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The move from one form of money to the next used to take thousands of years. The move from one information technology to the next used to take a century. Now both take decades, and some of them take less. Plotted here as one chart. Each line is a timeline. Each dot is a transition.
The horizontal axis is year, on a log scale. A point plotted near the left edge happened a long time ago. A point near the right happened recently. Same scale the Compare overlay uses.
The vertical axis is gap. How many years passed between the era a transition left behind and the era it arrived at. A point near the top means thousands of years went by. A point near the bottom means the gap was only a few years, or less.
A line that bends down from upper-left to lower-right is the compression story the whole site is about. The speed of information bends hardest. Money bends fastest in its recent half. Narrative bends steadily. The Mandate bends but has noise in it.
Market crashes, turned on as a fifth line, are included specifically because they do not compress uniformly. The gap between the South Sea Bubble and the Great Depression is longer than the gap between tulips and South Sea. Crashes happen when they happen. That difference, between domains that compress and domains that do not, is one of the more useful things this chart shows.
Click a column header to sort. Click a timeline label to open it.
| Timeline | From | To | At year ↑ | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| How We Agree | Narmer god-king | Hammurabi's written code | 1760 BC | 1,340 yrs |
| Evolution of Money | Barter | Coined metal | 600 BC | 8,400 yrs |
| How We Agree | Hammurabi's code | Cleisthenes' democracy | 508 BC | 1,252 yrs |
| Currency Debasement | Nero cuts the denarius | Diocletian price edict | 301 AD | 237 yrs |
| Evolution of Money | Coined metal | Paper money | 806 AD | 1,406 yrs |
| How We Agree | Athenian democracy | Magna Carta | 1215 | 1,723 yrs |
| Currency Debasement | Diocletian price edict | Henry VIII's Great Debasement | 1544 | 1,243 yrs |
| The Mandate | Divine authority | Sovereign crown | 1649 | 849 yrs |
| How We Agree | Magna Carta | Hobbes' Leviathan | 1651 | 436 yrs |
| Narrative Control | Medici | Central Banks | 1694 | 297 yrs |
| Major Market Crashes | Tulip Mania | South Sea Bubble | 1720 | 83 yrs |
| Currency Debasement | Great Debasement | John Law's Mississippi Bubble | 1720 | 176 yrs |
| The Mandate | Sovereign crown | Consent of governed | 1776 | 127 yrs |
| How We Agree | Leviathan | U.S. Constitution | 1787 | 136 yrs |
| Currency Debasement | Mississippi Bubble | French assignats | 1789 | 69 yrs |
| Currency Debasement | Assignats | U.S. Civil War greenbacks | 1862 | 73 yrs |
| Narrative Control | Central Banks | Robber Barons | 1869 | 175 yrs |
| Evolution of Money | Paper money | Gold Standard | 1871 | 1,065 yrs |
| The Mandate | Consent of governed | The ballot | 1893 | 117 yrs |
| How We Agree | U.S. Constitution | New Zealand universal suffrage | 1893 | 106 yrs |
| The Mandate | The ballot | Ideology & state | 1917 | 24 yrs |
| Speed of Information | Telegraph | Radio | 1920 | 76 yrs |
| Currency Debasement | Greenbacks | Weimar hyperinflation | 1923 | 61 yrs |
| Major Market Crashes | South Sea Bubble | Great Depression | 1929 | 209 yrs |
| Narrative Control | Robber Barons | SEC / Regulated Media | 1934 | 65 yrs |
| Evolution of Money | Gold Standard | Bretton Woods | 1944 | 73 yrs |
| Evolution of Money | Bretton Woods | Fiat | 1971 | 27 yrs |
| Currency Debasement | Weimar | Nixon closes the gold window | 1971 | 48 yrs |
| Speed of Information | Radio | Cable TV / Bloomberg | 1982 | 62 yrs |
| Major Market Crashes | Great Depression | Black Monday | 1987 | 58 yrs |
| Narrative Control | SEC / Regulated Media | CNBC / Analysts | 1989 | 55 yrs |
| Major Market Crashes | Black Monday | Japan's Lost Decade | 1989 | 2 yrs |
| Speed of Information | Cable / Bloomberg | Internet | 1995 | 13 yrs |
| Major Market Crashes | Japan's Lost Decade | Dot-com Crash | 2000 | 11 yrs |
| Major Market Crashes | Dot-com Crash | Global Financial Crisis | 2008 | 8 yrs |
| Currency Debasement | Nixon Shock | QE1 launched | 2008 | 37 yrs |
| Evolution of Money | Fiat | Crypto | 2009 | 38 yrs |
| How We Agree | Universal suffrage | Bitcoin genesis | 2009 | 116 yrs |
| Speed of Information | Internet | Twitter / Crypto | 2010 | 15 yrs |
| Narrative Control | CNBC / Analysts | Social Media / AI | 2010 | 21 yrs |
| The Mandate | Ideology & state | Code & crowd | 2016 | 99 yrs |
| Speed of Information | Twitter / Crypto | AI Algos | 2020 | 10 yrs |
| Major Market Crashes | Global Financial Crisis | COVID / Crypto Winter | 2020 | 12 yrs |
| Currency Debasement | QE1 | COVID unlimited QE | 2020 | 12 yrs |
This page shows the intervals between transitions. The Compare overlay shows every single event across all eight timelines on a shared axis. Different question, same data.
The top line on the chart. Every era traces the downward curve. The full scroll takes about ten minutes.