We have grown accustomed to asking permission. We seek permission to speak, build, develop land, cross borders, trade, open accounts, start businesses, use information or participate in systems upon which everyday life increasingly depends. ^[1][2]

This way of organising human activity has developed for understandable reasons. Complex societies require coordination, rights require protection and actions have consequences for others. Rules are necessary.

However, rules and permission are not the same thing. A rule establishes the boundary within which we may act. Permission requires someone else to decide whether we may act at all. The distinction may appear subtle, but its consequences are not.

A society organised around clear foundational rules leaves considerable space for human judgement. The boundaries are known, but what happens within them is not prescribed. Individuals remain free to make choices and respond to circumstances nobody could have anticipated.

A permissioned system operates differently. Someone is tasked with determining not merely the boundaries, but whether a particular activity may proceed. That requires administration and the exercise of judgement. Circumstances arise that require exceptions, and those exceptions require further rules to determine when and to whom they should apply.

Gradually, a curious consequence can emerge. The rules designed to administer complexity begin generating complexity of their own.

The Complexity We Create

We tend to associate complexity with sophistication. A system containing thousands of rules, extensive administrative structures and highly developed procedures can appear more advanced than one governed by a handful of simple principles.

But complexity has more than one source.

Some complexity emerges. We can look to language as a familiar example. A finite alphabet and a relatively stable grammatical structure allow an effectively limitless number of thoughts to be expressed. Nobody needs to approve each new sentence before it can be spoken or written. The rules establish enough common structure for communication to occur, while leaving the content to those using the language. The same pattern appears in mathematics, science, the Internet and throughout the natural world. Relatively simple underlying principles can support extraordinary complexity above them.

Other complexity is administered. It arises when an existing rule produces circumstances requiring an exception. The exception requires a definition. The definition creates a boundary case, and the boundary case requires guidance. Someone must interpret the guidance, another body may be required to supervise its application, and procedures are developed to ensure compliance.

Each step may appear perfectly rational when considered in isolation. The accumulated result can nevertheless be a system devoting increasing amounts of energy to managing consequences created by its own architecture.

We might think of this as compensatory complexity: complexity introduced not because the underlying human activity requires it, but because the system must repeatedly compensate for previous interventions.

We spend considerable time considering how an increasingly complex society can be administered more effectively. Perhaps we should also consider why so much administration became necessary in the first place.

Order Is Not the Same as Administration

One of the assumptions underlying permissioned systems is that without continuing administration, order will diminish.

Nature suggests otherwise. A forest has no administrator deciding where each tree should grow, how its roots should interact with fungi or which organisms should receive particular nutrients. Yet describing a forest as ungoverned would miss what is happening. Its order is continuously shaped by physical constraints, biological relationships, feedback mechanisms and conditions that apply without requiring permission from any authority. Its order is not imposed from above. It emerges from within the relationships themselves.

This does not mean human societies can simply be modelled upon ecosystems. Human beings possess intention, moral agency and capacities for abstraction that make social organisation fundamentally different. The analogy nevertheless reveals an important distinction: order does not necessarily require the continual administration of outcomes.

Some of the most resilient systems appear to achieve the opposite. They establish relatively simple and stable conditions and allow complexity to emerge within them. It is clear that rules are necessary, but what kind of rules create the conditions within which order can emerge without having to be imposed?

The more a system attempts to determine outcomes, the more discretion it requires. In contrast, the more clearly it establishes the conditions within which outcomes may emerge, the more responsibility can remain with the participant. A genuinely permissionless order may demand greater discipline at the foundational level precisely because it leaves greater freedom above it.

The Level Playing Field

For complexity to emerge without continual administration, a common set of foundational rules must nevertheless hold the whole together.

They provide the common reference point that allows independent participants to interact without first having to negotiate the terms of the system itself. Everyone may pursue different objectives, make different choices and produce entirely unforeseen outcomes, but their interactions remain intelligible because they occur within a shared framework.

In this sense, rules need not constrain freedom. Properly conceived, rules can make freedom possible.

A game of chess offers a simple illustration. The rules establish the field, but they do not determine how the game will unfold. Indeed, the extraordinary variety of possible outcomes exists precisely because the players do not need to reinvent the rules for each game they play.

The same principle applies more broadly. A level playing field does not require everyone to behave alike or produce the same outcome. It requires the underlying rules to operate consistently irrespective of the identity of the participant or the outcome desired.

A rule says: These are the conditions within which you are free to act.

Permission says: Whether you may act remains for someone else to decide.

The former locates discretion primarily with the participant. The latter progressively transfers it to the administrator.

Neither arrangement is appropriate in every circumstance. Children require permissions that autonomous adults do not. Organisations legitimately determine who may access their internal systems. Governments necessarily exercise authority in areas where individual actions can impose consequences upon others.

There is clearly a role for permission in human interaction. The question is where permission is actually necessary, and where it has simply become habitual.

When the Rules Begin to Move

There is another characteristic of foundational rules that is easily overlooked. For participants to organise their affairs around them, the rules must possess a reasonable degree of stability.

If the boundary continually moves, behaviour begins to change. Instead of directing energy towards the activity itself, participants must devote increasing attention to anticipating what the administrator may decide next.

This is familiar in almost every heavily administered environment. Businesses employ people not merely to create products and services, but to interpret changing requirements. Individuals seek professional advice to understand what they are permitted to do, while institutions construct compliance functions to monitor rules that themselves continue to evolve.

Again, much of this may be necessary. The point is not to criticise the people performing these functions. They are responding rationally to the environment within which they operate. Resources devoted to navigating the architecture are no longer available for the activity it was intended to support.

As the rules become more complex, another phenomenon emerges. Knowledge of the rules itself becomes a source of advantage. Those with the resources to employ advisers, lobby decision-makers, obtain licences, navigate procedures or wait for approvals acquire capabilities unavailable to those without them. A framework originally intended to create order can gradually produce asymmetries of access. The level playing field begins to tilt.

The Hidden Cost of Permission

The cost of a permissioned system is rarely captured by the cost of operating the institution that administers it.

There is also the cost of obtaining permission. Applications must be prepared, criteria must be satisfied, compliance must be demonstrated, records must be reconciled, decisions must be reviewed. Lawyers, consultants and intermediaries may be required to interpret what is permitted and how.

Then there is the cost of time. A person waiting six months for an approval experiences a cost even if the application itself was inexpensive. An entrepreneur who abandons an idea because navigating the requirements is beyond their resources bears a cost that will never appear in an administrative budget. So does the innovation that never comes into existence.

The pattern appears in very different settings. Certification regimes intended to protect standards can become easier for large organisations with dedicated compliance resources to navigate than for small players whose practices may embody the very principles the standards were designed to protect. Intellectual property systems intended to protect innovation can likewise require sufficient money, expertise and time that the process of securing protection becomes a significant undertaking in its own right.

Neither example suggests that certification or intellectual property protection is unnecessary. The point is subtler: the cost of navigating a permissioned architecture can itself influence who is able to participate in it.

Some of these costs are justified by the risks they prevent. Others may simply be the accumulated consequence of an architecture in which permission has become the default mechanism for creating order. This complicates comparisons between permissioned and permissionless systems.

The question is not simply: Which architecture costs less to administer? We must also consider how much human activity each requires merely to navigate it. Perhaps even more importantly: What activity never occurs because the cost of obtaining permission is too high?

Systems Teach Us How to Behave

Institutions do more than organise activity. Over time, they can shape the expectations of those who operate within them.

When permission is exceptional, we learn to exercise judgement. When permission becomes pervasive, we learn to seek approval. The change can be almost imperceptible.

Instead of asking: Is this right? we ask: Is this allowed?

Instead of asking: What consequences will follow from my decision? we ask: Have I complied with the rules?

Instead of asking: What am I responsible for? we may gradually come to ask: Who is responsible for deciding?

None of this requires coercion. Human beings adapt to the architecture surrounding them. Systems do not merely organise our actions; over time, they can teach us where to locate authority. If institutions repeatedly reward compliance with prescribed processes, navigating those processes becomes rational behaviour.

In the process, responsibility can migrate away from the individual and towards the system.

Compliance Is Not Responsibility

Modern institutions place enormous emphasis on compliance. Forms must be completed, boxes ticked, disclosures acknowledged, procedures followed, training completed and understanding affirmed. Each requirement may have a perfectly reasonable origin, often introduced in response to an identifiable risk or a genuine failure.

Taken together, however, they can produce a curious result. Compliance can begin to substitute for responsibility. The two are not the same.

Compliance asks whether the prescribed process has been followed. Responsibility asks whether we are willing to answer for what we have done.

A person can satisfy every procedural requirement while exercising remarkably little judgement. Indeed, the more comprehensive the procedure becomes, the easier it may be to conclude that responsibility has been discharged simply because the required steps have been completed.

The familiar tick-box affirmation captures the problem particularly well. We click to confirm that we have read, understood, considered or accepted something that we may barely have noticed. The system has obtained its evidence of compliance. Whether there was any meaningful understanding of the subject matter is another matter.

The result is a strange inversion. Mechanisms introduced to make people more accountable can gradually provide ways for responsibility to be outsourced.

I followed the procedure.

The rules allowed it.

The system approved it.

The box was ticked.

Each statement may be factually correct, but none necessarily addresses the question at the core: Was I responsible for what I did?

A feedback loop begins to take shape. As responsibility is externalised, more administration appears necessary. As administration expands, less space remains for individual judgement. With less opportunity to exercise judgement, the habit of responsibility weakens, creating the perceived need for still more rules, permissions and controls.

What begins as an attempt to manage risk can therefore become self-reinforcing. Compensatory complexity is no longer merely administrative—the architecture compensates for the very human capacity it has left less room to exercise.

When Rules Replace Judgement

There is an understandable reason why institutions attempt to codify judgement. Judgement varies between people. It can be exercised poorly, and it can be influenced by prejudice, self-interest or incomplete information. Rules promise consistency.

The difficulty is that no rulebook can anticipate every circumstance to which it will eventually be applied. The more we attempt to make rules substitute completely for judgement, the more detailed those rules must become. Exceptions need to be defined, thresholds introduced, categories refined and guidance issued to address situations the original rule did not anticipate.

Eventually the system can become extraordinarily precise about whether a process has been followed while becoming less capable of answering why the process exists in the first place. This is not necessarily a sign of greater order. It may be evidence that the underlying principles have become obscured by the machinery created to administer them.

Principles and rules perform different functions. A principle requires us to understand its purpose and exercise judgement in applying it. A detailed prescription attempts to determine the required behaviour in advance.

The former demands something of us. The latter can relieve us of the need to ask.

If every rule requires another rule to justify or interpret it, the chain cannot continue indefinitely. At some point we arrive at principles—ideas about fairness, reciprocity, property, responsibility, harm and the boundaries between one person’s freedom and another’s. Whether we describe these as natural law, universal principles or something else is a larger question. What matters here is that rules function most coherently when they express an underlying principle rather than attempting to replace one.

The Return of Responsibility

What happens when the foundational principles are sufficiently clear that fewer decisions need to be prescribed? Responsibility begins to return to the individual.

That may initially feel uncomfortable. A rulebook can provide protection from uncertainty. Permission can provide protection from consequences. If someone else authorised the action, responsibility can appear to belong somewhere else.

Freedom offers no such shelter. When the boundaries are clear but the decision remains ours, we must exercise judgement. We must consider consequences, recognise the interests of others and decide what we are willing to stand behind. Freedom does not remove responsibility. It makes its location unmistakable.

A system built around permission assumes that someone else must continually determine what may be done. A system built upon coherent foundational principles leaves more decisions with those making them.

That is riskier. People will sometimes make poor choices. Freedom includes that possibility, but responsibility cannot develop in an environment from which meaningful choice has progressively been removed. Like any human capacity, it strengthens through use. A permissionless architecture therefore does not ask less of the individual. It asks more.

Beyond Permission

If responsibility requires room in which to be exercised, we must ask what kind of systems create that room.

The objective cannot be to construct systems so comprehensive that nobody can ever make the ‘wrong’ decision. It is to establish conditions sufficiently clear and coherent that people are able to make decisions—and remain accountable for the ones they make.

Reversing the architecture of permission does not therefore mean abandoning rules, safeguards or institutions. Nor does it mean assuming that people will always make good decisions. It means asking a different question of the systems we create: do they establish coherent boundaries within which responsible human agency can flourish, or do they progressively substitute for it?

The architecture matters because the dynamic is self-reinforcing. Systems that leave less room for responsibility create an apparent need for greater administration. Those that leave more room for responsible agency can begin to reverse the cycle.

That brings us back to where we began.

Rules and permission are not the same thing. Rules can provide the common foundation that allows us to interact coherently. Permission places the decision to act in somebody else’s hands.

A society organised around coherent foundational principles may therefore demand more of us. Freedom leaves us responsible for our choices. Accountability ensures that their consequences remain ours. Neither offers the shelter of simply having followed the prescribed process.

Something else becomes possible. When people are free to choose, accountable for their choices and willing to accept responsibility for them, relationships no longer need to be organised primarily around control.

They can increasingly be organised around trust.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than directing disproportionate energy toward financial survival. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, guided by the conviction that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Anna Iversen

^[1] This essay is part of a series where I challenge the assumption that decay and decline are woven into the fabric of the universe itself, showing how our financial, cultural, and political systems have been built on an entropic logic of siphoning and scarcity—and how a very different design is possible. The keystone essay entitled “From Entropy to Creative Coherence—Finance, Geometry, and the Return of Living Order” frames this journey of exploration, and it can be found here From Entropy to Creative Coherence. This series of essays forms both a diagnosis of the structures that constrain human agency and an exploration of the coherence we might choose instead.

^[2] I would like to dedicate this essay to the late Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922-2019), whose explorations of entropy and “negentropy” in political economy paved the way for much of what follows. His work continues to inspire exploration of creativity, rather than decay, as a measure of value.

Sometimes an engineering result arrives at just the right moment to illuminate a broader question. Shortly after I posted an essay about why the real innovation may not lie in blockchain itself but in the emergence of a common public utility, I came across a paper examining the horizontal scalability of the Teranode architecture^[1] of Bitcoin Satoshi Vision^[2]. Its headline figure is difficult to ignore: 79 billion transactions per second.

That number is not what interested me the most.

What the Number Actually Measures

It is important to note the qualifications contained in the paper. The experiment did not demonstrate 79 billion transactions per second travelling end to end across an open network of independent miners. It measured transaction processing within a 100-instance Teranode fleet operating across ten geographic regions, within a single administrative domain. The author is careful to distinguish this from full public-network throughput. He also separates what was experimentally measured from what was subsequently modelled or projected.

That should not make the result less interesting, but it helps identify what the experiment actually tells us.

The paper reports that the system reached 79.09 billion pipeline-processed transactions per second at peak, with a more conservative measured figure of approximately 61.2 billion. Once allowances are made for production storage, peer-to-peer ingress and a more varied transaction mix, the paper’s author estimates a lower, though still remarkable, range.

Focusing too heavily on any of those numbers risks missing the more important point. The experiment asks whether transaction processing itself imposes the kind of architectural ceiling that blockchain discussions have often assumed. Its results suggest that the answer may be no.

Have We Been Asking the Wrong Question?

Much of the blockchain scalability debate has proceeded from a familiar premise: as transaction volumes increase, something about the underlying system must give. The ledger must be divided, activity moved elsewhere, additional layers introduced, or the rules altered to accommodate greater demand.

Teranode approaches the problem differently. As the paper puts it, the architecture “does not shard state; it shards processing of a unified UTXO model.”

That detail is easy to pass over, but it may be the most important sentence in the paper. Instead of dividing the foundational transaction model in order to increase capacity, Teranode distributes the work required to process it. Its component services can be replicated horizontally as demand grows. The common foundation remains common; the infrastructure operating upon it expands.

This is much closer to how we ordinarily think about infrastructure. The Internet did not accommodate growing use by creating a different foundational protocol for each new group of users. The common protocols remained, while the physical and computational infrastructure implementing them expanded, specialised and improved.

Blockchain scalability may too often have been approached as a problem requiring continual modification of the foundation, when the constraint may instead lie in the infrastructure operating on it.

Public Foundation, Private Infrastructure

This is where the paper becomes particularly interesting in light of the public-utility question I explored in my recent essay. The paper’s author describes the tested Teranode fleet as operating within a single administrative trust domain and observes that its internal architecture is closer to a distributed database pipeline than to a permissionless consensus system.

That may on first reading sound contradictory. How can infrastructure operating within a single administrative domain form part of a permissionless public network? The apparent contradiction disappears once the layers are separated.

A permissionless public protocol does not require every internal component operated by every participant to be permissionless. Each miner is free to organise its processing infrastructure in whatever manner it considers most efficient. What remains common is the protocol through which independent participants interact. Nature offers a familiar analogue: complex living structures divide functions among specialised parts, yet remain coherent because those parts operate within a common underlying order.

This is an important characteristic of a genuine public utility. Its purpose is not to replace private infrastructure or prescribe how every participant is required to organise itself. It is to provide a common foundation upon which private infrastructure can develop without requiring the rules beneath it to fragment as activity grows.

Seen in those terms, horizontal scalability takes on a different significance. Increasing demand does not necessarily require increasing complexity at the foundational level. It may instead require more—and better—industrial infrastructure operating upon it.

What “Unbounded” Means

This also helps clarify a term that otherwise risks sounding rather extravagant: unbounded scalability.

It cannot mean infinite capacity. Every physical system encounters constraints of computing power, bandwidth, storage, energy and cost. The paper is explicit about those constraints. At sufficient scale, storage becomes particularly significant, and the much larger throughput figures discussed beyond the experimentally tested range depend upon architectural changes that have not yet been implemented or validated.

“Unbounded” is therefore better understood as an architectural proposition rather than a numerical one. It means that capacity need not be constrained by a predetermined protocol ceiling. If demand justifies it, additional resources can be deployed and processing capacity expanded.

At that point, the question shifts from ‘How many transactions can the protocol permit?’ to ‘What infrastructure is economically justified by the demand placed on it?’

That is a very different question—and a familiar one wherever public infrastructure has developed at scale.

The Foundation May Never Have Been the Constraint

Seventy-nine billion transactions per second makes for an arresting headline. It should not be confused with demonstrated end-to-end throughput across the public BSV network, and the paper’s author does not present it as such.

Its more interesting implication is likely simpler. The experiment provides evidence that enormous increases in transaction-processing capacity can be achieved by distributing processing rather than continually redesigning the underlying transaction model. Infrastructure can expand, processing can specialise, and independent operators can determine how best to organise their own resources.

