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Blockchain is Over 1,400 Years Old
Qu’eche’s fingers were gnarled and knotty and today, almost numb. He’d been tying knots in strands, readjusting them, ensuring the strands hanging from the main line didn’t tangle. All while keeping an attentive ear on the King’s tax collector and census taker. It was a cold day, high up in the Andean mountains of Peru. Qu’eche was a master of the Quipu. The first example of what today we may call blockchain.
What are the similarities between the quipu and blockchain and what does their use tell us about the struggles facing blockchain today to become a general purpose technology like it could? Will it even get there and what are the sociocultural hurdles holding blockchain back?
What is the Quipu?
It was a technology created by Andean civilizations that goes as far back, we currently think, to around 650 AD. Which would suggest based on the archeological evidence, it would have been invented much earlier, probably in a cruder form as it evolved. Perhaps then the quipu and its predecessor(s) are closer to 2,000 years old?
The quipu was a brilliantly designed, mathematically complex system of record keeping, used for census keeping, tax tracking, inventories, military organisation and familial record keeping (well, for royalty anyway), calendars and other societal relevant information.
The quipu was designed based on a type of cotton or wool strings with knots tied to the strings, which might also vary in length. The knots and cords contained numerical and other values, like indicators and stories built on a base ten positional system. While their use in Incan societies is fairly well known, it is believed they were used by other Andean cultures such as the Aztec and Nazca (of the famous Nazca lines in Peru.)
Some quipus weren’t just for boring record keeping, or showing how even back then, the tax man could find you. Death and taxes has been around a rather long time. They were also used for ritual purposes such as religious ceremonies or the telling of stories. Important means of creating social cohesion at the time. And in many societies today.
