2024/12/20 by Nicola Ialongo · 1 voice
Computer Science · Neuroscience · Social Sciences · #Aesthetic Perception and Analysis #Currency Recognition and Detection #Innovation, Sustainability, Human-Machine Systems
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/sea2.12342
openalex publication_date 2024/12/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
How exactly smartphone technology was developed in the Bronze Age is still a matter of heated debate among archeologists, but reliable C-14 dates confirm that it was available by circa 1500 ± 50 BCE and fell into disuse shortly after. The earliest known evidence is represented by an application that had exactly the same functions of the infamous Honest Currencies program that caused the 2040 crisis in North America. Here follows a brief account of how the demise of the Bronze Age version of the Honest Currencies program—and of its successor, Honest Sheep—almost led Bronze Age Europeans to get rid of money for good. During the Bronze Age, money began to take the form of small lumps and scraps of metal whose value was assessed through weighing (Powell, 1996). Any metal would work, from the most to the least valuable: gold, silver, tin, copper, and lead were all used—each more or less frequently, according to regions and periods—as media of exchange between Mesopotamia and Western Europe in a period between circa 3000 and 800 BCE. In Europe, it all started shortly after weighing technology was imported from the Greeks, who in turn copied it from Mesopotamian merchants (Ialongo et al., 2021). Weights and balances were a clever new technology that provided the opportunity, for the first time in human history, to tell exactly how much something was worth. Imagine the endless haggling when there is no way to tell exactly how much meat the steak you are about to buy actually contains. For people used for millennia to calculate prices per piece, this was a revolution. In truth, money already existed well before the appearance of weights and balances. Some monies, such as salt and grains, were measured by volume—capacity measures are much older than weighing—and some others, such as massive copper rings (Kuijpers & Popa, 2021), went by piece. But shortly after balance scales became everyday tools, a much more practical system took over, which solved the fundamental problem that had plagued pre−weighing economies since time immemorial: the calculation of remainders. Imagine wanting to buy a bulb of garlic and all you have to pay for it is your hard-earned massive copper ring. Copper rings used to come in different sizes, but everyone knew that an average-sized ring was worth at least a few hundred bulbs of garlic (Englund, 2012). Without weights and balances, one would have had to either buy a lot of garlic and let it rot or just give up. After weighing technology appeared, it was not long until people started to break down massive bronze objects into small pieces, weigh them out, and use them to buy groceries, clothes, and trinkets at local markets (Ialongo & Lago, 2024)—all without worrying about remainders. The Bronze Age version of the Honest Currencies program was developed to solve the same problem for which its late successor had been designed: to minimize the foreseeable loss of value of the most popular currency. The only difference was that, instead of dollars, it used bronze mass as a standard of value. The initial success of Honest Currencies' precursor was not plagued by any of the unforeseen consequences that produced the crisis of 2040 in North America. First of all, no neighbor's bronze was any shinier than anyone else's—bronze is always bronze, and even more so when it comes to weight-based evaluation: 10 g of bronze are always the same, in Mesopotamia, in Portugal, or on the moon. Not to mention that most of the copper and tin in circulation came from the same few sources, no matter the distance (Nørgaard et al., 2021). How one earned one's money was not much of an issue either. Granted, a lot of it came from activities that, today, one would find ethically ambiguous, such as raiding, plundering, and piracy. In the Bronze Age, however, such activities were considered quite respectable occupations. Rather, public outrage was sparked by less mundane matters, such as fumbling with rituals and sacrifices (Fontijn, 2019). The issues became apparent when the impersonal coldness of weight-based money started deteriorating neighborly relations, and more and more people began advocating for a return to a more primitive economy (Rosenswig, 2024). Following the spread of weighing technology, however, the economy had grown too fast, and going back to traditional accounting systems would have resulted in a slump that no one wanted, not even the most traditionalist. Still, something had to be done fast, before society transformed into a rational plutocracy in which even familial ties would be quantified in pieces of metal (Bloch & Parry, 1989). The main competitor of the Honest Currencies program—a Danish, family-run company that made