The common foundation can remain common. Coming immediately after the question I explored in Blockchain Isn’t the Innovation. The Public Utility Is^[3], that seems worth noticing.

Perhaps we have been exploring blockchain scalability from the wrong angle. Rather than asking how much more complexity must be added to the foundation, perhaps we should ask whether we have been trying to solve an infrastructure problem by continually redesigning it.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than directing disproportionate energy toward financial survival. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, guided by the conviction that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Anna Iversen

^[1]Horizontal Scaling of UTXO-Based Transaction Processing: Architecture, Empirical Validation, and Fleet-Scale Projection, Dr Craig S Wright, written 27 April 2026, posted 10 August 2026.

^[2] Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) is designed to preserve Satoshi Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin protocol and scale it without imposing an artificial transaction-capacity limit Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.

^[3] Blockchain Isn’t the Innovation. The Public Utility Is, Anna Iversen, 13 August 2026

The Wrong Question

“Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.”

This criticism has become increasingly common. After years of costly enterprise projects that delivered little more than conventional databases with a new label, it is understandable why many have arrived at that conclusion.

What if the criticism is aimed at the wrong thing? What if the innovation was never about blockchain itself, but the creation of the first permissionless public utility for digital property and value? If so, comparing it to a permissioned system is rather like comparing a public road with a private driveway. Both may carry traffic, but they were built to solve fundamentally different problems.

The question, then, is what each was designed to achieve, not which is cheaper to operate, although the operational cost is of course an important metric.

Permissioned Systems Solve Different Problems

Most organisations operate permissioned systems. A business controls its databases, a bank maintains its ledger, a government administers its records, a central bank operates its currency. Access is granted to authorised participants, the rules can be amended when circumstances change, and governance rests with those responsible for operating the system.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Indeed, it is often entirely appropriate. Where participants are known, objectives are aligned and responsibility is clearly defined, a permissioned architecture is frequently the simplest and most efficient solution.

This is precisely why so many enterprise blockchain initiatives struggled to justify themselves. They attempted to replace one permissioned system with another, while adding complexity rather than removing it. In many cases, a well-designed conventional database was not only cheaper but better suited to the task.

That should not surprise us. If the problem is already one of trusted administration, adding a blockchain offers little additional value. The criticism, however, does not follow that blockchain itself is a solution looking for a problem. It merely suggests that many of the problems to which blockchain has been applied were never the problems it was developed to solve.

A Public Utility—Not Another Platform

Bitcoin^[1] addressed a fundamentally different question. It did not ask: “How can we improve an existing process?” Instead it asked: “How can people who do not know one another exchange value without first requiring permission from a trusted intermediary?”

That is an altogether different challenge. It requires an architecture that no participant controls, that every participant can verify, and that continues to operate according to the same rules regardless of who uses it.

Seen in this light, what may initially appear inefficient begins to look rather different. The independent miners securing the network are often described as performing the same work many times over. From the perspective of a private database, this appears wasteful. Why not simply appoint one trusted operator and eliminate the duplication?

The miners are not being rewarded for duplicating computation. They are being rewarded for performing the work that removes the need to trust any individual participant.

The computation is the mechanism through which something far more valuable emerges: a neutral environment in which history cannot easily be rewritten, ownership can be independently verified and settlement occurs according to publicly known rules rather than institutional discretion. That neutrality is not a by-product of the architecture. It is the architecture.

Is Public Infrastructure More Costly?

Public infrastructure often appears unnecessarily expensive when viewed only through the lens of immediate operating costs. Roads require continual maintenance, electricity grids demand constant investment, the Internet itself consumes extraordinary amounts of energy and capital, yet societies continue to build and maintain such infrastructure because its value lies not in the cost of any individual journey, transmission or connection, but in the countless forms of human activity it enables.

A permissionless public utility should be viewed in much the same way. This also changes the way cost ought to be measured. Such infrastructure does not incur its costs one transaction at a time. The network is secured as a whole, with every transaction sharing that security. As throughput increases, the cost of providing that security is distributed across an ever-growing volume of economic activity. The relevant question therefore shifts from what the network costs to operate to how its cost per interaction evolves as adoption grows.

Infrastructure frequently becomes more economical as utilisation increases. A motorway carrying one hundred vehicles is an expensive road. The same motorway carrying one hundred thousand vehicles is an extraordinarily efficient piece of public infrastructure. The same principle applies to a permissionless network capable of scaling without architectural change.

The greatest public utilities do not merely scale technically. They scale institutionally. Roads do not require one network for manufacturers and another for retailers, and the Internet does not require separate protocols for education, entertainment and commerce. Their value lies precisely in providing a common foundation upon which entirely different forms of human activity can coexist.

A permissionless public utility for value has the potential to exhibit the same characteristic. Rather than encouraging every industry, consortium or jurisdiction to construct its own permissioned network, it offers a common settlement layer capable of supporting them all. The result is not simply greater efficiency within individual organisations, but fewer boundaries between organisations in the first place.

The true value of a public utility is not that it replaces private systems. It is that it allows every private system to stop solving the same foundational problem independently.

More Than a Payments Ledger

One reason Bitcoin is so often misunderstood is that it is frequently described as a ledger. Technically, this is correct, but it is also incomplete. Traditional ledgers record obligations, bank accounts record claims against a financial institution and payment systems record the movement of those claims between authorised participants.

Bitcoin should not be understood as a payments ledger. It is better understood as a public register for digital property, upon which the direct transfer of digital cash is only one possible application. It records the existence, control and transfer of digital property according to publicly known rules.

That is fundamentally different from a conventional accounting ledger. Property does not require the continuing permission of an intermediary to exist. Its transfer does not depend upon one institution updating its internal records before another institution accepts the result. Instead, ownership itself becomes part of a common public record capable of being independently verified by every participant.

The ledger is not simply keeping accounts—it is maintaining the constitutional record of digital property. A public utility for digital property and value therefore requires something more than a ledger of obligations: the underlying architecture must be capable of recording property itself. Once ownership itself becomes part of a shared public record, a further possibility emerges. The ledger no longer serves merely as a register of property. It also becomes a shared source of verifiable truth.

A Shared Record of Truth

Every permissioned system asks participants to trust the institution maintaining the record. The institution may deserve that trust, and it may have earned it over decades. Nevertheless. trust remains concentrated.

A permissionless public utility seeks something different. Rather than asking participants to trust an institution’s continuing integrity, it provides a shared record that every participant can independently verify. This changes the nature of accountability. History cannot easily be rewritten, ownership cannot be quietly altered and transactions cannot simply disappear because it becomes inconvenient for them to remain.

Institutions become accountable to the record as much as the record becomes useful to institutions. Truth is no longer maintained by authority alone. It becomes a publicly verifiable property inherent to the system.

The ledger therefore does more than record transactions. It establishes a common factual foundation upon which individuals, businesses and institutions can rely. Disputes may still arise and courts may still determine legal rights, but the underlying record does not depend upon the continuing discretion of any single institution. Truth itself becomes part of the public utility.

Who Shapes the Rules?

One of the questions we rarely ask is perhaps the simplest of all: Who does the system ultimately serve?

Every permissioned system has an owner. Whether that owner is a company, a consortium or a government, someone remains responsible for deciding who may participate, how the rules should evolve and which interests take precedence when conflicts arise.

This is entirely understandable. Ownership brings responsibility, and responsibility requires governance. Ownership also brings something else: interests. Every decision is made from the perspective of those entrusted with operating the system. They may act wisely, fairly and transparently, but the architecture itself cannot escape this fundamental characteristic. It exists within a framework of administration.

A permissionless public utility is different. It has no operator seeking to optimise it for its own benefit because, in any meaningful sense, it has no ‘self’ to optimise. Its purpose is not to maximise revenue, increase market share or strengthen its competitive position. Its purpose is simply to provide a stable set of rules upon which everyone else can build—like language, mathematics or the Internet. Its success is measured not by its own growth, but by the flourishing of everything that emerges from it.

There is another subtle consequence. Permissioned systems inevitably ask: How should we improve our platform? Permissionless public utilities ask: Should the platform change at all?

That is a profound inversion. For a technology company, continual change is a virtue, but for a public utility, the same impulse may become a liability. Imagine if electrical voltage standards changed every year, or TCP/IP.

Stability itself becomes valuable. This, I believe, explains one of the greatest misunderstandings surrounding Bitcoin. Many people evaluate it as though it were software. Software is generally expected to evolve rapidly. Public utilities, by contrast, derive much of their value from stability. Those are very different categories.

Much attention is given to technical resilience. A permissionless network has no single server whose failure brings the system to a halt. Less attention is given to institutional resilience. A permissioned architecture ultimately depends upon the continued integrity, competence and existence of those entrusted with governing it. However wisely they exercise that responsibility, they remain institutional points of dependency, required to remain competent, impartial and resilient indefinitely.

A genuinely ownerless public utility seeks to remove that dependency. Rather than asking participants to trust the continuing judgement of an owner or governing body, it asks them to trust publicly known rules that apply equally to everyone. The objective is not to eliminate people from its operation. It is to eliminate the need for any individual or institution to remain permanently trustworthy.

People often describe Bitcoin as “decentralised”. But without asking what is decentralised, and with respect to what, the description tells us surprisingly little. The more important characteristic may be that it is ownerless. Not ownerless in the sense that nobody participates, but ownerless in the sense that nobody possesses the legitimate authority to reshape it in pursuit of their own interests. That is an extraordinarily unusual property, and it is precisely what allows everyone else to rely upon it.

Everything else—proof of work, mining, scalability, low transaction costs, digital property, micropayments—flows from that single architectural decision.

What Does It Mean for a System to Be “Ownerless”?

One of the most misunderstood aspects of a permissionless public utility is the suggestion that it is “ownerless”. At first glance, this appears impossible. Computers and businesses are owned, miners own equipment and software is written by people. Surely someone owns the system. The answer depends upon what we mean by ownership.

Ownership is often confused with participation. Yet they are not the same thing. Thousands of people may contribute to maintaining a public road, but none of them owns the rules of the road. Countless engineers contribute to the Internet, yet no individual or company possesses the authority to redefine the Internet Protocol for everyone else simply because it would suit their interests.

The more useful question is therefore not Who participates? but Who possesses discretionary authority over the system itself? This is ultimately a constitutional question rather than a technical one.

Most permissioned systems have an identifiable owner or governing body. Whether that is a company, a consortium or a public authority, in the end someone retains the discretion to decide who may participate, how the rules should evolve and when exceptions should be made. Those decisions may be entirely appropriate, but they remain matters of governance.

An ownerless public utility is different. It does not mean that nobody maintains it, improves software or conducts business upon it. It means that no participant possesses discretionary authority over its constitutional rules. The protocol is not continually adjusted to accommodate changing commercial interests, political priorities or institutional preferences. Instead, it provides a stable foundation within which everyone operates according to the same publicly known rules.

That distinction changes the nature of the system itself. When the constitutional layer is stable, innovation does not depend upon persuading those in authority to modify it. The underlying framework remains constant while creativity is freed to flourish above it. Individuals and organisations can build new applications, businesses and services without altering the protocol upon which everyone else relies.

In this sense, an ownerless public utility resembles a constitution more than an enterprise. Its purpose is not to direct human activity but to establish a level playing field upon which human activity can emerge.

A permissionless public utility is defined by the absence of discretionary authority over its foundational rules, not by the absence of people involved.

The purpose of a permissionless public utility is not to remove judgement from every aspect of human affairs. Courts will continue to be required to resolve disputes, contracts will require interpretation and commercial decisions will involve discretion. What changes is the underlying record. Verification of the ledger itself does not depend upon institutional judgement but upon objective rules that every participant can independently apply.

Constitutional Design

Bitcoin’s design uses Proof of Work to establish the common record through objective computational verification rather than the exercise of discretion by a recognised validator or governing body. Validity does not depend upon who a particular participant is, whether it has been authorised to take part or whether others consider its decision worthy of acceptance. The same rules apply to everyone, and the result can be independently verified by anyone. This objectivity is fundamental to a permissionless public utility: if establishing the common record ultimately depends upon the continuing judgement or authority of particular participants, permission has merely re-entered the architecture in another form.

Other consensus mechanisms make different architectural choices. Some include governance mechanisms concerning validator participation, staking arrangements or protocol evolution. Such mechanisms differ from one protocol to another, but they generally introduce governance questions that extend beyond the simple verification of computational work. Each involves trade-offs. The important distinction is not the label attached to the mechanism, but the degree to which it introduces continuing discretionary authority into the constitutional layer of the system.

Beyond the Blockchain

When viewed merely as another database, a permissionless public utility can appear unnecessarily elaborate and expensive. Viewed as infrastructure, the calculation changes. Viewed as a common framework for digital property, objective verification and global coordination, something more fundamental comes into focus.

Its significance lies not in replacing existing institutions, but in providing neutral infrastructure upon which they can build. Private systems remain free to serve particular purposes, businesses remain free to compete and institutions continue to exercise judgement within their respective spheres. What changes is the common infrastructure beneath them: a shared record that does not depend upon the continuing permission or discretion of any one of them.

This architectural distinction is what many enterprise blockchain projects missed. They sought to use blockchain to build better organisations or processes. Bitcoin addressed a different problem. It created infrastructure capable of operating without an institutional owner, while providing a common set of rules that applies equally to everyone.

The distinction matters far beyond technology. Throughout history, some of humanity’s most enduring systems have flourished not because every possible outcome was anticipated and administered, but because stable foundational rules allowed countless independent participants to create outcomes nobody could have predicted. Language, science, the common law and the Internet all exhibit aspects of this pattern. Their complexity emerges above those rules rather than being prescribed by them. The enduring value lies in enabling the organic evolution of human creativity, not in directing it.

Perhaps this is the more interesting question with which to leave the discussion. Why do some systems require ever more administration, permissions and exceptions as they grow, while others can support extraordinary complexity while leaving their foundational rules remarkably simple and stable?

That question reaches beyond blockchain. It concerns how systems organise themselves and where authority, discretion and responsibility reside within them. It is a question worth exploring separately.

For present purposes, however, the central point is simpler. The original innovation was not the creation of another ledger, another payments network or another blockchain. It was the creation of a permissionless public utility for digital property and value: a shared, objectively verifiable foundation that no single institution owns and no continuing authority has discretion to reshape for its own benefit.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than directing disproportionate energy toward financial survival. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, guided by the conviction that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Anna Iversen

^[1] As described in the White Paper entitled ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’ by Satoshi Nakamoto, 31 October 2008. In this essay, the term ‘Bitcoin’ refers to the architecture laid out in the White Paper.

Throughout history, we have been presented with a choice between two visions of society—one promising unity, and the other promising freedom.

The first asks us to subordinate ourselves to something larger. A nation, a party, an institution, a collective. Its promise is order, stability, and belonging. Its danger is that the individual blurs or even disappears. We are asked to sacrifice who we really are for ‘the greater good’.

The second asks us to stand on our own. To reject dependency, resist control, and chart our own course. Its promise is autonomy and self-determination. Its danger is that we become increasingly isolated, disconnected from one another and from any shared purpose. The attitude of ’each to their own’ weakens the very relationships upon which society is built.

We have spent centuries moving back and forth between these two poles. The problem is that neither seems capable of fully satisfying what it means to be human. Most of us intuitively recognise this. We do not wish to disappear into a collective, nor do we wish to live entirely alone. We seek something else, even if we struggle to describe it.[1][2]

Are these truly the only options available? What if the choice is not between conformity and isolation? What if there is a third possibility? Not unity through sameness, nor freedom through separation, but individuality expressed through participation.

This possibility appears in many different forms. It appears in healthy families, thriving communities, scientific discovery, great works of art, successful economies, and enduring civilisations. Distinct individuals contribute something uniquely their own, whilst their contributions become part of something larger than themselves.

The challenge of our time may not be that we have too much freedom or too little freedom. Perhaps we have forgotten how freedom, responsibility, individuality, and participation fit together.

Looking at it from this perspective, many modern-day debates dominating society can be approached differently. Questions of economics, technology, ownership, identity, governance, and even personal development don’t need to be treated as isolated discussions on separate topics. Instead, they become different expressions of the same underlying question: How do free individuals participate in the creation of a coherent civilisation?

Individuation Is Not the Destination

One of the defining characteristics of our age is the desire to become fully ourselves.

This longing is emerging almost everywhere. People seek authenticity rather than conformity. They question inherited beliefs, challenge institutions, reject labels, and search for a deeper sense of identity. Beneath much of the turbulence of modern society lies a genuine impulse: the desire to discover who we truly are.

This is an essential stage of human development. A child begins life in dependence. Gradually, responsibility grows. Choices become their own, and identity is no longer borrowed from parents, peers, institutions, or society. The individual begins the lifelong process of becoming who they uniquely are.

Curiously, at this point we often begin to assume that the journey is complete. Freedom becomes the ability to stand alone, success becomes independence, sovereignty becomes self-sufficiency. Increasingly, we come to believe that the highest expression of liberty is to need no one —but civilisation has never been built by self-sufficient individuals.

Every great civilisation has emerged through participation. The scientist depends upon discoveries made by previous generations, the composer writes for musicians who bring the work to life, the engineer builds upon the knowledge and expertise of countless others. The farmer feeds the teacher, the teacher inspires the engineer. Each contributes something unique, yet none creates alone.

Individuation, then, is not the end of the journey. It is what makes meaningful participation possible. Only someone who has discovered their own voice can truly contribute it to the larger human conversation.

We often imagine human development as a journey inward, towards self-discovery. In reality, that journey has two halves. The first is inward, the second is outward. We discover ourselves not so that we may withdraw from the world, but so that we may participate in it more fully.

The Difference Between a March and a Quartet

Music sometimes reveals truths that philosophy struggles to express. Consider two very different ways of creating order.

The first is the march. Every foot falls at precisely the same moment, every movement is synchronised, and individual expression disappears into the rhythm of the whole. The power comes from uniformity. There is something undeniably impressive about it, yet there is also something unsettling. The individual voice is barely audible.

Now consider a string quartet. Or better still, the extraordinary quartet Mir ist so wunderbar from Beethoven’s Fidelio.[3] Four voices sing at the same time. Each carries a different melody expressing a different perspective, each retaining its own identity. Together they create a harmony that none could produce alone. No voice dominates or disappears. The music emerges because each voice remains true to itself while entering into relationship with the others.

