RULES WITHOUT RULERS

A Nobel laureate in chemistry who spent the last thirty years of his life arguing that the banking system violated the second law of thermodynamics. A Ukrainian physician who tried to put Marxism on a thermodynamic footing and was rejected by Friedrich Engels in a single letter. The most famous industrialist in America proposing to pay for a dam with a currency denominated in kilowatt hours, with Thomas Edison standing beside him saying the present system was a swindle. An entire movement of engineers who wanted to abolish money and hand the economy to a technical council. Buckminster Fuller trying to wire the planet's electrical grids into one system so that no nation could hold the switch. Two academics building the field of ecological economics on the observation that the economy is a one way street. And Hayek, at the end of his career, arguing that we would never get good money until we took the power to issue it away from the state.

Nine serious attempts across roughly a century. Every one of them saw something true. Every one of them failed.

Rules Without Rulers follows that lineage from Wilhelm Ostwald's energetics at the start of the twentieth century to the cypherpunks at its end, and asks why each attempt to tie money to physical reality broke down where it did. Read together, their failures describe the problem Bitcoin was built to solve, and they show why the answer took a hundred years to arrive.

Brian Connelly spent thirty years as a systems architect and strategic consultant to Fortune 500 companies. Before that he did clinical social work in Newark, where he learned that people's problems are rarely just personal. He has been writing about Bitcoin since 2014 and lives in Hershey, Pennsylvania.