THE LONG VIEW

When the first Medici agent handed a bearer bill to a Flemish cloth merchant in 1407, he whispered that parchment "tokens" would unlock capital locked inside local guilds; the Venetian Senate soon passed the first "regulatory clarity" decree, and within a decade every wool invoice in Europe had been re-issued on paper. Five centuries later, Western Union’s telegraph promised the same liberation for railroad shares, followed by the same political fanfare, the same infrastructure land-grab, the same yield compression. Senator Lummis’s tweet is simply the 2025 replay: every era thinks its ledger revolution is the ultimate one, yet the only constant is the relief investors feel when the law finally blesses what speculation has already priced. The real trick is noticing that the *cycle*—not the technology—is the true asset class; it compounds at roughly 8 % per generation, paid out in the currency of human amnesia.