That is coherence. The difference is profound. The march achieves unity by reducing difference. The quartet achieves unity by embracing it. One depends upon conformity. The other depends upon participation.

Humans are naturally inclined toward participation. We delight in contributing, building, discovering, teaching, creating and sharing. The satisfaction comes not merely from achievement, but from knowing that our contribution has become part of something larger than ourselves.

Many of our institutions no longer reflect this pattern. People are increasingly experiencing themselves as isolated consumers, passive employees, anonymous users, or disconnected voters. The structures around us often separate us from the consequences of our own creativity and responsibility.

This is where the personal journey begins to mirror the civilisational one.

When Institutions Become Entropic

The journey of the individual and the journey of civilisation are reflections of one another. A healthy individual gradually moves from dependence to responsibility, from borrowed identity to authentic participation.

Healthy institutions ought to support that same movement, although many appear to be moving in the opposite direction. Instead of drawing people into meaningful participation, they increasingly reduce them to consumers, users, employees, voters, audiences, or simply data points. The individual remains present, but their contribution becomes progressively detached from the consequences of what they contribute to and create.

This pattern can be seen well beyond economics. Work becomes separated from purpose, education becomes separated from curiosity, politics becomes separated from citizenship, money becomes separated from productive activity, information becomes separated from those who created it, and technology becomes separated from the people it was meant to serve.

None of these separations happened overnight, and each emerged for understandable reasons —many even brought remarkable advances. Yet over time, the cumulative effect has been to weaken the relationships that allow individuals to experience themselves as active participants in the flourishing of society.

The result is not simply inefficiency, but alienation. People instinctively know that they are capable of contributing something meaningful. When that contribution no longer finds a natural path into the world, frustration and apathy follows. Some seek greater control, while others withdraw altogether. Many simply stop believing that their actions matter.

What appears to be a crisis of economics or politics may, at a deeper level, be a crisis of participation.

The Architecture of Trust

Participation is impossible without trust. Not the naïve trust of childhood that assumes no one will disappoint us. Life teaches us otherwise. Promises are broken, people betray, power corrupts, institutions fail. Growing up requires us to see the world as it is.

In learning not to be naïve, it is easy to begin to distrust almost everything. We mistake cynicism for wisdom, withdrawal for sovereignty, isolation for freedom. But a civilisation cannot be built upon universal distrust.

Every meaningful act of creation requires trust. The scientist trusts that others will build upon her discoveries, the entrepreneur trusts that customers, employees and investors will join in bringing an idea to life, the musician trusts fellow performers, the architect trusts the builder, the parent trusts the child enough to let them grow and develop into who they are.

Trust, then, is not the absence of discernment. It is the willingness to enter into relationship with eyes open. Trust is risky, as it inevitably always will be. The question is whether we can build relationships and institutions worthy of it. Perhaps this is one of the defining challenges of our time—not simply restoring trust in existing institutions, but creating institutions whose very architecture encourages trustworthy participation.

When Relationships Become Mechanisms

Every enduring institution begins with a relationship. A school with the relationship between teacher and student, a market with the relationship between people exchanging value, a legal system with relationships of trust, responsibility, and justice, a financial system with the relationship between savings, investment, and productive enterprise, and a family with relationships of love, care, and mutual respect.

Over time, these relationships become formalised. Rules emerge, processes develop, organisations grow, relationships deepen. This is not only natural but necessary. Civilisation requires institutions capable of carrying wisdom across generations.

Yet every institution faces the same danger. The mechanism gradually replaces the relationship it was created to serve. Education becomes the pursuit of credentials rather than understanding, finance becomes the trading of claims rather than the cultivation of productive enterprise, law becomes procedural rather than just, and technology becomes an end in itself rather than a means of extending human creativity.

The institution continues to function, but something essential has been lost. The living relationship that gave it purpose fades. This occurs because every institution requires continual renewal through conscious participation. Without stewardship, even the best-designed systems gradually become disconnected from the purpose that first brought them into being.

Perhaps this is what entropy looks like in human affairs. Not sudden collapse, but the slow substitution of mechanism for relationship.

The Architecture of Stewardship

Every generation inherits the institutions created by those who came before. Sometimes those institutions continue to serve their original purpose, but sometimes they drift so far from it that they begin producing the opposite of what they were designed to achieve. When this happens, there is a temptation to believe that the answer lies in new technology.

History suggests otherwise. Technology amplifies human intention—it can deepen extraction just as easily as it can strengthen participation. Artificial intelligence may become the greatest engine of concentration the world has ever seen, separating creators ever further from the value they generate, or it may become one of the greatest tools for expanding human creativity, enabling millions of people to contribute in ways that were previously impossible.

Digital networks may centralise power in ever fewer hands, or they may reconnect creators directly with those who benefit from their work. Financial innovation may accelerate speculation, or it may help capital once again fulfil its original purpose: nurturing productive enterprise.

The technology itself cannot answer these questions. Only the architecture of our relationships can. The challenge before us is therefore civilisational, not technological. Can we design institutions that strengthen the relationships upon which human flourishing depends?

Ownership has always mattered because responsibility requires somewhere to rest. Yet ownership alone is not enough. A person may own land without caring for it, a company may own intellectual assets without nurturing innovation, an investor may own shares without contributing to the long-term flourishing of the enterprise.

Ownership answers the question: “What is mine?”

Stewardship asks a different question: “What has been entrusted to my care?”

This is a subtle, yet profound distinction. Ownership establishes the relationship, whilst stewardship gives that relationship purpose. The highest expression of property is therefore not possession. It is participation in the flourishing of what one has been entrusted to cultivate.

The same principle can be seen in our relationship with the natural world. We are often presented with another false choice. Either nature exists to be exploited, or humanity should withdraw, leaving the landscape as though civilisation had never existed. Neither vision captures our true role.

A flourishing orchard, a well-tended garden, fertile farmland, restored rivers, and beautiful cities all testify to something different. They reveal what becomes possible when human creativity works in partnership with the natural order rather than against it.

Stewardship is neither domination nor withdrawal—it is conscious participation in the unfolding of life. Perhaps civilisation itself should be understood in the same way. Its purpose is not to replace nature, nor to retreat from it. Its purpose is to cultivate the conditions in which both humanity and the wider living world can flourish together.

We often ask how we build better economies, better institutions or better technologies. Perhaps these are not the first questions. Instead we should ask whether we are willing to become faithful stewards of what has been entrusted to us.

Stewardship extends beyond our own existence, prompting us to consider how to leave something behind that is richer than we found it. This encompasses the institutions we build, the knowledge we pass on, the landscapes we cultivate, the technologies we create, and the relationships we nurture. In each case, we become temporary custodians of something whose full flowering may not occur within our own lifetime.

Love is the life force that flows through the whole process. Responsibility without love becomes duty, participation without love becomes transaction, stewardship without love becomes management, cultivation without love becomes optimisation. Only love transforms each of those into something life-giving. Civilisation is the art of cultivating relationships through which love becomes productive.

Extraction asks, “What can I take?” Stewardship asks, “What has been entrusted to my care, and how can I help it flourish?”.

Entropy separates. Coherence reconnects.

Civilisations are not built by pursuing outcomes. They are built by faithfully cultivating the relationships through which human flourishing naturally emerges.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than directing disproportionate energy toward financial survival. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, guided by the conviction that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Substack Anna Iversen

[1] This essay is part of a series where I challenge the assumption that decay and decline are woven into the fabric of the universe itself, showing how our financial, cultural, and political systems have been built on an entropic logic of siphoning and scarcity—and how a very different design is possible. The keystone essay entitled “From Entropy to Creative Coherence—Finance, Geometry, and the Return of Living Order” frames this journey of exploration, and it can be found here From Entropy to Coherence_Anna Iversen . This series of essays form both a diagnosis of our caged existence, and a vision of the coherence we could choose instead.

[2] I would like to dedicate this essay to the late Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922-2019), whose explorations of entropy and “negentropy” in political economy paved the way for much of what follows. His work continues to inspire those of us who believe that creativity, not decay, is the true measure of value.

[3] Harley Schlanger, The Larouche Organization, at the Manhattan Town Hall Project 13 September 2025 held an address entitled “A Polyphonic World System In Which All Voices Are Heard” reflecting on how music offers a vivid illustration of this truth. He made reference to Beethoven’s quartet Mir ist so wunderbar, from Fidelio, to demonstrate the higher order of polyphony. Four characters, each with different perspectives and desires, sing together in harmony. Their voices are distinct, yet woven into coherence through love. The result is not uniformity but beauty—a higher harmonic resonance where many perspectives can coexist without collapsing into conflict, instead holding one another and reaching further heights. A Polyphonic World System In Which All Voices Are Heard

The common law has always encountered novelty with remarkable confidence. Rather than abandoning established principles, it has sought first to understand the facts before it. This essay asks whether that same disciplined methodology may offer the most fruitful way of approaching the question of digital property today.

The rapid emergence of digital technologies has prompted renewed interest in one of the oldest questions in private law: what is property? Recent debates concerning digital files, cryptoassets and other forms of digital value have produced thoughtful and sophisticated scholarship, reflecting a growing recognition that the law may be encountering objects unlike those it has traditionally been asked to consider.[1]

Much of the discussion has naturally focused on questions of classification. Can a digital file be property? Are cryptoassets things in possession, things in action, or something else entirely? Does the recognition of a possible third category of personal property simply acknowledge an existing legal reality, or does it risk extending proprietary status beyond its principled limits?[2]

These are important questions. Yet they may not be the first questions. Before asking into which legal category a novel object should fall, it may be worth asking a more fundamental question: how do proprietary relationships emerge in the first place?

That question does not seek to expand property law, nor to dilute its principles through analogy or metaphor. On the contrary, it begins from the assumption that the coherence of property law depends upon the continued application of the principles that have guided it for centuries. If new forms of architecture are capable of giving rise to proprietary relationships, they should do so not because they resemble physical objects, nor because they are economically valuable, but because they satisfy the objective conditions that property law has long regarded as significant.

Considered from this perspective, recent debates concerning digital files, in-game items and cryptoassets may not primarily be debates about technology. They may instead be inviting us to reconsider a more enduring question: not what should be recognised as property, but what conditions must exist before any novel object is capable of becoming the subject of proprietary rights?

Property as an Emergent Relationship

The search for a third category of personal property reflects a recognition that the traditional distinction between things in possession and things in action may not accommodate every novel object presented by technological development. That recognition is both understandable and important. It also invites a prior question.

Before asking into which category a novel object should fall, how does that object become capable of proprietary treatment at all?

This question shifts the enquiry from classification to emergence. The common law has never treated proprietary rights as arising merely because an object possesses economic value, nor because it resembles something already recognised as property. Rather, proprietary relationships emerge where the characteristics of the object, and the legal relationships it makes possible, satisfy principles that have developed over centuries.

The object itself may be unfamiliar. The principles need not be. Viewed in this way, the distinction between physical and digital objects begins to lose much of its significance. The common law has never been concerned with whether an object is tangible or intangible as such. Its concern is whether the object exhibits characteristics capable of supporting proprietary relationships.

The emergence of digital technologies therefore does not require the invention of a new theory of property. It requires the careful application of an existing methodology to a new form of architecture.

The question is then not whether digital objects should be treated as property by analogy with physical objects. Nor is it whether the law should expand its conception of property in response to technological change.

The more fundamental question is whether we have now developed architectures capable of giving rise to proprietary relationships in the first place?

The Discipline of the Common Law

The common law has never depended upon its ability to anticipate technological change. Indeed, one of its defining characteristics has been its willingness to encounter circumstances that could not previously have been imagined without abandoning the principles upon which it rests.

Throughout its history, the courts have been presented with previously unencountered forms of commerce, new methods of communication, unfamiliar financial instruments and hitherto unknown forms of economic organisation. The judicial task has never been to become expert in each new innovation. Rather, it has been to understand the factual circumstances before the court and to determine whether established legal principles apply.

This is an important distinction. The common law does not preserve its coherence by resisting novelty. It preserves its coherence by applying enduring principles to new facts.

That approach requires confidence in the law’s own methodology. Novelty lies in the facts presented to the court; stability lies in the method by which those facts are analysed. The legal principles themselves are not continually rewritten in response to technological innovation. Instead, they provide the stable framework within which new factual situations may be understood.

The significance of this methodology extends beyond the resolution of individual disputes. It is the means by which the common law has remained both stable and adaptable across centuries of economic and technological change. A legal system that continually revises its foundational principles in response to each new development would ultimately undermine the certainty upon which commerce depends. Equally, a legal system unwilling to engage with genuinely unfamiliar circumstances would gradually become detached from the society it serves. The strength of the common law lies in avoiding both extremes.

This suggests that current debates concerning digital technologies should not begin by asking whether the law must change in order to accommodate them. The more faithful common-law enquiry is different. It begins by asking what factual circumstances the new architecture presents, and whether those circumstances exhibit characteristics to which existing legal principles have long attached significance.

Only once that enquiry has been undertaken does the question of legal characterisation properly arise. This is more than merely a procedural observation. It reflects a deeper understanding of the role of law itself. The purpose of the law is not to reshape enduring legal principles whenever society develops new forms of organisation or technology. Rather, it is to interpret new circumstances in the light of those enduring principles. This is what allows legal certainty and social innovation to coexist. One provides the stable foundation; the other supplies the continually evolving factual landscape to which the law is called upon to respond.

Property as a Legal Relationship

The common law has long recognised that property is not simply a description of an object. Rather, it describes a legal relationship in respect of an object. The significance of this distinction becomes particularly apparent whenever the law encounters something unfamiliar.

Questions concerning property are therefore rarely answered by examining the object in isolation. The same physical object may be owned, leased, licensed, pledged, held on trust or possessed on behalf of another. What differs is not the object itself, but the legal relationship that exists in respect of it.

This observation has important consequences for the ongoing discussions concerning digital technologies. If property is understood primarily as a legal relationship, the question cannot simply be whether a digital file, cryptoasset or other digital object is property. The more meaningful enquiry is whether the characteristics of that object are capable of giving rise to the kind of legal relationship that property law has historically recognised.

Seen in this light, many of the debates surrounding digital property begin to take on a different character. The question is no longer whether technology has produced something that resembles a physical object closely enough to justify proprietary treatment. Nor is it whether economic value alone should attract proprietary protection. Rather, the enquiry becomes whether an unfamiliar object exhibits characteristics capable of supporting the legal relationships that property law has developed over hundreds of years.

This shift in perspective moves the discussion away from analogy and towards principle. The common law is not required to imagine that a digital object is somehow physical. It is required only to determine whether the factual characteristics of that object justify the application of established legal principles governing proprietary relationships.

Property law is often discussed as though its primary concern were things. In reality, its deeper concern is people. Proprietary rights exist because they provide an ordered framework governing relationships between persons in respect of identifiable objects. The object matters because it becomes the focal point around which legal relationships are organised, expectations are formed and disputes are resolved.

This perspective is important because it shifts the emphasis away from the nature of the object in isolation. Whether an object is tangible or intangible, familiar or unfamiliar, is not itself determinative. The more fundamental enquiry concerns the quality of the legal relationships that the object is capable of supporting. It is those relationships that property law ultimately exists to regulate.

The Emergence of Proprietary Relationships

If property is understood as a legal relationship rather than an inherent quality of an object, a further question naturally follows. What characteristics must a novel object exhibit before it becomes capable of supporting such a relationship?

The purpose of this enquiry is not to formulate a new legal test. Nor is it to suggest that proprietary rights arise whenever a sufficient number of conditions are met. Rather, it is to identify recurring features that have historically informed the law’s recognition of proprietary relationships. They are observations drawn from legal experience rather than conditions imposed upon it.

The first of these is identifiability. Before the law can recognise rights in respect of an object, the object itself must be capable of being distinguished from others. This does not require physical existence. It requires only that the object possess sufficient continuity and distinctiveness to become the subject of legal relations.

Continuity follows naturally. Proprietary relationships persist through time. The law must therefore be capable of recognising that the object to which those relationships attach remains the same object as circumstances change. The precise means by which continuity is established may differ considerably between different forms of property. The principle itself does not.

A third characteristic concerns authority. Proprietary relationships necessarily imply that someone possesses the capacity to determine the lawful disposition of the object. This should not be confused with mere physical control or practical access. Authority concerns the recognised ability to bring about changes in the legal relationship itself.

Closely connected is exclusion. Property law has long recognised that proprietary relationships acquire meaning only where others may be excluded from exercising equivalent authority. Exclusion is therefore not simply an economic concept arising from scarcity. It is a legal consequence of recognising that relationships concerning an object cannot simultaneously be held in inconsistent ways.

Transfer represents a further recurring characteristic. Property does not merely exist; it is capable of passing from one legal relationship to another according to objectively ascertainable rules. The law has always attached considerable significance to the certainty with which such transitions occur.

Finally, proprietary relationships depend upon some means of recognition beyond the immediate parties themselves. Whether through possession, registration, documentary evidence or other legal mechanisms, third parties require objective grounds upon which existing relationships may be understood and relied upon.

None of these observations depends upon whether the object under consideration is tangible or intangible, familiar or technologically novel. They arise from the nature of proprietary relationships themselves. It is against these enduring characteristics, rather than by analogy or metaphor, that any unfamiliar object should first be examined.

Two Perspectives on a Common Question

Recent scholarship concerning digital property illustrates both the progress that has been made and the questions that remain.

One line of enquiry, exemplified by the work of Dave Michels[3], asks whether digital files may themselves become the subject of proprietary relationships. Significantly, this analysis does not seek to transform information into property. On the contrary, it carefully distinguishes between the digital file and the information contained within it. Existing doctrines governing copyright, patents, confidentiality and other forms of intellectual property continue to perform their established functions. The enquiry is different. It concerns whether the digital object through which information is embodied may itself become capable of supporting proprietary relationships.

A different, though complementary, perspective is reflected in the work of Professor Kelvin Low[4]. His concern is not merely whether novel digital objects should receive proprietary recognition, but whether the concepts upon which property law depends can be applied without sacrificing their coherence. In particular, he has cautioned against reasoning by metaphor. Describing a digital file as though it were a physical object, or speaking of “transfer” and “possession” without examining what has actually occurred, risks allowing analogy to substitute for legal analysis.

Both perspectives illuminate an important aspect of the enquiry. Michels directs attention towards the functional characteristics that may distinguish certain digital objects from information more generally. Low reminds us that novelty alone cannot justify the extension of proprietary concepts, and that legal reasoning must begin with the factual circumstances rather than the language used to describe them.

