Circles

This week's conversation around the world computer and all, reminded us of one story.

Before 1840, a letter in Britain was priced by distance and paid for by whoever received it. Keeping in touch was expensive. At least for most, as some privileged ones, like Members of Parliament, sent letters for free.

Then came the Penny Post. One penny for a letter sent anywhere in the country. The same price for everyone, as the free privilege was abolished, even for the Queen.

Within a year - BOOM! - letters went from 76 million to 169 million.

In 1860 George Elgar Hicks painted the rush for the six o'clock post. Rich and poor, young and old, each with a letter of their own. Six in the evening was the daily deadline for the regular inland mail.

One set of rules for everyone. Anyone's transaction gets through.

Circles also gives everyone the same rate. One CRC an hour. The post made everyone a sender. Circles makes everyone an issuer.

Welcome to the island where the river run with wine. Again.

In the winter of 1636, Dutch traders were buying and selling tulip bulbs that were still in the ground: paper promises on flowers nobody had seen. The rarest bulbs changed hands for more than a craftsman earned in a decade. In February 1637 the bids stopped, and a tulip went back to being worth a tulip.

Ever since, "tulip" has been the word people reach for whenever the financial system goes nuts. Jan Brueghel the Younger shown it first - painting the speculators as monkeys in merchant dress: one poring over a price list, a table heaped with coins, flowers trampled into the dirt.

Germans call late July Sauregurkenzeit. The Dutch say komkommertijd. English once said cucumber time: the season when nothing happens and nothing is fresh.

In 1602, Juan Sánchez Cotán hung a quince and a cabbage on strings in a cold, dark larder and painted them with the gravity of an altarpiece. The strings were not decoration. They were how you kept food through a season it could not survive on its own.

We hang money up the same way, for the same reason. It never quite keeps, and we are rarely the ones who decide how fast it goes.

Circles takes the other side of that bet. Money that fades a little when it sits still, because it was built to move, not to be stored.

As The Odyssey came back on the big screen big way, we thought it's a good time for sharing the scene everyone remembers, fired in clay 2,500 years ago.

There's a lesson, if you look close enough. The rope holds Odysseus when he hears the Sirens call, but mind the crew instead. When he begs to be untied, they row on. It's a promise, that keeps him tied.

Money is a promise no one keeps alone.