, and qualifications. Society Protocol interweaves three complementary systems: an energy system to represent explicit status, decentralized identifiers to formally certify and reveal verifiable credentials, and transparent reputation histories reveal demonstrated capabilities. **Control of Resources (Property Rights):** Each State must provide a semblance of property rights for its population. Society Protocol uses cryptography to ensure bearer ownership of fully programmable digital property combined with coordination to ensure control of physical property. **Legitimacy:** Each State must share an accurate layer of shared historical identity (the state). Society Protocol does this with its verifiable _Timeline_. **Borders (Access Control):** Each State must delineate and control access to its boundaries. Society Protocol protects its borders via cryptography and coordination. ### Moats & Network Effects The non-fungibility of every Society Protocol instance establishes tremendous moats which protect the network and deep value stored within the state. > Deep value is not traceable. (Deep and real value cannot be extracted to trade, it is embedded in the whole system.) **Moats of a State:** borders, culture, language, economy, social history / tribal affiliation, physical force **Moats of the state:** Each individual’s identity, status, relationships, organizations, and history are stored in the state. All their friends’ state, history, connections are there. **Network Effects:** Instances of P2P networks exhibit superlinear growth characteristics. As the network size (n) increases, the potential connections and value grow according to Metcalfe's Law, which states that the value is proportional to n². - The more an instance of Society Protocol grows, the more superlinearly powerful it becomes. * * * ### _Defining Patterns of Triple-Entry Accounting_ **Forms of State**: _Synchronized States_ **Accounting:** _Full Accounting & Full Accountability_ All public state interactions are chronologically recorded in the _Timeline_ for the entire lifetime of the Synchronized State. Additionally, since data is the format of the state; the entire state can be algorithmically analyzed and acted upon, using computation. **Public state contents:** _Everything that’s relevant to the public state._ - Instances of Society Protocol track: identity (who is it), money (who paid what), status (who holds power), social graphs and relationships (who knows whom), group decision making (governance), property rights (who owns what), organizations (corporations, religions, and family trees), and more across history in the public state. Since we have a clear delineation between the private, semi-private, and public state. It’s optimal to only place data that belongs in the public state, meaning it is useful for the functioning of public society, there. **Methods of state transmission:** _Digital Data_ It’s also possible that we discover new mediums in the future! **Effort to propagate and maintain the state:** _Essentially no effort (running a program)._ Installing occasional updates to the program is all the effort necessary to propagate and synchronize the state worldwide. **Mutability/permanence of state (trust)**: Quasi-_Immutable and Quasi-Permanent!_ _Change is the only constant in this universe_. Nothing is truly immutable and permanent, but relatively speaking, Synchronized States are a massive leap towards immutability and permanence. - Immutability: It’s possible to fork history out of a Synchronized State and change its history and ruleset altogether, but requires widespread social consensus and coordination, and still leaves copies of the old state in many places. - Permanence: The past is a tail of data, it won't stay forever, but remains at minimum as long as that Synchronized State is alive. **Who controls the public state?** _Everyone_ - Anyone in the system can participate in upholding the Synchronized State itself. - Anyone in the system has permissionless access to the Synchronized State via CRUD. - Anyone in the system can participate in governance[^12], which controls some gated aspects of the public state. **Synchronization**: _Synchronized_ All events in Society Protocol happen in one place and everywhere simultaneously. **7 Byzantine Generals Problem**: _Solved_ The 7 Generals can gather around any city, country, or State and send verifiable encrypted messages to coordinate at nearly the speed of light (enabling complex, multi-step conditional operations and strategies, rather than mere binary attack decisions), which have the full weight of their identity, property, and data behind them. ### Illustration of Triple-Entry Accounting ![[Triple-Entry Accounting.excalidraw.png]] We stand at the threshold of **The Age of Synchronicity**—a transformation as profound as any in human history. The emergence of triple-entry accounting and Synchronized States represents not merely an incremental advancement but a fundamental reimagining of how humanity tracks its shared reality. This evolution will reshape our collective existence at a scale unseen for thousands of years. Throughout history, the winners have written our shared state. Now, history will be written by the _Timeline_—a synchronized, immutable record that belongs to everyone. For the first time, every individual can participate in creating history simultaneously, without specialized gatekeepers or innate class advantages. Will history still be written by the winners? _I’ll let you think about it_. What we know with certainty is that our collective story will be a global collaboration on an unprecedented scale. The future of human coordination begins now, with Society Protocol illuminating the path forward into this new epoch of human coordination. --- ### Bibliography Bitcoin Magazine. (2023, September 27). _What Is The Byzantine Generals Problem?_ Bitcoin Magazine - Bitcoin News, Articles and Expert Insights. [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/glossary/what-is-the-byzantine-generals-problem](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/glossary/what-is-the-byzantine-generals-problem) James Wright. (2014). _The Evolution of Writing | Denise Schmandt-Besserat_. [https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing/](https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing/) Mark, J. J. (2022, November 17). _Cuneiform_. World History Encyclopedia. [https://www.worldhistory.org/cuneiform/](https://www.worldhistory.org/cuneiform/) Roos, D. (2019, August 28). _7 Ways the Printing Press Changed the World_. HISTORY. [https://www.history.com/articles/printing-press-renaissance](https://www.history.com/articles/printing-press-renaissance) William G. Urry. (n.d.). _Paleography | Deciphering Ancient Writing & Manuscripts | Britannica_. Retrieved April 26, 2025, from [https://www.britannica.com/topic/paleography](https://www.britannica.com/topic/paleography) ### Footnotes [^1]: The STF of the universe is physics. What is the STF of The State? _I don’t know. Why did you think I would know?_ I don’t think there’s a word for it in English. [^2]: It’s important to make these kinds of deductions about history, if you want to “unskew the skew.” It’s important to 1) understand where the skew comes from 2) make the proper adjustment. [^3]: The antecedent of the cuneiform script was a system of counting and recording goods with clay tokens. The evolution of writing from tokens to pictography, syllabary, and alphabet illustrates the development of information processing to deal with larger amounts of data in ever greater abstraction. [^4]: This skill was crucial for trade, administration, and religious records, but the complexity of cuneiform—requiring mastery of hundreds of signs—meant that education was exclusive. Scribal schools, called edubba, were expensive and mostly accessible to the sons of the elite, such as nobility, priests, and wealthy merchants. [^5]: The written alphabets themselves were also constantly evolving and mutating without synchronization—these are considered state conflicts. [^6]: This is a key characteristic of the double-entry accounting age: for the first time, the state contains some accounting + accountability. [^7]: German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436, although he was far from the first to automate the book-printing process. Woodblock printing in China dates back to the 9th century and Korean bookmakers were printing with movable metal type a century before Gutenberg [@roos7WaysPrinting2019]. [^8]: The Printing Press ignited a revolution of information by being able to duplicate the state easily. Society Protocol will ignite an evolution of coordination by being able to synchronize the state easily. [^9]: Have you ever considered why you’re not allowed to change, customize, and optimize your feed on any social media networks? [^10]: It’s technically quasi-immutable; there are events known as forks in the blockchain world which can mutate the past and current states. [^11]: Synchronized States will retain judges and courts for subjective decisions. [^12]: This is true in most Society Protocol variants, but autocracies and gated governance mechanisms are also possible.