Viewed together, however, these approaches also suggest a further question. If proprietary relationships are neither to be denied simply because an object is technologically unfamiliar, nor recognised merely because it resembles something already familiar. What is the proper basis upon which the enquiry should proceed?

The answer may lie neither in analogy nor in classification, but in methodology. Before asking whether a novel object belongs within an existing category of property, the common law first asks: what has actually been created? It is only once the factual architecture has been understood that questions of legal characterisation properly arise.

Understanding the Object Before Classifying It

If methodology requires the court first to understand what has actually been created, the immediate question becomes one of fact rather than law. What precisely is the object whose legal character is being considered?

This question is easily overlooked in discussions concerning digital technologies because technological vocabulary often conceals rather than clarifies the underlying architecture. Terms such as “digital asset”, “token”, “cryptoasset”, “coin” or even “file” are frequently employed as though they describe legally meaningful categories. In reality, they often identify little more than broad families of technologies whose internal architectures may differ in ways of considerable legal significance.

The common law has little interest in labels as such. It is concerned with the factual characteristics of the object before the court. The same label may describe structures giving rise to profoundly different legal relationships, just as different legal instruments may perform remarkably similar economic functions. Terminology therefore provides, at most, the starting point of legal enquiry.

This observation assumes particular importance in the context of digital technologies. Much contemporary discussion proceeds as though all cryptoassets, or all digital files, possess sufficiently similar characteristics to justify collective legal treatment. Yet the relevant question is not whether different objects share a technological label. It is whether they exhibit the factual characteristics capable of supporting proprietary relationships.

The task before the court is therefore neither to accept nor reject technological descriptions at face value. It is to understand the architecture that gives rise to the object itself. Only then can the legal significance of that object properly be assessed. Architecture is not the object of legal analysis; it is the source of the factual circumstances that become the object of legal analysis.

A Novel Architectural Fact

In October 2008, a short paper entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System[5] described an architecture intended to solve a longstanding problem in digital systems. The paper has most commonly been read through the lenses of computer science, economics and finance. Viewed from the perspective developed in the preceding sections, a different question emerges.

Rather than asking whether the architecture proposed a new form of digital currency or money, or whether it should properly be classified as a cryptoasset, the common-law enquiry begins elsewhere.

What factual architecture does the paper actually describe? This question is intentionally modest. It does not assume that the architecture gives rise to proprietary rights, nor does it seek to characterise the legal status of any particular digital object. It merely recognises that legal analysis must begin with an accurate understanding of the facts.

Read in this way, the White Paper is striking. It does not begin by asserting ownership. It does not create rights by declaration. Nor does it rely upon metaphor to suggest that digital information should simply be treated as though it were physical.

Instead, it describes an architecture governed by objective rules. Those rules establish the conditions under which authority may be exercised, provenance demonstrated, lawful state changes recognised and competing claims resolved. Identity is maintained not through physical possession but through continuity of the chain itself. Authority is demonstrated rather than asserted. Transfer is effected through compliance with objective rules rather than through the intervention of a trusted intermediary.

Whether those characteristics ultimately satisfy the requirements of property law remains a legal question. The architecture does not answer it. It does, however, present the common law with something it has not previously encountered: a factual architecture specifically designed to organise relationships between persons in respect of a novel digital object according to stable, objective and publicly verifiable rules.

That proposition is neither technological nor jurisprudential alone. It is architectural. Once understood in those terms, the question before the law is no longer whether digital objects resemble physical ones closely enough to justify proprietary treatment. The question becomes whether this particular architecture gives rise to the kinds of relationships that property law has long been prepared to recognise.

Seeing the Architecture

One of the difficulties presented by genuinely novel developments is that they are often interpreted through the vocabulary of existing categories. This is both natural and necessary. Language develops gradually, and the first descriptions of unfamiliar phenomena frequently rely upon analogy with things already known. Such analogies can be useful as an initial point of orientation. They become problematic only when they begin to substitute for analysis.

Much of the discussion surrounding Bitcoin[6] illustrates this difficulty. It has come to be described in terms such as “cryptocurrency”, “digital currency”, “virtual asset” and later “cryptoasset”. Each description sought to place the architecture within a broad conceptual framework being developed across an abundance of different technologies whose architectures were not the same. Each description therefore carried assumptions that risked directing attention towards classification before the architecture itself had been properly understood.

The White Paper adopts a noticeably different approach. Rather than arguing by analogy, it describes a sequence of objective rules governing the creation, continuity and transfer of a novel digital object. Its concern is architectural rather than metaphorical. The reader is invited to understand how the system operates before reaching conclusions about its legal or economic significance.

This distinction is not merely linguistic. It reflects a methodological discipline that closely resembles that of the common law itself. Courts do not begin with labels. They begin with facts. They seek first to understand what has been created before determining the legal relationships to which those facts may give rise.

Perhaps this explains why the architecture described in the White Paper has proven so difficult to characterise. Much of the subsequent discussion has proceeded by asking what familiar category it most closely resembles. The more fundamental enquiry is different. Before asking what it should be called, the common law asks a prior question: what has actually been created?

Architecture and the Emergence of Proprietary Relationships

If the common-law enquiry begins by understanding what has been created before asking how it should be characterised, the significance of the architecture described in the White Paper becomes clearer.

The architecture does not purport to redefine property law. Nor does it seek to create legal rights through technological means. Instead, it establishes a framework of objective rules governing the existence, continuity and disposition of a d digital object. Those rules do not answer legal questions. They create the factual circumstances from which legal questions arise. This distinction is fundamental.

Throughout the development of the common law, courts have encountered novel arrangements of facts that gave rise to previously unfamiliar legal questions. The legal principles themselves remained remarkably stable. What changed were the factual circumstances to which those principles were applied.

Viewed in this way, the originality of the architecture lies not in its technological sophistication alone, but in the legal significance of the relationships it makes possible. Identity is not established through physical possession but through objective continuity. Authority is not presumed but demonstrated. Competing claims are resolved according to publicly ascertainable rules. Provenance is not reconstructed retrospectively but forms part of the continuing identity of the object itself. Changes in legal relationships occur through objectively defined processes rather than discretionary intervention.

None of these observations determines whether proprietary rights arise as a matter of law. That remains the responsibility of the courts. They do, however, present the law with factual circumstances possessing characteristics that property jurisprudence has long regarded as significant.

This is why the architecture deserves careful legal attention. Its importance does not lie in the terminology commonly used to describe it, nor in contemporary regulatory classifications. It lies in the possibility that it represents a novel factual arrangement capable of supporting proprietary relationships according to principles the common law has applied for generations.

The legal enquiry changes in an important respect. The question is then not whether the law should adapt itself to accommodate technological novelty. The question becomes whether enduring legal principles, faithfully applied, are sufficient to evaluate a novel form of architecture whose defining characteristics can now be examined objectively.

The discussion has now arrived at a point where three distinct strands of enquiry begin to converge.

The common law provides the methodology.

Contemporary scholarship identifies the jurisprudential questions.

The White Paper presents the factual circumstances.

These are not competing enquiries. They are successive ones.

The common law cannot characterise what it has not first understood. Scholarship cannot determine whether an unfamiliar object should receive proprietary recognition without first identifying its relevant characteristics. Nor can architecture determine legal consequences. It can only establish the factual circumstances from which those consequences may emerge.

Seen in this way, the relationship between law and technology changes fundamentally. The architecture does not ask the law to abandon its principles. It invites the law to apply them.

The Question Before the Law

If the preceding analysis is correct, the debate concerning digital property may be entering a new phase.

For some years, much of the discussion has centred upon classification. Are particular digital objects capable of being recognised as property? Do they fall within existing categories, or should the law acknowledge a further category of personal property? These questions remain important. Yet they may no longer be the questions upon which the enquiry ultimately turns.

Methodology provides the deeper point of enquiry. Before the common law determines how a novel object should be characterised, it must first understand the factual architecture from which that object emerges. Classification cannot meaningfully precede understanding.

This has implications extending well beyond any particular technology. Digital architectures are likely to continue evolving in ways that present the law with increasingly unfamiliar forms of human organisation and interaction. Artificial intelligence, autonomous agents, tokenised financial instruments and digital representations of value may each raise distinct legal questions. Their technological diversity, however, need not require a corresponding diversity of legal methodology.

The lasting strength of the common law has always lain in its confidence that stable principles are capable of engaging with new factual realities. That confidence should not diminish simply because the architecture giving rise to those facts is digital rather than physical, or because it employs technologies unfamiliar to previous generations.

Indeed, the emergence of novel architectures may provide an opportunity to reaffirm, rather than reconsider, the discipline of the common law. The question is not whether legal principle must yield to technological innovation. It is whether technological innovation has now produced factual circumstances capable of engaging legal principles in ways that were previously impossible.

Seen from this perspective, the debate concerning digital property becomes less a question of legal expansion than one of legal recognition. The law is not asked to create new principles. It is asked to examine whether established principles apply to new forms of factual reality. The common law has never feared novelty. It has feared abandoning disciplined reasoning in the face of novelty.

Conclusion

The purpose of this essay has not been to argue that digital objects should be recognised as property, nor to suggest that technological innovation requires the common law to depart from its established principles. On the contrary, it has proceeded from the belief that the enduring strength of the common law lies precisely in its confidence that stable principles remain capable of engaging with novel facts.

Viewed from this perspective, recent debates concerning digital property reveal something more significant than disagreement about classification. They reveal the convergence of distinct lines of enquiry.

The common law asks how established principles should be applied to new factual realities. Contemporary scholarship explores whether certain forms of digital object are capable of supporting proprietary relationships without diminishing the coherence of property law. The architecture described in the White Paper presents a previously unencountered factual arrangement whose legal significance can now be examined through that same disciplined methodology.

These are not competing conversations. They are successive stages of the same enquiry. Perhaps this is the real significance of the present moment. For the first time, the law is presented not merely with new terminology or new forms of economic activity, but with architectures deliberately designed to structure relationships between persons in respect of purely digital objects. Whether particular architectures ultimately satisfy the requirements of property law remains a matter for careful legal analysis. The common law should decide that question as it always has: patiently, objectively and by reference to enduring principle rather than analogy.

The more fundamental contribution of the architecture may therefore lie elsewhere. It does not ask the law to change. It asks the law to examine a new factual reality. The question before us is not simply whether digital objects can become property. It is whether we have now developed architectures capable of giving rise to proprietary relationships in the first place.

If that question is now before the law, it should be approached not with anxiety that established principles have become obsolete, but with confidence that they remain equal to the task. The common law has never derived its strength from predicting the future. It has derived its strength from understanding the present with sufficient clarity that enduring principles can be faithfully applied to circumstances that previous generations could never have imagined.

The significance of this enquiry therefore extends beyond digital property alone. It illustrates something more enduring about the common law itself. Novelty need not be met by abandoning principle, nor by forcing unfamiliar realities into familiar categories through analogy. The common law has always possessed a more disciplined path. It begins by understanding what has been created. It then asks whether established principles are sufficient to engage with that new reality. If they are, the law has not changed. Our understanding of the world has.

Perhaps that is the true significance of the present debate. It is not that technology has outgrown the common law. It is that novel architectures now invite the common law to exercise the confidence in its own method that has always been the source of its enduring strength. That is where every common-law enquiry begins.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than directing disproportionate energy toward financial survival. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, guided by the conviction that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Substack Anna Iversen

[1] This essay is inspired by the debate hosted by The Cloud Legal Project, Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London, 25 June 2026, where Dave Michels, researcher with the Cloud Legal Project at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London, and a Guest Teacher at the London School of Economics, and Kelvin Low, Professor of Law and Director of the Centre for Private Law at the University of Hong Kong, debated the proposition that “the law does not protect digital files as property, nor should it” Items - Centre for Commercial Law Studies

[2] E.g. Property (Digital Assets etc) Bill, extending to England and Wales and Northern Ireland, Property (Digital Assets etc) Bill

[3] Johan David Michels, researcher and PhD candidate with the Cloud Legal Project at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London, and a Guest Teacher at the London School of Economics Dave-Michels-CV-07.17.pdf

[4] Kelvin Low, Professor of Law and Director, Centre for Private Law, The University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law Kelvin Low - Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong

[5] White Paper entitled ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’ by Satoshi Nakamoto, 31 October 2008 bitcoin.pdf and referred to in this essay as the ‘White Paper’.

[6] In this context, the term ‘Bitcoin’ is used to describe the architecture laid out in the White Paper.

Britain’s future will not be determined by the number of regulations it removes, the taxes it raises or lowers, or the financial targets it manages to meet. Those things may play a role, but they are not what ultimately determines whether a nation flourishes.

Prosperous nations are built upon something more fundamental. They possess the ability to produce the things they need, to develop the talents of their people, to maintain the infrastructure upon which daily life depends, and to pass greater capabilities to the next generation than they themselves inherited. They have ambition and a vision for the future, and that vision goes much further than the next budget or election cycle.

Throughout history, societies have risen when they focused on building and declined when they became preoccupied with managing the consequences of earlier accomplishments. This is not merely an economic distinction, but one of civilisational consequence.

A builder nation thinks in decades rather than quarters. It measures success not merely by consumption, but by what it creates, maintains and leaves behind. It views its infrastructure, institutions, knowledge and natural resources not as assets to be extracted, but as responsibilities to be stewarded.

The challenge Britain is facing today is therefore not simply how to generate more growth. It is whether Britain can once again think and act like a builder nation.

Every generation receives tools that its predecessors could scarcely imagine. The steam engine transformed physical production. Electrification extended human capability across entire continents. Telecommunications collapsed distance. Computing accelerated the processing of information. Today, artificial intelligence, advanced networks and digital systems are opening possibilities that would have appeared inconceivable only a few decades ago.

The challenge facing Britain is not whether new tools exist—they do. Nor is it whether technology will continue to advance—it will. The real challenge is whether we possess the wisdom to use these tools in ways that increase the productive capacity and resilience that ensures a flourishing of society.

Power without stewardship becomes extraction. Technology without purpose becomes distraction. Innovation without responsibility can accelerate decline just as easily as it can accelerate progress.

A nation organised around building approaches new capabilities in another way. It does not merely ask what can be done, but what ought to be built. It does not simply seek to increase efficiency, but to strengthen the foundations upon which future generations will depend.

The challenge before Britain is therefore far bigger than economic reform. It is the challenge of stewardship in an age of unprecedented capability.

The Forgotten Purpose of Economics

Economics is often presented as the science of managing scarcity. Governments are judged by growth rates, inflation figures, debt levels and market performance. Financial commentators analyse economic life through statistics, forecasts and indicators, while policy debates frequently revolve around taxation, spending and monetary policy.

These measures can be useful, but they are not the economy itself.

An economy is not a collection of numbers on a spreadsheet. It is the means through which a society organises its resources, knowledge, labour and creativity to meet human needs and improve the conditions of life.

At its heart, economics concerns something remarkably simple: how a society develops the capacity to generate greater value tomorrow compared to what it can generate today.

This understanding was once far more common than it is now.

The statesmen and economists associated with what has become known as the American System did not view wealth primarily as money. They viewed wealth as productive capacity. The true measure of a nation was not the size of its financial sector or the volume of transactions taking place within its borders, but its ability to build infrastructure, advance science, develop industry, educate its people and increase the productive powers of labour.

Under this view, finance was never intended to become an end in itself. Money was a tool, credit was a tool, and markets were tools. Their role was to facilitate the creation of real wealth in the physical economy.

More recently, the economist Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922-2019) expanded upon many of these ideas through his emphasis on physical economy. He argued that genuine economic progress could not be measured solely through financial indicators. The more important question was whether a society was increasing its capacity to transform nature through scientific discovery, technological advancement and improvements in infrastructure. In other words, was the nation becoming more capable?

This is important because modern economies often confuse financial activity with wealth creation. A nation can experience rising asset prices while its infrastructure deteriorates. Financial markets can expand while productive industries contract. Economic statistics can improve while the underlying capabilities of a society weaken.

The differentiator between these two approaches to the economy is the difference between managing claims on wealth and creating wealth itself.

For much of our history, this distinction remained relatively clear because productive activity was tangible. Farms produced food, factories produced goods, power stations generated energy, railways moved people and resources. The connection between productive powers and prosperity was visible.

Today, the picture is more complex. Information, software, data, knowledge and intellectual property have become increasingly important sources of value. Yet the underlying principle remains unchanged. Wealth does not arise from the circulation of claims alone. It arises from the creation of new capabilities that allow society to achieve more with the resources available to it.

A builder nation therefore inherently approaches economics differently. Its primary concern is not how wealth can be redistributed after it has been created, but how the conditions for wealth creation can be expanded in the first place.

It asks different questions.

Are we developing the talents of our people?

Are we encouraging scientific discovery?

Are we building resilient infrastructure?

Are we producing the energy required for future growth?

Are we creating systems that reward innovation?

Are we preserving and transmitting knowledge across generations?

These are not separate from economics. They are economics in its most fundamental sense.

When seen from this perspective, the challenge facing Britain is not simply one of fiscal policy, regulation or trade. It is a question of productive capacity. It is a question of whether the institutions of the nation are organised around administration or stewardship, consumption or creation, short-term management or long-term development.

Only once that question is addressed can we begin to consider the tools through which a modern builder nation might be constructed.

From Administration to Stewardship

Once economics is understood as the cultivation of a nation’s productive capability, a deeper question surfaces.

How should a nation relate to the resources, institutions and capabilities entrusted to it?

For many years, public discourse has largely been framed in administrative terms. Governments administer budgets, regulators administer rules, public bodies administer services, corporations administer assets. Increasingly, success is measured by efficiency, compliance and the achievement of short-term targets.

Administration has its place. Complex societies require organisation. Rules matter, as does accountability and competence. But administration alone cannot create a flourishing civilisation. A society can become highly skilled at administering decline. It can efficiently manage deteriorating infrastructure. It can efficiently process rising healthcare costs. It can efficiently oversee shrinking industrial capacity. It can efficiently distribute resources generated by previous generations while investing little in the creation of new wealth.

Stewardship is different. A steward is concerned not only with what exists today, but with what will exist tomorrow. Stewardship asks whether the assets, capabilities and opportunities inherited from previous generations are being preserved, strengthened and expanded for those who follow.

The distinction may seem subtle, but it changes everything.

A steward views infrastructure differently. Roads, railways, energy networks, water systems and communications networks are not merely costs to be managed. They are productive assets that enable future prosperity.

A steward views agriculture differently. Land is not simply a resource to be exploited for immediate output. It is a living productive system whose fertility, resilience and long-term health and regenerative capacity must be maintained.

