In a discussion today with Jean-François about the content of my previous post, he described another very important way of thinking about the evolution of writing from pictographs to alphabets and ideograms. Namely that the step taken was from a system in which representations could be created, to a system in which information can be created. Likewise our current wealth acknowledgment systems actually represent wealth directly. A direct consequence of this is that money can be stolen. Writing, however creates information. Information intrinsically can’t be stolen (you have to set up complicated legal systems to shoe-horn information into being steal-able). Open money embodies the shift to a wealth acknowledgment system that allows us to move beyond representing wealth, into building information about wealth.