a fortune by shipping Baltic amber to Aššur in Mesopotamia (Bunnefeld et al., 2023)—came up with a revolutionary idea to get rid of money: barter. In-kind payments were not completely unknown in prehistory, but the idea that an entire economy could be based on barter would have been considered laughable even by the most clueless laypeople (Graeber, 2011). After all, as we now know, barter thrives much more in modern economies than it ever has in ancient ones (Appadurai, 1986). The new program could keep track of who owed what to whom, without even using money as a standard of value. Instead, it used sheep. Sheep have been the staple of prehistoric economies since the introduction of animal husbandry in the Neolithic, and their prominent role in European economies grew when new breeds that could yield unprecedented quantities of high-quality wool were introduced (Rast-Eicher & Jørgensen, 2013). Their economic importance was so enduring that the Latin term for “sheep” actually means “wealth.” The company's motto “Here, there, and everywhere”—later popularized by a rock band from Liverpool—promised to usher in an era of moneyless utopia. Imagine that Todd gets shoes from Meredith, who wants potatoes in exchange, but Todd doesn't have any. This is precisely how economists imagine money was born: Todd will give Meredith something that Meredith can use to buy the potatoes she wants from someone else—that is, money (von Mises, 1996). Honest Sheep made this system obsolete. The database contained a detailed account of everything that everyone in the network owed, what they produced, and any skills and expertise they possessed (Velde, 2021). Every good and service was quantified in terms of its equivalent sheep value. The application would then register Meredith's credit and Todd's debt, make them visible to every other user in the network, and immediately send a notification to everyone in their proximity, at which point Meredith could claim her compensation in any shape or form, as long as its value in sheep was equal to what she was owed. If the value of the compensation was either higher or lower, the app would register the fractional sheep remainder and store it for the next transaction. This promised not only to eliminate the need for money but also to eliminate the need to be paid back directly by the transaction partner. Imagine Jane, a plumber, just taking a bike from Dave, then fixing the radiators of Mary's restaurant, in which Dave had had dinner the day before, without paying the bill. Literally, anyone could take things and services from anyone else and expect to be repaid in kind timely and effortlessly. At the beginning, Honest Sheep seemed to succeed in restoring those neighborly values that had been the bread and butter of European economies for millennia. The idea of using sheep as a standard of value was extraordinarily well accepted: It made sense to everyone, and it even seemed to appease the primitivist movement's longing for a return to tradition. The creeping cause of the looming disaster was that the system worked surprisingly well for literally everything but actual sheep. Archeologists blame the Honest Sheep collapse on a poor design choice in the system's back end: The fractional logic that was introduced with weighing technology was by then so ingrained in collective thinking that the developers integrated it into the system. As a result, prices were never round multiples of a sheep. Because sheep were not only a standard of value but actually one of the most frequently traded commodities on the market, this caused the issue that went down in history as the Fractional Sheep Dilemma: Bronze Age consumers soon realized that two half sheep are not really worth a whole one. Nearly all transactions ended up with a fractional sheep remainder, and sellers, in order to prevent the Fractional Sheep Dilemma, started to round up prices. Hence, if a wheel of cheese used to cost one-third of a sheep, it went up to one sheep; if the weekly salary of a mercenary used to be 4.6 sheep, the price went up to five sheep, and so on. This caused a massive decline in sheep value that threatened to bring the economy back to pre-Neolithic levels. Archeologists believe that the catastrophic performances of Honest Currencies and Honest Sheep are the main reason why smartphone technology disappeared during the Bronze Age and did not reappear until very recently. After a short time, when it became clear that the fractional sheep remainder issue could not be solved in any other feasible way, Bronze Age people went back to breaking and weighing bits of metal, and life went on as it always had. This lasted until sometime in the Iron Age, around 600 BCE. A few important persons in western Anatolia eventually convinced everyone that a branded piece of metal with certified mass was much more practical than weighing out every single piece, and that is how money became how we know it today. Once again, this alleged revolution turned out to create more problems than it solved. That is a different story.