A steward views education differently. The purpose is not merely to produce credentials, but to cultivate the knowledge, critical thinking, skills and creativity upon which future innovation depends.

A steward views healthcare differently. The objective is not only to manage or treat illness, but to preserve and enhance the wellbeing, health and productive potential of the population.

A steward views scientific research differently. Discovery is not an expense. It is an investment in capabilities that do not yet exist.

A steward views innovation differently. The purpose is not to exploit innovation for short-term gains, but to ensure those imagining and bringing the future of humanity are valued, supported, and elevated within the economy itself.

In each case, the time horizon expands.

The issue to be addressed ceases to be: “How do we manage this year’s challenges?”

It becomes: “What foundations are we creating for the next generation?”

This shift in perspective becomes increasingly important in an age of rapidly advancing technology.

Humanity now possesses tools capable of processing information, coordinating resources and generating and preserving knowledge at scales that previous generations could scarcely imagine. Artificial intelligence, advanced communications networks, automation and digital systems are transforming the way societies function. However, more powerful tools do not automatically produce better outcomes.

A poorly maintained ship does not become safer because its engines are more powerful. A society without clear purpose and identity does not become more prosperous simply because it possesses more advanced technology.

The quality of the outcome depends upon the wisdom with which the tools are used. Technology amplifies intent.

Where stewardship is present, new technologies can strengthen generative capacity, improve resilience and expand human opportunity. Where stewardship is absent, the same technologies can accelerate waste, concentration, fragmentation and short-term extraction. The challenge facing Britain is therefore not technology seen in isolation. It is philosophical and institutional.

Do we view the tools of the twenty-first century primarily as mechanisms for consumption, speculation, surveillance and administration?

or,

Do we view them as instruments through which a builder nation can more effectively steward its resources, develop its people and increase its productive capabilities?

The answer to that question will shape the character of the century ahead.

For the first time in history, societies possess the ability to coordinate information, resources and economic activity in near real time. Entire systems can be made more transparent, more accountable and more efficient than was previously possible.

The opportunity is extraordinary, but to understand its importance, we must first recognise that the nature of infrastructure itself is changing. Modern societies increasingly depend upon something less visible but equally important: information infrastructure. It is here that one of the most significant opportunities for national renewal begins to arise.

The Infrastructure We Cannot See

When people think of infrastructure, they typically picture physical assets—roads, railways, ports, power stations, water systems. These remain essential. No nation can flourish without reliable access to energy, transportation and the physical networks upon which economic activity depends.

Every era introduces new forms of infrastructure. The industrial age required systems capable of moving raw materials, goods and people across vast distances. The twentieth century expanded these networks and added new layers of communication, finance and logistics.

Today, societies depend upon information infrastructure. It is often overlooked precisely because it is largely invisible.

Modern economies are built upon an extraordinary volume of information. Information is used by governments to allocate resources, by businesses to coordinate production, by hospitals to manage patient care, by supply chains to enhance operational efficiency, by researchers to achieve scientific research advances. Financial systems function through information.

Increasingly, the effectiveness of a nation depends upon the quality, accuracy and accessibility of the information upon which decisions are made. A farmer deciding when to plant a crop relies upon it, an engineer maintaining critical infrastructure relies upon it, a doctor treating a patient relies upon it, and a government allocating public resources relies upon it. In each case, the quality of the outcome is directly influenced by the quality of the information available.

Throughout history, information has been fragmented by necessity. Records were stored in separate locations, verification was slow, coordination was costly, information often travelled more slowly than the decisions that depended upon it.

Digital systems have transformed this landscape. It is now possible for data to be transmitted globally, stored indefinitely and accessed almost instantaneously. Vast quantities of knowledge can be shared at negligible cost. Coordination can occur across organisations, industries and continents in real time.

This has created opportunities that previous generations could barely imagine. It has also revealed an important limitation. The internet solved the problem of communication, but it did not solve the problem of ownership. Neither did it solve the problem of accountability or of maintaining a truthful record of economic activity.

Information can be copied endlessly, but ownership remains uncertain. Data can be shared globally, but trust often remains dependent upon intermediaries. Records can be stored digitally, but their integrity frequently relies upon the institutions maintaining them.

As data has become more important, the question of trust has become more important too. A builder nation cannot rely solely upon the movement of information. It must also consider the quality of that information.

Can records be verified?

Can ownership be established?

Can responsibility be identified?

Can economic activity be audited?

Can knowledge be preserved across generations?

These questions are not technical curiosities—they are stewardship questions. The more complex a society becomes, the more important it becomes for its information systems to accurately reflect reality.

For centuries, societies have developed institutions to create trust within the physical world. Property registers to establish ownership, accounting systems for tracking resources, contracts for defining rights and obligations. Legal systems have provided recourse when disputes have arisen.

The challenge facing this new era is how to extend these principles into the digital realm. The answer may prove to be one of the most important infrastructure developments of our age.

It has now become possible to establish ownership, accountability and continuity within digital systems themselves, creating the foundations for a new layer of economic infrastructure upon which future societies may increasingly depend.

The Missing Economic Layer

To understand why this development matters, it is first necessary to understand what was missing from the internet’s original architecture. The internet transformed the world by enabling data to move freely across distance. A message that once took days or weeks to deliver now travels across the globe in fractions of a second. Knowledge can be shared instantaneously, businesses can coordinate across continents, and scientific discoveries can be disseminated worldwide almost immediately. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this achievement.

Despite its transformative impact, the internet was built primarily as a communications network. It enabled information to move, but it did not enable information to be owned. This may prove to be more significant than it may initially seem.

Information itself remains fundamentally different from physical objects. A piece of information can be copied indefinitely without depriving its creator of possession. If a document, image or idea is shared, both parties can continue to hold it simultaneously.

Ownership requires something more. It requires the ability to establish exclusivity, continuity and responsibility. The significance of digital property is not that information itself suddenly becomes scarce, but that digital systems can now create and maintain rivalrous forms of ownership within an informational environment.

Economic activity has always depended not only upon communication, but upon the ability to establish ownership, transfer rights, record transactions and maintain accountability. Property rights provide the foundation upon which investment, trade, innovation and long-term planning become possible.

In the physical world, societies developed institutions to support these functions. Land registries recording ownership, contracts establishing obligations, accounting systems tracking resources, and courts providing dispute resolution mechanisms.

The digital world inherited few of these capabilities. Information can be copied, often without distinction between the original and the copy, ownership frequently depends on contractual arrangements maintained by intermediaries, and records can be altered, duplicated or fragmented across multiple systems. As the digital economy has expanded, this limitation has grown in significance.

The challenge has not merely been technical, but also economic.

How could ownership exist within a digital environment?

How could a digital object be transferred from one person to another without creating competing versions?

How could economic activity occurring online be recorded in a manner that preserved continuity, accountability and auditability?

How could property itself exist within the digital realm?

These questions remained largely unresolved until the appearance of a technology that is still widely misunderstood. In October 2008[1], a paper published under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto described a system that has often been presented as a new form of money. Its deeper significance lies in the emergence of digital property. What the system has introduced is a method through which ownership, transfer and economic history can be recorded directly within a digital environment.

Most digital systems record claims. They record that a person is entitled to something, that a balance exists, or that a right is recognised by an intermediary. Digital property is different. It allows ownership itself to be represented and transferred within the system itself rather than merely recording a claim upon an external asset or institution.

This innovation has made it possible to establish continuity of ownership without requiring a central authority to maintain the record. This represented much more than a payment system. It represented the emergence of a new form of infrastructure.

Just as the internet created a common protocol for the transmission of information, this new system created the foundations for the management of digital property and the implications extend far beyond finance.

A builder nation views infrastructure according to the capabilities it enables whether it be railways, electrical networks or the internet. Digital property infrastructure enables a new capability—the management of ownership, accountability and economic activity within digital systems. The significance of digital property is that ownership can now exist within digital systems in a manner that is exclusive, transferable and accountable.

This creates the possibility of transparent and auditable public expenditure for governments, the possibility of more accurate resource management and supply chain coordination for industry, opportunities for secure and portable medical records for healthcare, improved provenance, traceability and stewardship of resources for agriculture, the preservation of intellectual contributions and the verification of knowledge for scientific research, and the possibility of greater control over their digital identities, records and assets for citizens.

In this light, the significance of the original Bitcoin is not that it created another financial product. Its significance lies in that it introduced a new layer of economic infrastructure capable of supporting more complex societies.

Ownership is not merely an economic concept. It is the foundation of stewardship. People care for, invest in and take responsibility for what they own. The significance of digital property is that it extends this relationship into the digital realm, making it possible to establish accountability and stewardship within increasingly important areas of economic and social life.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to dramatically increase humanity’s productive capabilities, accelerating discovery, innovation and the efficient use of resources. As information becomes easier to generate, the importance of establishing ownership, provenance and accountability increases. Digital property may prove to be a necessary complement to artificial intelligence, providing the stewardship layer through which increasingly powerful tools can be aligned with human responsibility and long-term value creation. Properly integrated, these technologies can help extend the creative and productive capacities of individuals throughout society rather than concentrating capability, wealth and influence within an ever-smaller number of institutions.

The question for a society organised around building is therefore not whether such infrastructure should exist, as it already does. The question is how it should be used. Will it become another mechanism for speculation and short-term gain, or will it be employed as a tool of stewardship, helping societies manage resources, preserve knowledge, strengthen accountability and coordinate economic activity more effectively?

The answer may prove as important to the twenty-first century as the development of railways was to the nineteenth century. Once ownership can exist within digital systems, an entirely new set of possibilities begins to appear. Among the most important is the opportunity to rethink the relationship between information, money and value itself. Of these, money occupies a particularly important position because it influences how societies allocate resources and organise economic activity.

Money, Value and the Stewardship of Capital

Money occupies a unique place within every economy. It is so familiar that it is rarely questioned, yet the assumptions embedded within a monetary system influence almost every aspect of national life. Investment decisions, infrastructure development, industrial expansion, scientific research and household prosperity are all shaped by the way money is created, distributed and used.

For this reason, the question facing a nation organised around building is not simply how much money exists, but what purpose money is intended to serve.

Historically, the most successful periods of economic development have tended to occur when finance remained connected to productive activity, specifically when capital has flowed toward infrastructure, industry, scientific advancement and the expansion of the capacity to create. Societies have prospered when money has functioned as a facilitator of development rather than as an objective in itself.

Over time, however, financial systems have become increasingly detached from the underlying productive economy, and what we are seeing in contemporary economies is financial activity expanding independently of productive activity. Asset prices can rise while infrastructure deteriorates. Credit can flow more readily into speculation than into innovation. The result is often a widening gap between financial wealth and productive capability.

A builder nation seeks to close that gap. It recognises that money is not wealth. Money is a mechanism through which wealth is measured, exchanged and directed. The real wealth of a nation resides in its people, its knowledge, its infrastructure, its natural resources, its scientific capabilities and its capacity to create value.

The role of money is therefore not to dominate the economy, but to serve it. It is the inverse of how we tend to regard it today. This distinction becomes more important as economic activity moves into digital environments. Much of the contemporary discussion surrounding digital currencies has focused on speed, convenience and efficiency. These are all valid considerations, but they do not address the more fundamental question.

What is the nature of the asset being held?

In many contemporary systems, individuals and institutions possess claims upon intermediaries. Banks maintain records of balances, financial institutions maintain records of ownership. Rights and obligations are often distributed across multiple layers of administration. Such arrangements can function effectively, but they are ultimately systems of claims.

The emergence of digital property introduces another possibility. It has now become possible for ownership itself to exist within a digital environment in a manner that is directly verifiable and independently transferable. Rather than relying exclusively upon chains of intermediated claims, digital systems can increasingly support direct forms of ownership, and its implications are profound.

Digital property also opens the door to new forms of economic participation. By making micropayments practical, it becomes possible to reward valuable contributions at a level of precision previously unattainable. A society organised around building benefits when creativity, knowledge and innovation can be recognised wherever they arise, allowing value to flow more directly to those who help create it.

Builder nations require foundations that are resilient, transparent and capable of supporting long-term investment. The stronger the connection between economic activity and the underlying reality it represents, the more effectively resources can be allocated and stewarded.

Viewed through this lens, digital monetary infrastructure becomes more than a payments technology. It becomes part of the architecture through which productive activity is organised. The opportunity is not simply to digitise existing monetary systems. The opportunity is to align monetary systems more closely with the realities of production, ownership and value creation.

This is particularly relevant for national development. Successful nations have historically benefited from institutions capable of directing capital toward productive ends. Infrastructure projects, scientific advancement, industrial expansion and strategic capabilities frequently require investment horizons that extend beyond immediate market cycles.

The challenge is not merely the availability of capital, but its stewardship. Capital can be directed toward extraction or creation. It can be used to maximise short-term returns or to cultivate long-term capabilities. It can concentrate value within increasingly narrow channels or support broad-based productive development. The distinction is ultimately one of purpose. A builder nation treats capital as a tool for expanding future possibilities.

It has now become possible to imagine monetary systems that operate with unprecedented transparency, auditability and efficiency while remaining grounded in principles of ownership, accountability and stewardship. Such systems need not diminish individual freedom—quite the opposite. Properly designed, they can strengthen it by reducing dependence upon opaque intermediaries and increasing the ability of individuals, businesses and institutions to participate directly in economic life.

The goal is not greater centralisation, nor is it the abandonment of institutions. The goal is alignment. Alignment between money and value, between finance and production, between technological capability and human flourishing.

Such a nation understands that money alone cannot create prosperity, but it also understands that monetary systems influence what societies choose to build. When money is aligned with stewardship rather than extraction, entirely new possibilities begin to appear for the financing of innovation, infrastructure and human creativity. Of all the resources available to a nation, none is ultimately more important than human creativity itself.

Stewarding Innovation and Human Creativity

Every nation depends upon resources. Some possess abundant energy reserves, others benefit from fertile land, strategic geography or access to important trade routes. Yet the most valuable resource available to any society is neither found beneath the ground nor contained within its borders. It exists within the minds of its people.

Every scientific breakthrough, technological innovation, engineering achievement and creative endeavour begins as an idea. Before it becomes a product, a discovery, a business or an institution, it exists as an act of human imagination.

The generative capability of a nation therefore depends not only upon its physical resources, but upon its ability to cultivate, support and reward those who create new possibilities. This has always been true, but has often been overlooked. What has amplified and changed this is the increasing importance of intangible value.

In previous centuries, economic activity was almost exclusively dominated by physical production. Today, knowledge, information, intellectual property and innovation account for an ever-growing proportion of economic value. Scientific discoveries, software, designs, creative works and technological inventions increasingly shape the trajectory of nations.

Many of the institutions through which innovation is financed were designed for an earlier era. Creators frequently face a difficult choice. In order to obtain the capital necessary to develop an idea, they may be required to surrender significant control over the future of what they have created. Financial structures often prioritise liquidity events, ownership transfers and exit strategies that may not align with the creator’s long-term vision.

These arrangements can generate remarkable successes, but they also reveal a deeper question. What is the role of capital? If capital exists solely to maximise financial returns, then the answer is straightforward. If, however, capital exists to support the development of productive capacity, then a different set of possibilities emerges.

A builder nation recognises that creators are not merely seeking funding. They are attempting to bring something into existence that did not previously exist. The role of capital should therefore be to support that process, rather than replacing the stewardship of the creator.

This becomes increasingly important as the tools available to creators become more powerful. Digital infrastructure now makes it possible to establish ownership, manage rights, distribute value and coordinate economic activity in new ways. Information itself can increasingly function as property, contributions can be recorded, revenue can be shared, rights can be preserved, while also honouring inventor, innovator and creator sovereignty.

It is now time to imagine capital structures designed around long-term alignment rather than eventual separation through structures by which investors participate in success without requiring creators to relinquish stewardship. New structures where value can be shared without necessitating dilution, capable of nurturing innovation while preserving the creative intent from which it originated. Such approaches are not simply financial innovations. They are stewardship innovations.[2]

They innately recognise that the purpose of a nation is not merely to consume the fruits of creativity, but to cultivate the conditions under which creativity can flourish. Such a nation therefore invests not only in infrastructure, energy and industry. It invests in inventors, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and artists. It invests in those whose ideas will become the foundations upon which future generations build.

Ultimately, every bridge, every institution, every technology and every discovery begins with a single act of creation. To steward creativity is therefore to steward the future itself.

Britain as a Builder Nation

A builder nation is not defined by the volume of its consumption, the size of its financial markets or the number of regulatory bodies or the regulations they administer. It is defined by its capacity to create. To create knowledge, infrastructure, energy as well as the opportunity and the conditions under which future generations can flourish.

Viewed from this perspective, Britain’s challenges are not fundamentally economic, technological or political. They are questions of philosophical orientation and they are relevant to every nation.

What are the nation’s institutions designed to achieve?

What capabilities are they cultivating?

What future are they helping to build?

The twenty-first century presents a very different landscape to the possibilities humanity has had historically, yet it will not be technology alone that determines the future. A society equipped with powerful tools but lacking in clear purpose may simply accelerate existing problems. Efficiency can accelerate waste just as easily as it can accelerate progress.

The true differentiator lies in stewardship and Britain’s challenge as well as opportunity is therefore not to recreate the past, but to apply enduring principles through the tools of the present. The principles themselves are remarkably simple:

A nation should develop its productive capacities, invest in infrastructure, advance scientific discovery, cultivate the talents of its people, encourage innovation, reward creation, and preserve the conditions upon which future prosperity depends.

These ideas are not new. What is new are the tools now available to achieve them. A builder nation in the twenty-first century can combine physical infrastructure with information infrastructure. It can unite scientific progress with transparent systems of accountability, connect capital more directly to productive activity, and support creators without requiring them to surrender stewardship of what they create. It can treat information as an asset to be preserved, knowledge as a resource to be cultivated and technology as a tool to serve human flourishing.

Above all, it would recognise that the ultimate source of wealth is neither money nor technology.

It is human creativity.

Britain possesses all of the ingredients necessary to fulfil such a role. Its scientific heritage remains extraordinary. Its legal traditions, if properly aligned, remain influential worldwide. Its engineers, entrepreneurs, researchers and creators continue to contribute much beyond its shores.

There is little doubt that Britain retains the capacity to build, but the question is whether it chooses to organise its institutions, technologies and resources around that purpose. The future of the nation is not going to be determined solely by what it consumes, administers or regulates. It will be shaped by what the people of the nation choose to build.

Britain does not need to become what it once was. The opportunities before it are far greater than any previous generation could have imagined. The challenge is to meet those opportunities with equal measures of creativity, responsibility and stewardship. This requires insight that increasingly powerful tools require deep reflection and increasingly thoughtful institutions. It also requires the understanding that prosperity is ultimately a consequence of productive capacity.

The opportunity before Britain is historically unique because the technologies now available allow enduring economic principles to be expressed in ways that were previously impossible.

In order for Britain to once again become a builder nation, we need to remember that the role of a nation is not merely to manage the present, but to cultivate the future. That is the opportunity before Britain. Not Britain restored, or Britain remembered. Britain renewed through the timeless act of building.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than directing disproportionate energy toward financial survival. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, guided by the conviction that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Substack Anna Iversen

[1] White paper entitled ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’, by Satoshi Nakamoto, 31 October 2008 bitcoin.pdf . Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) has retained the original Bitcoin protocol architecture as laid out by Satoshi Nakamoto in the 2008 white paper. It is worth noting that when most people use the term “Bitcoin”, they are referring to BTC, the token traded on exchanges, widely reported in the media and generally known to the world’s population. Yet BTC does not fully reflect the system described in the white paper.

[2] The Sovereign Revenue Trust Entity^® (SRTE^®) is a patent-pending entrepreneurial investment structure designed to align the interests of creators and investors. Rather than requiring dilution and one-time exit events, its objective is to preserve creator stewardship while enabling investors to participate in the value created. The underlying premise is that greater alignment can strengthen stewardship and improve the conditions under which innovation, resilience and long-term value creation occur.

Please refer to Barbara Guth’s ‘The Evolution of Finance’ trilogy, Evolution of Finance Volume 3 US, Evolution of Finance Volume 3 UK and associated SRTE^® publications The Evolution of Finance, Sagesse SRTE, Substack Barbara Guth.

There is a question that sits beneath modern life.

Am I enough?

We seldom ask it directly. Instead, we ask it through comparison. We compare our careers to those of our peers, we compare our finances, our relationships, our health, our appearance, our achievements and our failures. We compare how much we know, how much we own and how well we seem to be coping.

Some comparisons leave us feeling superior, and others leave us feeling inadequate. Both arise from the same assumption: that our value can be measured.[1][2]

This habit has become so normal that we rarely question it. We assume that evaluating ourselves is simply part of being human. That confidence must be earned, worth must be proven, and value must somehow be justified. So we spend our lives accumulating evidence—status, qualifications, possessions, experiences, recognition.

Even our struggles can become part of the case we build for ourselves. Each layer added in the hope that it will finally answer the question. Each layer added in the hope that it will finally be enough.

For many people something curious is beginning to occur. The more layers that accumulate, the less satisfying they become. The achievement arrives but does not provide the certainty that was promised. The recognition comes but quickly fades.

The next goal appears before the previous one has had time to settle. What once felt like a path toward fulfilment begins to resemble a treadmill. The destination keeps moving, but the question remains unanswered.

Perhaps that is because we have been trying to answer the wrong question. The issue may not be that we have failed to prove our worth. The issue may be that worth never required proof in the first place.

One of the greatest fears we carry is the fear of becoming nothing. We spend years constructing identities, collecting achievements, defending beliefs and maintaining stories about who we are. Over time we become so accustomed to these identities that we mistake them for ourselves.

So when life invites us to question them, the invitation can feel threatening.

If I am not my career, who am I?

If I am not my success, who am I?

If I am not my failures, who am I?

If I am not the story I have been telling about myself, who am I?

The fear is understandable. When the layers have been present for long enough, removing them can feel like erasing ourselves.

The fear arises from a misunderstanding. What if the layers were never the source of our identity? What if they were simply the accumulated responses, adaptations and experiences that gathered around it?

A sculptor does not create a statue by adding more and more marble. The sculptor reveals the form by removing what does not belong. Becoming ourselves may follow a similar path, and the journey is not one of construction but of discovery. Not becoming less, not becoming nothing, but becoming visible to ourselves.

The identities did not appear by accident. Most were formed for a reason. Some helped us belong, some helped us stay safe, some helped us earn approval, and some helped us navigate uncertainty.

As children we quickly learn that certain behaviours are rewarded and others are discouraged. We discover which parts of ourselves are welcomed and which parts are more difficult for others to receive.

Without realising it, we begin adapting. We become who we need to be in order to fit the environment around us. This is not deception. It is intelligence. It is life responding to circumstances.

The difficulty arises when an adaptation becomes permanent. What once served a purpose gradually becomes a limitation.

The mask becomes so familiar that we forget we are wearing it.

The role becomes so familiar that we forget we are playing it.

The story becomes so familiar that we stop questioning whether it is true.

Over time the layers accumulate upon one another—not because anything is wrong, or because anyone intended harm, but because this is often how unconscious living unfolds. We adapt, we identify with the adaptation, and then we defend the identity that emerged from it. Eventually we forget there was ever a distinction between the two.

This is why the process of remembering who we are can feel so unsettling.

The layers are familiar. The person beneath them may not be. Familiarity and truth are not the same thing. Many of the beliefs we carry about ourselves were formed long before we possessed the awareness to examine them. Many of the limits we assume are ours were inherited from circumstances that no longer exist. Many of the identities we defend were built in response to conditions we have already outgrown.

The invitation is simply to see these layers, not to reject them. What is seen clearly no longer needs to be unconsciously carried.

There is something curious that happens when we begin to observe the layers. We discover that they can be seen.

A belief can be seen.

A fear can be seen.

A role can be seen.

A story can be seen.

Even an identity can be seen.

If these things can be seen, a simple question arises.

Who is doing the seeing?

Most of us spend our lives looking through our thoughts without ever noticing that we are looking. We become so immersed in the contents of our experience that we rarely pause to consider the awareness in which the experience is appearing.

Thoughts come and go, as do emotions. Beliefs change, opinions change, circumstances change, and identities evolve.

Throughout it all, something remains. Quietly witnessing the entire process—not as a detached observer standing outside our existence, but as the presence through which life is experienced.

It is difficult to describe because it is so close. Like a fish attempting to describe water, we often overlook it precisely because it has always been here. Yet we experience moments when the usual noise falls silent—while watching a sunset, standing beside the sea, in the presence of a newborn child, in moments of profound gratitude, creativity or awe.

For a brief moment the endless process of measurement stops. The need to define ourselves relaxes. The constant narration quietens, leaving something simple.

Not an idea, or a belief, or an identity. Just an experience of being. Most of us have touched this state many times. We simply did not recognise its significance.

For many, the possibility of releasing these stories carries an unspoken concern.

If I stop striving to become somebody, what will motivate me?

If I stop comparing myself to others, will I lose my ambition?

If I stop defining myself through achievement, what will drive me forward?

We have become so accustomed to using deficiency as fuel that it can be difficult to imagine another way of moving through life.

Life itself offers countless examples. A flower does not bloom because it is trying to become worthy, a bird does not sing because it is competing for significance, a child does not explore the world because they have calculated the benefits of curiosity.

Life unfolds because unfolding is its nature.

Beneath the layers of comparison and self-evaluation there exists a natural impulse toward growth, creativity, exploration and expression—not because we are incomplete, but because we are alive.

Much of what we call ambition may in fact be a distorted expression of something more fundamental. The desire to create, to learn, to contribute, to experience, and to discover what lies within us.

When these impulses become entangled with questions of worth, they often become heavy. Achievement becomes proof, success becomes validation, failure becomes judgement. The simple joy of participation becomes overshadowed by the need for measurement.

When worth no longer needs to be earned, an extraordinary shift takes place. The activity remains, the creativity remains, the growth remains, but the burden falls away. Life ceases to be an examination and becomes an exploration.

The question is no longer: “Am I enough?”

Instead it becomes: “What wishes to emerge?”

At this point a misunderstanding often arises. The moment we begin speaking of allowing, surrendering or unfolding, many people imagine passivity, drifting, relinquishing responsibility and allowing life to simply carry them wherever it may.

This is not what is being described. A leaf carried by the wind is not exercising choice—a conscious human being is. The invitation is not to abandon participation in life. The invitation is to participate more consciously.

There is a difference between forcing and creating, between controlling and choosing, between reacting and responding.

Our actions are often shaped by unconscious patterns. We pursue certain goals because we believe they will make us worthy. We avoid certain risks because we fear failure. We defend certain identities because we are afraid of losing them.

From the outside these actions may appear intentional, although many are simply reactions to stories we have never examined.

As awareness grows, a shift occurs. The stories become visible, as do the fears and the patterns, and in that visibility, choice becomes possible.

This is not less responsibility—it is more. The unconscious life reacts. The conscious life responds.

The unconscious life is pushed and pulled by circumstances. The conscious life participates. What unfolds is not a passive existence. It is an increasingly deliberate one— not because every outcome can be controlled, but because our relationship to life becomes conscious.

The river still flows, but we are no longer being swept downstream without awareness. We become participants in the journey. Not its masters, not its victims—its participants.

This is why wonder becomes available again—not as a result of the world suddenly changing, but because we do.

We go through our lives experiencing reality through layers of interpretation. What does this mean about me? How do I compare? Am I succeeding? Am I failing? Am I doing enough? Am I enough?

These questions can become so constant that we cease noticing how much of life is passing unnoticed around us. The beauty of a sunrise, the intricacy of a flower, the golden laughter of a child, the rhythm of the seasons, the miracle of consciousness itself.

None of these disappear. They are simply overshadowed by the endless process of self-evaluation.

When the need to constantly define ourselves begins to soften, something remarkable happens. Attention becomes available again. Not attention directed inward toward endless analysis, but attention directed toward existence itself. Curiosity returns, gratitude returns, a sense of awe and delight returns.

The world begins to feel less like a problem to be solved and more like a mystery to be experienced. This does not make us passive. If anything, it makes us more alive. We listen more carefully, we observe more deeply, we create more freely, and we participate more fully.

Life is no longer happening to us, nor is it something we must conquer. It becomes something we are privileged to experience. This may be what so many of us have been seeking all along. Not a better identity, a more impressive story, or a stronger mask, but a direct relationship with existence itself.

The kind we knew before we learned to measure our worth. The kind that has quietly waited beneath every layer ever since. It was never lost, only forgotten.

The greatest discovery may be that there was never anything we needed to become. We have been taught to seek, to strive, to improve, to accumulate, to define ourselves through what we achieve, what we possess and how we compare.

Beneath all of this effort lies a more subtle possibility. What if the journey was never about becoming more? What if it was about remembering?

Remembering that our worth does not need to be earned, that our identity is not confined to the stories we tell about ourselves, that life is something to participate in rather than to control. That beneath every role, every belief, every success and every failure there exists something that has been present all along.

Not waiting to be created, not waiting to be perfected. Simply waiting to be recognised. Perhaps this is why so many of the structures that once defined us now seem to be losing their grip.

They were not mistakes, but they have served their purpose. What once helped us navigate the world can no longer tell us who we are. That discovery can feel unsettling, yet it also carries a profound gift. For when the masks begin to fall away, we do not find emptiness.

We find life.

We find curiosity.

We find wonder.

We find the quiet joy of being.

From that place a new possibility emerges—not the opportunity to become someone else, but the opportunity to begin being who we have always been.

That is what remembrance truly is. The recognition of something that was always there— not the recovery of something lost.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than directing disproportionate energy toward financial survival. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, in the knowledge that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Substack Anna Iversen

[1] This essay is part of a series where I challenge the assumption that decay and decline are woven into the fabric of the universe itself, showing how our financial, cultural, and political systems have been built on an entropic logic of siphoning and scarcity—and how a very different design is possible. The keystone essay entitled “From Entropy to Creative Coherence—Finance, Geometry, and the Return of Living Order” frames this journey of exploration, and it can be found here From Entropy to Coherence_Anna Iversen . This series of essays form both a diagnosis of our caged existence, and a vision of the coherence we could choose instead.

[2] I would like to dedicate this essay to the late Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922-2019), whose explorations of entropy and “negentropy” in political economy paved the way for much of what follows. His work continues to inspire those of us who believe that creativity, not decay, is the true measure of value.

I listened to a podcast recently[1] which offered a fascinating glimpse into how the debate around money, digital assets, and financial architecture is evolving.

The conversation ranged across gold, stablecoins, Bitcoin reserves, foreign exchange markets, central bank digital currencies, US Treasury policy, and the future of the US dollar. Throughout, there was a recurring emphasis on physical assets, collateral, and the importance of property rights.

Beneath the discussion lies a question that was never fully articulated: What is the difference between property and a claim?

This distinction may prove more important than any debate about CBDCs, stablecoins, gold, Bitcoin, or the future reserve currency of the world.

At one point, the conversation turned to stablecoins and private property. A distinction was drawn between stablecoins and central bank digital currencies, with the suggestion that stablecoins preserve private ownership whereas CBDCs place control in the hands of the state. This observation contains an important truth. The legal structure surrounding a CBDC is indeed fundamentally different from that of a privately issued instrument.

However, a further distinction remained unaddressed. A stablecoin is in most cases a claim. Ownership of a stablecoin does not typically confer ownership of the underlying dollars which it is backed by. Rather, it confers a right against the issuer. The holder possesses a claim upon an asset, not the asset itself.

The same is true of a bank deposit and most financial instruments. It is also true of much of what is now being described as tokenisation. The distinction that needs to be made is therefore not simply between public and private systems. It is between claims and property.

This becomes particularly relevant when the conversation turns to foreign exchange markets. During the podcast, Ripple, and XRP, and Stellar, and XLM, were discussed as potential future liquidity providers within international payments and settlement networks. Such a development is entirely plausible. Yet even if realised, it would not alter the underlying architecture of the financial system.

Currencies remain claims. Liquidity remains the movement of claims. Settlement remains the offsetting and transfer of claims.

The speed of transfer may increase, the efficiency of reconciliation may improve, friction may be reduced, and the markets may never sleep, but the underlying legal character remains unchanged. What emerges is a more efficient claims-based system rather than a transition to property-based money.

This is an important distinction because claims inevitably introduce dependence on a third party. Every claim depends upon an issuer, an intermediary, a legal relationship, or a promise that must ultimately be honoured by another party.

Property stands on different foundations. Gold held directly is property. Land is property. It is not an intermediated relationship.

A digital asset capable of existing independently of any issuer, while preserving exclusive control, transferability, and legal continuity, begins to function as property rather than a claim.

Digital property does not eliminate law, nor does it replace existing legal systems. Rather, it allows the asset itself to persist as the object of ownership as it moves between parties. Instead of relying primarily upon a chain of intermediaries and contractual obligations, ownership, transfer, provenance, and control remain attached to the asset itself. The technology does not remove legal rights and obligations; it provides a means through which they can be expressed more directly.

The importance of this distinction is increasingly visible in discussions around gold itself. Much of the debate currently taking place surrounding bullion markets revolves around the tension between paper claims and physical delivery. When market participants insist upon physical delivery, they are effectively demanding the asset itself rather than a representation of it.

The debate is not ultimately about gold. It is about the difference between ownership and entitlement.

The recent podcast discussion was especially interesting because it repeatedly gravitates toward the asset side of the balance sheet. Gold reserves, Bitcoin reserves, collateral, strategic holdings, and productive assets all feature prominently. It clearly shows the growing recognition that sustainable monetary systems require a foundation in assets rather than an endless expansion of liabilities.

What now remains is the final step to be taken.

The issue at hand is not merely whether the future belongs to CBDCs, stablecoins, Bitcoin, XRP, gold, or some combination of them.

The issue is whether the next monetary architecture will continue to be built primarily upon claims, or whether technology has finally made it possible to build directly upon property rights.

Until that question is answered, many of the most important debates in finance will continue to circle around the issue without ever quite reaching its centre.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than directing disproportionate energy toward financial survival. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, in the knowledge that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Substack Anna Iversen

[1] Crypto Rich in conversation with Tom Luongo and Vincent Lanci on the ‘Rich Does Politics’ channel on YouTube, ‘China’s Gold Surge Just Handed Trump London On A Plate’, 31 May 2026.

Thank you Crypto Rich, Tom and Vincent for providing the inspiration for this essay.

Information Without Value

We are seeing a proliferation of artificial intelligence systems, each reliant upon vast quantities of human-generated information. Writing, music, images, research, software code, and creative works of every kind are now being absorbed, processed, recombined, and redistributed at unprecedented speed and scale. Whilst the exchange of information is accelerating, the economic foundations supporting digital creation appear increasingly unstable.

Since its inception, the internet has enabled the frictionless movement of information, but the movement of value has lagged behind. As a result, monetisation has gravitated toward platforms, advertisers, and aggregators capable of extracting value indirectly through scale, visibility, and control over distribution. Creators, meanwhile, have become progressively separated from the downstream economic activity generated by their work.[1][2]

This separation between information and value has profoundly shaped the economic structure of the digital age. Because information can move across the world at close to zero cost while value transfer has remained comparatively slow, expensive, and heavily intermediated, monetisation has migrated away from the informational exchange toward indirect models built around aggregation and attention.

Advertising has become the dominant economic layer of the internet not simply because it is lucrative, but because it solved a structural problem. Given that information has not readily been able to carry native economic exchange, its value has had to be captured elsewhere through increasingly sophisticated systems designed to monetise visibility rather than direct participation.

Journalists, musicians, photographers, researchers, software developers, educators, and many others have found themselves participating in systems where distribution has expanded dramatically while direct economic continuity has weakened. The internet has generated unprecedented informational abundance, yet much of the corresponding economic value has accumulated within the infrastructural and algorithmic layers governing access, aggregation, and visibility.

Artificial intelligence now accelerates these dynamics at extraordinary scale. Large language models and generative systems do not merely distribute information; they absorb and recombine vast informational structures continuously, often abstracting content further from its original source and context. As this process intensifies, existing tensions surrounding copyright, licensing, and compensation reveal themselves as symptoms of a deeper structural imbalance within the informational economy itself.

Consequently, the question is not exclusively whether information can be protected, but whether informational systems can preserve continuity between creation and value generation in an environment where information becomes infinitely reproducible, continuously recombinable, and globally distributable at machine speed.

Why Micropayments Matter

Since the birth of the internet, micropayments have remained economically impractical. The friction associated with payment processing, banking infrastructure, settlement delays, platform fees, and administrative overheads has meant that transferring extremely small amounts of value is often more expensive than the value being transferred itself. As a result, direct economic exchange at the level of individual interactions has simply not been achievable at scale.

This limitation has shaped the architecture of the digital economy more profoundly than is often recognised. Because it has not been possible for value to move efficiently in granular form, business models have evolved around aggregation instead. Advertising, subscription bundling, data extraction, platform dependency, and attention optimisation have emerged as structural responses to the inability of informational exchange to carry economically viable value transfer.

Now the emergence of scalable digital payment infrastructure capable of supporting micropayments begins to alter this equation fundamentally.

Micropayments are frequently misunderstood as simply “very small payments”. In reality, their significance lies in something far more consequential: the ability to introduce continuous economic exchange into environments previously dependent upon indirect monetisation structures. Once transaction costs fall sufficiently, entirely new forms of interaction become possible. Reading an article, training an artificial intelligence model, streaming a piece of music, accessing research, validating origin, citing a source, or contributing computational resources can all become part of a continuous flow of granular value exchange rather than isolated, heavily intermediated transactions.

However, micropayments on their own are insufficient to resolve the deeper structural problem. The ability to transfer small amounts of value efficiently matters, but without persistent attribution, provenance, and continuity between informational origin and economic participation, the underlying architecture remains incomplete.

This is where digital property fundamentally alters the discussion.

From a Copying System to a Property System

Since its inception, the web has functioned primarily as a copying system. Digital information has been transmitted, replicated, stored, indexed, scraped, and recombined with extraordinary efficiency, but the information itself has not behaved economically like personal property. Ownership has therefore had to be imposed from outside the object through contracts, licences, platform permissions, access controls, or legal enforcement to govern access, usage, and compensation.

However, if digital property can be established directly within the informational environment, ownership and economic participation no longer need to exist as separate layers imposed from the outside.

When information can be possessed rather than merely accessed, economic exchange no longer needs to be separated from the informational object. It becomes a native characteristic of the informational exchange itself.

This would make a crucial difference to how the internet operates. A licence is not property, a subscription is not property, and a token that points to a copyable file is not, by itself, property. In each case, the economic relationship depends upon an external structure mediating access or recognition. The underlying information remains capable of being separated from origin, duplicated without loss, and abstracted from its economic context. It has often been assumed that there is no other way of handling digital information.

Digital property changes this assumption. If a digital object can carry possession, provenance, transfer history, access rules, and governance conditions as part of its own structure, information does not need to remain passive data governed only by surrounding systems. It can become an ownable, transferable, and economically active object within the network itself.

Only then do micropayments acquire their full significance. They are not merely small payments added to the existing internet. They become the economic expression of digital property, allowing value to move continuously with information, rather than through complex layers of contractual intermediation.

The significance of digital property infrastructure lies not merely in ‘ownership’ as traditionally understood, but in the preservation of continuity, enabling economic participation to remain persistently connected to the exchange of information itself rather than existing as fragmented records distributed across multiple disconnected systems.

The Future Architecture of Innovation

The need for digital property becomes more pronounced as artificial intelligence assumes a greater role in the creation, distribution, and utilisation of information. As AI systems continuously ingest, process, recombine, and generate information, questions surrounding authorship and ownership become more difficult to resolve through industrial-era models built predominantly around exclusion and enforcement. Information now moves too rapidly, too globally, and too continuously for many traditional approaches to scale effectively.

There is a profound structural difference between systems primarily built around abstracted claims and systems capable of supporting more direct informational participation. In one model, increasing digitisation and artificial intelligence accelerate concentration within complex layers of intermediation. In the other, digital infrastructure begins restoring continuity between creation, attribution, exchange, and value generation.

The significance of this distinction extends well beyond copyright or media industries. Scientific research, software development, education, patents, machine-to-machine communication, and innovation ecosystems themselves may all be reshaped by whether informational economies evolve around extractive aggregation models or around architectures capable of supporting continuous and distributed participation.

Artificial intelligence further increases the significance of this shift in the architecture of the internet. As AI systems increasingly interact autonomously with informational environments, machine-to-machine exchange may itself become economically relevant. In such an environment, the ability to facilitate granular, low-friction value transfer ceases to be merely a convenience and instead becomes foundational infrastructure for how informational economies operate.

These developments are no longer confined to theoretical discussions surrounding blockchain, digital assets, or emerging payment technologies. The convergence of artificial intelligence, scalable digital infrastructure, and progressively fragmented informational economies is beginning to expose structural tensions that were previously easier to overlook.

Innovation and Economic Continuity

Innovation has always depended upon the ability to sustain continuity between contribution and reward. Scientific discovery, invention, research, engineering, artistic creation, and entrepreneurial risk-taking all require systems capable of preserving some meaningful relationship between participation and economic return. Where this continuity weakens excessively, productive activity can begin to erode as incentives favour aggregation, speculation, visibility capture, or control over distribution, rather than the creation of new knowledge and productive capacity.

In this respect, the emerging informational economy risks reproducing many of the same dynamics already visible within our financialised economic systems more broadly. Layers of abstraction expand around underlying productive activity while value concentrates within the infrastructural mechanisms governing access, visibility, intermediation, and exchange. Artificial intelligence, operating within such architectures, may further accelerate these tendencies by dramatically increasing the speed at which information can be absorbed, transformed, and redistributed.

Yet an alternative trajectory is also emerging.

If the exchange of information can carry persistent and granular value transfer, then entirely different forms of economic coordination become possible. Under such conditions, participation no longer depends solely upon capturing mass attention or operating through dominant intermediaries. Instead, informational systems can begin facilitating more continuous and distributed economic interaction directly between creators, innovators, users, machines, and markets themselves.

This possibility becomes particularly significant when considering the future relationship between artificial intelligence and human contribution. Current debates often frame AI and creators as inherently adversarial forces, positioning technological progress and human participation in opposition to one another. This framing may be a consequence of the underlying economic architecture rather than an inevitable feature of the technology.

Systems capable of supporting granular value exchange make it possible for artificial intelligence to eventually operate within economies where attribution and participation remain structurally connected to informational usage itself. Rather than merely extracting value from accumulated informational abundance, AI systems could participate within continuous exchange environments where contribution, validation, refinement, licensing, and utilisation all become economically measurable in real time.

In such an environment, innovation ecosystems begin to look very different from the platform-dominated models that have shaped much of the internet era. Smaller creators, niche expertise, specialised research communities, independent inventors, open scientific collaboration, machine-to-machine services, and highly granular knowledge markets all become increasingly viable once transaction costs fall sufficiently and the exchange of information becomes economically native.

The Emerging Property Economy

The internet allowed information to move globally. Digital property allows information to be possessed. Micropayments allow value to move with it.

Humanity may indeed be approaching a genuine fork in the road. One path leads toward ever greater concentration of informational and economic power within systems optimised for extraction at global scale. The other points toward architectures capable of supporting more distributed participation, continuous exchange, and closer alignment between creation, attribution, and value generation.

It is this path that may mark the beginning of a more participatory informational economy, one in which innovation, creativity, and exchange remain more closely connected to the value they generate.

The technologies themselves do not determine which path emerges. The outcome will be shaped by the structures we build around them.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than directing disproportionate energy toward financial survival. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, in the knowledge that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Substack Anna Iversen

[1] This essay is part of a series where I challenge the assumption that decay and decline are woven into the fabric of the universe itself, showing how our financial, cultural, and political systems have been built on an entropic logic of siphoning and scarcity—and how a very different design is possible. The keystone essay entitled “From Entropy to Creative Coherence—Finance, Geometry, and the Return of Living Order” frames this journey of exploration, and it can be found here From Entropy to Coherence_Anna Iversen . This series of essays form both a diagnosis of our caged existence, and a vision of the coherence we could choose instead.

[2] I would like to dedicate this essay to the late Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922-2019), whose explorations of entropy and “negentropy” in political economy paved the way for much of what follows. His work continues to inspire those of us who believe that creativity, not decay, is the true measure of value.

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (CLARITY Act)[1] in the United States is being presented as a market-structure bill for digital assets. In one sense, that is accurate. Its purpose is to allocate regulatory authority between the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)[2] and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)[3], and to provide a pathway by which certain digital assets may move outside the securities framework and into treatment more analogous to commodities within the broader CFTC regulatory sphere.

Beneath that regulatory question lies a deeper legal one. A commodity is not simply a ‘security’ that has escaped SEC jurisdiction. Nor is it merely a token that the market prefers to call a ‘commodity’. Commodity treatment presupposes that the relevant asset has a legal character distinct from an issuer-dependent claim. It must be capable of independent existence, control, and transfer in a manner that does not depend primarily upon the continuing performance, discretion, or permission of an issuer or intermediary.

This is an important dividing line because securities and commodities arise from fundamentally different legal relationships. A security generally represents a claim connected to an issuer, enterprise, or contractual arrangement upon which the holder depends for value or performance. A commodity, by contrast, is not primarily defined by an ongoing obligation owed by another party. It exists and may be transferred independently of a continuing issuer relationship. Gold does not depend upon the managerial efforts of a gold issuer in order to remain gold. The legal significance of commodity classification therefore lies not merely in lighter regulation, but in the assumption that the asset possesses a degree of independent existence and alienability distinct from a contractual claim.

That is where the CLARITY Act becomes most important—and also where its current weakness lies. The Act attempts to draw the line through the concept of a ‘mature blockchain system’. This is a meaningful step in the right direction. It recognises that architecture matters: control, governance, transparency, functionality, and the absence of unilateral authority are no longer peripheral technical details. They are becoming the legal facts upon which regulatory classification depends.

The CLARITY Act’s definition of a ‘mature blockchain system’[4] focuses heavily upon the absence of unilateral control or coordinated authority over the network. This reflects a growing recognition that digital commodity treatment cannot coherently apply where an asset remains dependent upon ongoing administrative discretion. Yet the emphasis remains predominantly negative: sufficiently dispersed control, sufficiently reduced dependence, sufficiently diminished coordination, rather than positively identifying the characteristics required for digital property. What remains less fully articulated is the positive side of the equation—what legal and technological characteristics must exist before a digital asset can function as property capable of coherent commodity classification in the first place.

This debate around ‘mature blockchain systems’ reveals that ‘decentralisation’ alone may be an insufficient legal test. Systems can appear decentralised through distribution while remaining dependent upon informal governance or coordinated discretion. The decisive question is whether the system remains dependent upon ongoing discretionary managerial authority analogous to a security or contractual claim.

Recent debate concerning governance, lawful recovery mechanisms, and operational stewardship has raised the question of whether such features could prevent a system from satisfying the ‘mature blockchain system’ test. Yet the presence of governance or lawful recovery mechanisms does not necessarily prevent a system from supporting digital property or coherent commodity classification. The determining factor is whether the system operates through transparent and objective rules applied independently of arbitrary control.

Properly understood, decentralisation is not the absence of rules. It is the absence of arbitrary control.

A system governed by transparent, objective, pre-defined rules applied equally to participants may in fact support more robust forms of decentralisation than systems dependent upon informal governance, social coordination, or discretionary intervention by influential actors.

Recent joint guidance from the SEC and CFTC[5] suggests regulators are increasingly attempting to distinguish digital commodities from securities by reference to functionality, decentralisation, and the degree of managerial dependence.[6] This still leaves unresolved the deeper legal issue: what characteristics must a digital asset possess before commodity treatment becomes legally coherent? A commodity is not merely a non-security. It presupposes a form of independent existence and transferability distinct from claims dependent upon continuing third-party performance.

Recent Executive Orders[7] issued by the White House further reinforce the direction of travel. On the one hand, the Administration is seeking to integrate digital assets and innovative financial technology more deeply into traditional financial services and payment systems. On the other, it is simultaneously strengthening anti-illicit-finance controls, customer identification requirements, and financial oversight mechanisms with the expressed goal of restoring integrity to America’s financial system, safeguarding financial institutions against structural risks, and deterring fraud and abuse. The result is that questions of governance, lawful enforceability, recoverability, and operational control are becoming increasingly central to the architecture of digital financial systems themselves.

However, the ‘mature blockchain’ test being employed by regulators and lawmakers is still weaker than it needs to achieve full clarity. The absence of common control is not, by itself, enough. A system may be widely administered, procedurally decentralised, or operated by multiple approved participants while still functioning as a permissioned environment or a claims-based ledger. The issue is not merely whether a blockchain is ‘decentralised’. It is whether the architecture supports native digital property.

That is the distinction the law must face before regulatory classification can do its work.

The SEC/CFTC line is therefore not simply a turf question. It is a legal-character question. If an asset remains dependent upon issuer obligations, contractual rights, discretionary administration, ongoing intermediary reliance, or controlled access, it belongs much closer to the world of securities, claims, or regulated financial contracts. If, however, the asset can be controlled and transferred through deterministic rules, public verifiability, continuous provenance, and non-discretionary validation, then commodity treatment becomes the legally sound classification.

The approach amongst lawmakers and regulators still tends to define digital commodities negatively—as assets that are sufficiently unlike securities. Yet commodities are not merely the absence of securities characteristics. They possess positive legal characteristics of their own. The unresolved issue is therefore not simply when a digital asset ceases to depend upon managerial efforts, but what technological and legal conditions must exist before it can coherently function as property capable of commodity classification at all.

This is why the CLARITY Act’s maturity test matters so much. It should not become a broad gateway through which systems in which control, transfer, or participation ultimately remain dependent upon discretionary approval structures are able to obtain commodity classification simply because no single person or entity formally controls them.

Commodity treatment should require more than distributed administration. It should require architecture capable of supporting property-like control.

The point is not that the CLARITY Act must become a property statute. It is not designed to define digital property in the way that private law must. But a market-structure statute cannot avoid property questions altogether.

Regulation follows legal character. It does not create it.

If the Act is passed, it may bring long-awaited regulatory clarity. But if the underlying legal distinction is not properly understood, that clarity may prove superficial. The risk is that the law grants commodity status to assets that remain, in substance, digitally administered claims. Regulatory classification cannot be satisfactorily resolved until the legal nature of the digital asset itself is better understood.

The real issue at hand is whether the underlying architecture allows the asset to exist, be controlled, and be transferred as property in digital form independent of continuing discretionary dependence upon an issuer, intermediary, or governing authority, not whether a token is popular, decentralised in appearance, or traded on a market. That is where the next phase of legal clarity must begin.

The significance of the CLARITY Act therefore extends beyond digital assets alone. It signals the beginning of a much larger legal transition in which questions of architecture, control, provenance, and lawful digital ownership are moving from the periphery of financial regulation toward its centre. The challenge now facing lawmakers is not simply how to regulate digital markets, but how to distinguish systems that merely digitise contractual claims from those capable of supporting genuine digital property.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than directing disproportionate energy toward financial survival. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, in the knowledge that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Substack Anna Iversen

[1] H.R.3633 - Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 — 119th Congress (2025-2026). Passed by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs 14 May 2026 and reported to the Senate. Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 . Subsequent Senate Banking Committee draft material reviewed by the author appears to revise aspects surrounding the ‘mature blockchain system’ framework discussed herein. The analysis in this article addresses the broader conceptual issue underpinning such provisions: the legal and architectural conditions required before digital assets can coherently receive treatment analogous to commodities rather than securities.

[2] www.sec.gov

[3] www.cftc.gov

[4] A “mature blockchain system” is defined as “a blockchain system, together with its related digital commodity, that is not controlled by any person or group of persons under common control.”.

There is a certification process with the SEC where the applicant must provide details of the blockchain’s maturity: “A certification described under paragraph (1) shall be filed with the Commission, and include such information that is reasonably necessary to establish that the blockchain system is not controlled by any person or group of persons under common control, which may include information regarding— ‘‘(A) the operation of the blockchain system; (B) the functionality of the related digital commodity, (C) how the market value of the digital commodity is substantially derived from the programmatic functioning of such blockchain system; (D) any decentralized governance system which relates to the blockchain system; and (E) the current roles, if any, of the digital commodity issuer, digital commodity affiliated persons, and digital commodity related persons where such roles are material to the development or operation of such blockchain system or the decentralized governance system of such blockchain system.”

[5] Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission: Application of the Federal Securities Laws to Certain Types of Crypto Assets and Certain Transactions Involving Crypto Assets, 17 March 2026 SEC and CFTC Joint Guidance on Crypto Asset

[6] The SEC and CFTC joint guidance states that “a digital commodity is a crypto asset that is intrinsically linked to and derives its value from the programmatic operation of a crypto system that is functional, as well as supply and demand dynamics, rather than from the expectation of profits from the essential managerial efforts of others.” (page 14), thereby placing emphasis on operational functionality and managerial dependence.

[7] ‘Integrating Financial Technology Innovation Into Regulatory Frameworks’, May 19, 2026, Integrating Financial Technology Innovation into Regulatory Frameworks – The White House and ‘Restoring Integrity to America’s Financial System’, May 19, 2026, Restoring Integrity to America’s Financial System – The White House.

When the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Bank of England jointly published their recent Call for Input on the future of tokenisation in UK wholesale financial markets[1], the document was presented primarily as a discussion of infrastructure, regulation and market modernisation.

On the surface, that is exactly what it is. The paper discusses settlement, collateral, interoperability, custody, programmable infrastructure and the future role of tokenised assets within wholesale financial markets. It reflects the growing recognition that distributed ledger technologies (DLT) may significantly reshape how financial assets are issued, transferred, settled and administered.

Beneath the technical language, something of great significance is beginning to emerge.

For decades, financial markets have increasingly operated through layers of abstraction so pervasive that many of their assumptions now appear self-evident. Ownership has become intermediated. Settlement has become deferred. Claims multiply faster than the underlying productive activity from which they ultimately derive their value. Liquidity has increasingly become synonymous with financial health. Circulation has become more important than finality.[2][3]

Over time, this has ceased to feel unusual. It has simply become the environment within which the financial markets operate. Human beings, like the institutions they run, gradually adapt their perception to the structures they inhabit.

This is why the current tokenisation debate is more important than it first appears, because beneath the discussion about DLT infrastructure, digital assets and programmable settlement lies a foundational question:

What kind of economic reality is the financial system intended to represent?

Tokenisation itself is not a destination. It is an architectural tool, and like all tools, its effects depend upon the direction in which it is applied. At present, two very different trajectories appear to be emerging simultaneously.

This is noteworthy because systems do not merely organise economic activity. Over time, they also shape perception.

In our heavily financialised environment, people have gradually become accustomed to interacting not with property directly, but with layers of representation surrounding it. Pension entitlements, fund units, derivatives, structured products, synthetic exposure, collateral chains and custodial abstractions all become part of daily economic life. The underlying assets often recede beneath the claims architecture built on top of them. Entire institutional frameworks have developed around maintaining coherence within systems whose complexity is continuously increasing.

Eventually, the distinction between ownership and entitlement begins to blur. Access starts to feel like possession, exposure starts to feel like ownership, and liquidity starts to feel like value itself. The abstraction becomes culturally invisible precisely because we are surrounded by it.

The discussion is frequently framed as though all forms of digitisation represent the same underlying phenomenon, while in fact tokenisation describes two very different directions of travel.

The claims-based trajectory extends the logic of the existing system. In this model, blockchain infrastructure primarily improves the speed, programmability and interoperability of claims. Assets become more mobile, collateral moves more efficiently, settlement windows narrow, and financial instruments become increasingly composable across platforms and jurisdictions.

This is of course a remarkable technical achievement. However, it risks accelerating the same tendencies that have already produced growing layers of systemic abstraction: leverage built upon leverage, collateral rotating through multiple counterparties, increasingly complex dependency chains, and economic activity becoming progressively detached from direct ownership and productive reality.

In such a system, tokenisation does not fundamentally alter the underlying ontology of finance. It simply increases its velocity.

This is why many of the concerns now emerging within institutional discussions are so revealing. Questions surrounding settlement finality, interoperability, collateral integrity, operational resilience and the maintenance of clear ownership records are not merely technical concerns. They are signals that the financial system is beginning to encounter the limits of excessive informational fragmentation.

The recent FCA and Bank of England paper reflects this tension clearly. The document repeatedly emphasises programmable settlement, tokenised collateral, interoperability and the coexistence of multiple infrastructures whilst placing equally strong emphasis on accountability, settlement finality, resilience and legally reliable records of ownership.

These two lines of enquiry suggest that institutions increasingly recognise that efficiency alone cannot serve as the organising principle of a financial system indefinitely. At some point, coherence matters.

This is where the discussion begins to become more interesting. Alongside the drive toward programmability and interoperability, another set of concepts has gradually been emerging in institutional discussion:

Settlement finality.
Provenance.
Deterministic ownership records.
Auditability.
Direct transfer.
Singleness of money.

For many years, these concerns have remained largely in the background of modern finance. Markets have increasingly prioritised liquidity, collateral mobility and the continuous expansion of balance sheet capacity. Settlement itself has become something almost secondary—an operational process sitting beneath the more visible machinery of financial activity.

In highly intermediated systems, complexity gradually accumulates by design. Ownership records fragment across institutions, claims circulate independently of underlying assets, reconciliation layers multiply, counterparty chains deepen, and legal and economic reality drift further apart. At sufficient scale, the system increasingly relies not upon direct continuity, but upon confidence that the surrounding network of obligations will continue functioning.

This may be one reason why tokenisation has generated such intense institutional interest. Not simply because distributed systems can move information faster, but because they raise the possibility of reducing the distance between economic activity and the records through which that activity is represented.

That possibility changes the nature of the discussion entirely, because once ownership history becomes continuously verifiable, transfer becomes directly auditable, and settlement can occur against deterministic rules rather than layered reconciliation processes, the financial system begins moving away from pure abstraction toward informational coherence.

This does not eliminate the need for law, institutions or trusted governance, nor does it imply that all intermediaries disappear. The recent FCA and Bank of England paper makes clear that accountable entities, legal certainty and regulated infrastructure will remain central to wholesale financial markets.

Yet the paper also clearly shows that many of the qualities now being prioritised by regulators—settlement finality, resilient ownership records, reduction of reconciliation friction—are ultimately coherence mechanisms. They are attempts to preserve continuity between financial representation and underlying economic reality within increasingly digital environments.

This is a significant move. It signals that major institutional discussions are beginning to move beyond the assumption that ever-increasing abstraction is necessarily synonymous with progress. Instead, the emerging question is whether digital systems might allow certain forms of complexity to be reduced rather than endlessly compounded. That is a very different direction of travel from the one that has dominated much of the increasingly financialised architecture of recent decades.

This is where tokenisation reveals itself not merely as a technological transition, but as a fork in the road. The choice is not technological, but one between different economic models.

One path extends the logic of the existing system: increasingly efficient circulation and optimisation of financial claims across programmable infrastructure. From a technical standpoint, this may prove extraordinarily effective, yet efficiency alone does not necessarily reduce systemic entropy. Under certain conditions, it can amplify it.

The faster claims circulate, the more rapidly fragility itself can propagate through interconnected systems. Layers of claims-based instruments may become increasingly difficult to trace back to underlying productive activity. Liquidity and leverage may continue expanding faster than settlement and ownership continuity. Complexity may become more dynamic, but not necessarily more coherent. In this trajectory, tokenisation risks becoming less a transformation of the financial system than the digitisation and acceleration of its existing tendencies.

The alternative possibility is for systems to be organised around an entirely different main focus: one in which ownership, provenance, settlement and economic activity begin moving into closer alignment.

Here, the significance of tokenisation lies not primarily in accelerating circulation, but in restoring informational continuity:

Ownership records become directly verifiable.
Transfer histories become continuously auditable.
Settlement becomes increasingly integrated with the asset itself rather than deferred across multiple institutional layers.
Reconciliation burdens begin to reduce because the integrity of the record no longer depends upon so many fragmented systems continuously remaining in synchronisation.

Under this model, claims do not disappear. Credit, finance and contractual structures remain essential components of economic life, but they return to a supporting role around a more coherent informational foundation rather than functioning as the dominant substrate of the system itself.

This distinction is subtle but profound, because it changes what the financial system is attempting to optimise for.

One trajectory primarily optimises for circulation..

The other increasingly optimises for continuity.

One extends abstraction. The other begins reducing the distance between economic reality and its representation.

At present, institutional markets appear to be moving through both transitions simultaneously. That is why the current moment feels conceptually unsettled. The language of coherence is beginning to emerge inside systems still largely organised around abstraction.

In many ways, this is the defining characteristic of the transition itself. Institutions are beginning to sense the need for greater coherence before fully understanding what coherence structurally requires. Societies adapt to the informational environments they inhabit. The structures surrounding us eventually cease to appear constructed. They begin to feel natural.

This is why the current transition is much greater than most people realise. The technologies now emerging do not merely introduce new efficiencies. They reopen questions that the financial system had, for a long time, largely ceased asking:

• What constitutes ownership?

• What makes a transfer final?

• What relationship should exist between an asset and its record?

• How much abstraction can accumulate before coherence itself begins to weaken?

• What kind of economy emerges when claims become more central than the productive reality from which they derive value?

These are not merely legal or technical questions, but civilisational questions. Every economic system reflects a deeper model of reality:
what it measures,
what it prioritises,
what it treats as foundational, and
what it allows to drift into abstraction.

Seen in this light, the growing institutional focus on settlement finality, provenance, resilience and informational integrity begins to look less accidental. These concerns are emerging precisely at the moment when digital systems make it possible to reconsider how closely economic representation and economic reality might align.

Whether that possibility ultimately leads toward greater coherence or simply toward more efficient abstraction remains unresolved. Both trajectories are visible simultaneously.

The technologies are capable of either reducing reconciliation and restoring continuity or supporting unprecedented circulation of synthetic claims and programmable leverage. What appears as equivalent infrastructures are capable of strengthening ownership records or accelerating financial complexity. The outcome depends not upon the technology alone, but upon the principles around which the surrounding system is organised.

What is changing is not merely the form in which assets move, but the growing recognition that the relationship between ownership, settlement, value and economic reality may no longer need to remain organised around the assumptions of the current financialised phase of the modern era.

Perhaps that is why the current tokenisation debate carries greater weight than infrastructure alone. Because beneath the language of tokenisation lies the outline of something deeper: a gradual rediscovery of the difference between representation and reality itself.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than directing disproportionate energy toward financial survival. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, in the knowledge that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Substack Anna Iversen

[1] Financial Conduct Authority and Bank of England Call for Input on the future of tokenisation, 18 May 2026 Call for Input: The future of tokenisation - A joint vision from the authorities for UK wholesale financial markets

[2] This essay is part of a series where I challenge the assumption that decay and decline are woven into the fabric of the universe itself, showing how our financial, cultural, and political systems have been built on an entropic logic of siphoning and scarcity—and how a very different design is possible. The keystone essay entitled “From Entropy to Creative Coherence—Finance, Geometry, and the Return of Living Order” frames this journey of exploration, and it can be found here From Entropy to Coherence_Anna Iversen . This series of essays form both a diagnosis of our caged existence, and a vision of the coherence we could choose instead.

[3] I would like to dedicate this essay to the late Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922-2019), whose explorations of entropy and “negentropy” in political economy paved the way for much of what follows. His work continues to inspire those of us who believe that creativity, not decay, is the true measure of value.

This article was first published in the May 2026 issue of Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law (JIBFL).[1]

Key Points

· Regulatory classification of digital assets cannot substitute for analysis of underlying legal structure; whether an asset functions as property or as a claim is determined by custody, control, transfer mechanics, and insolvency outcomes.

· Assertions of decentralisation or tokenisation do not establish property rights. Where digital assets remain dependent on issuer-based systems, discretionary control, or intermediaries, holders are exposed to counterparty risk regardless of regulatory label.

· For transactional certainty and effective collateral treatment, regulators and market participants must distinguish asset-level characteristics from the separate question of how intermediaries hold and administer those assets in practice.

Abstract:

In this article, the author examines why regulatory clarity in relation to digital assets cannot be achieved through classification alone. She argues that whether a digital asset functions as property or as a claim depends on legal structure, including control, transfer mechanics, custody and insolvency treatment, rather than on technological labels or market descriptions. By distinguishing asset-level characteristics from the separate questions of how intermediaries hold and administer digital assets in practice, the article highlights the implications for collateral regimes, regulatory perimeter design and private law accountability.

Introduction

The rapid expansion of digital assets has placed increasing pressure on existing frameworks of financial regulation and private law. In response, legislative and regulatory initiatives have sought to bring greater clarity to the classification and oversight of these instruments. Such efforts are necessary. However, they risk addressing the symptoms of uncertainty rather than its cause.

At the heart of the current debate lies a more fundamental issue: whether, and under what conditions, a digital asset can exist as personal property rather than merely as a claim. Much of the discourse surrounding digital assets proceeds on the assumption that this question can be resolved by classification alone. In practice, classification is a downstream exercise. The legal character of an instrument is determined not by how it is labelled, but by the structure of the rights it confers and the way those rights are enforced.

This article does not attempt to restate the property law of any particular jurisdiction but instead examines the legal characteristics that must be present before a digital asset can plausibly function as property across legal systems. The analysis therefore proceeds by reference to legal effects and relationships, rather than by attempting to map digital assets onto existing property categories or technological taxonomies.

The technical capacity to represent or transfer a digital token does not, without more, establish the legal transfer of property insights [2] Ultimately, it is the legal consequences—rather than technological claims of decentralisation or innovation—that determine whether digital markets are resilient or fragile.

Property and Claims in Financial Law

The distinction between property and claims determines the private law treatment of assets, custody, and insolvency, and recent scholarship has explored how this distinction translates—often imperfectly—into digital contexts. [3]

A claim is a right against a person or entity. It is relational and contingent, depending on the continued existence, solvency, and performance of an obligor. Claims are enforced through contractual or statutory mechanisms and, in the event of insolvency, are resolved through collective procedures that allocate losses according to priority rules. The holder of a claim bears counterparty risk as an intrinsic feature of the relationship.

Property, by contrast, is a right in an asset enforceable against the world, rather than against a specific counterparty, and it does not depend on the continued performance of another party to subsist. Properly constituted property rights determine whether an asset remains insulated from an intermediary’s estate or is drawn into it upon insolvency. In this sense, property is defined less by day-to-day use than by its legal behaviour under failure.

This distinction determines whether an asset is available to satisfy the claims of general creditors, whether it may be reused or encumbered by an intermediary, and whether a purported owner must compete with others for recovery when an institution fails.

In digital markets, this foundational distinction is frequently obscured. Systems may provide access, functionality, or transactional capability that resembles ownership, even where the underlying legal relationship remains one of entitlement or credit. Where this occurs, participants may assume property-like protections that do not, in fact, exist. The consequences of such assumptions only become apparent when conditions change—most notably in cases of enforcement, suspension, or insolvency.

For this reason, any analysis of digital assets that proceeds directly to the question of regulatory classification without first addressing the property-claim distinction risks misdiagnosing the problem it seeks to solve.

Recent law reform analysis has emphasised that questions of regulatory treatment arise only after the underlying private characteristics of digital assets—such as transferability, third-party effectiveness, and survivability—are properly understood. [4]

Digital Assets and the Problem of Misclassification

Much of the regulatory debate surrounding digital assets is framed in terms of classification. While such exercises are required for regulatory administration, they do not determine the legal nature of the rights held by market participants. Classification does not decide whether an asset is held as property or as a claim; it merely describes how an instrument is to be regulated once its legal character is understood. Where this sequence is reversed, classification risks becoming a substitute for legal analysis rather than its consequence.

This risk is amplified in digital markets, where technical features are often invoked as proxies for legal characteristics. Assertions of decentralisation, permission- lessness, or privacy are frequently treated as indicators of property-like status. However, these descriptors are not legal criteria. They do not establish who exercises practical control, who holds custody, or how rights are resolved when an intermediary fails.

Disputes over regulatory jurisdiction illustrate this problem. Arguments that a digital asset should fall under one supervisory regime rather than another are often advanced without addressing whether the asset in question can exist independently of the discretions of an issuer or platform, or whether the holder’s position is insulated from counterparty risk. In such cases, the debate concerns the scope of oversight over an instrument whose legal nature remains unclear.

The consequence is misplaced confidence. An asset may be clearly classified for regulatory purposes while the holder’s legal position remains ambiguous. Where markets are dominated by intermediated holding arrangements, this ambiguity is not theoretical. It determines whether participants hold enforceable rights in assets or merely contractual entitlements that collapse into unsecured claims upon failure.

Regulatory clarity, therefore, cannot be achieved by classification alone. It requires prior attention to the structure of the rights being regulated.

Structural Conditions for the Existence of Digital Property

Comparative and international work increasingly recognises that digital assets require functional criteria—such as control, transferability, and third-party effectiveness[5]—before they can be treated as property interests. As noted by the Law Commission of England and Wales in its 2023 report, digital assets are not treated as a distinct technological category, but as potential objects of personal property whose legal recognition depends on demonstrable characteristics rather than labels or market practice.

For a digital asset to plausibly exist as personal property, rather than as a claim dressed in technical form, certain structural conditions must be satisfied. These conditions do not depend on the technology employed, nor do they require regulatory prescription of design. They arise from the legal characteristics that distinguish property from entitlement.

The following conditions can be read as a practical diagnostic for distinguishing property from mediated entitlement.

First, the asset must be capable of existing independently of an issuer, platform or administrator. Its continued existence and transferability cannot depend on discretionary governance or ongoing sponsorship. Where an asset’s validity rests on a system’s willingness to permit access or honour balances, the holder’s position remains contingent on the system’s continued operation.

Second, effective control must reside with the holder rather than with the system through which the asset is accessed. Property presupposes that the holder determines when and how an asset is transferred. Where movement can be delayed, frozen, or denied by an intermediary, control has not been transferred, regardless of the terminology used to describe the arrangement.

Third, the mechanics of transfer must be capable of evidencing a genuine change in ownership. For digital property, transfer must be final, exclusive, and verifiable, such that the transferor’s ability to exercise control is extinguished and the transferee’s ability to exercise control is established without reliance on trust in an intermediary. Absent such mechanics, apparent transfers may amount to no more than internal reallocations within a managed system.

These characteristics are not intended to replicate possession of tangible things, but to identify functional equivalents that allow legal systems to recognise enforceable, rivalrous interests in digital form. Central to this analysis is not physical possession, but rivalry: the ability for an asset to be held, transferred, and enforced in a manner that excludes simultaneous claims by multiple parties.

Fourth, ownership must survive institutional failure. The decisive question is not how a system functions under normal conditions, but what happens when governance breaks down, platforms suspend operations, or insolvency proceedings commence. If the holder’s rights dissolve into a claim against an intermediary at that point, property never existed in the relevant legal sense.

Finally, transparency must support accountability. Systems that obscure custody, reuse, or assert priority under the banner of privacy or decentralisation, risk shifting power away from holders rather than toward them. Legal enforceability requires that rights be capable of being identified, audited, and asserted when disputes arise.

In particular, the emphasis on independence from discretionary control, effective transfer, and survivability upon insolvency reflects long-standing private law concerns rather than novel regulatory innovation.

These conditions explain why debates framed solely around technological descriptors often miss the point. Digital property is not declared by design choices or regulatory labels; it is demonstrated through legal mechanics. Where the structure is absent, regulatory clarity achieved at the level of taxonomy may coexist with continued uncertainty at the level of legal rights.

While digital assets do not require physical form to constitute property, those that are capable of being held, transferred, and enforced without reliance on discretionary intermediaries enjoy a structural advantage. Where an asset’s control and transfer are effected directly between holders, the legal relationship more closely resembles possession in functional terms, even though the asset remains intangible. This does not collapse digital assets into the category of tangible things, but it does reduce the scope for intermediation risk, discretionary control, and the transformation of proprietary relationships into claims. By contrast, where transfer and control are mediated by platforms or custodians, the holder’s position becomes contingent on institutional performance, and the legal analysis necessarily shifts from property to entitlement.

Having identified the conditions under which a digital asset may plausibly exist as property in law, the analysis must then turn to a separate and secondary question: in practice, how those assets are held, mediated, and transformed when they pass through intermediaries.

Custody, Intermediation, and the Illusion of Ownership

Even where a digital asset can exist as property, direct holding by end users in contemporary markets is the exception rather than the rule. Most activity takes place through intermediaries—exchanges, custodians, brokers, wallet providers, or layered service arrangements—that stand between the user and the underlying asset. This structure is not inherently problematic; intermediation has long been a feature of financial markets. The difficulty arises when intermediated arrangements obscure the legal nature of the rights held by users.

In many such arrangements, the intermediary retains custody of the asset or controls the mechanisms through which the asset is accessed and transferred. Users interact with the asset through accounts, interfaces, or internal ledger entries that display balances and transaction histories. These features can create a strong impression of ownership, even where the intermediary retains practical authority over movement, withdrawal, and use.

While insolvency reveals these distinctions most starkly, the same structural features shape legal risk and allocation of rights throughout the asset’s lifecycle.

Empirical studies of digital asset custody arrangements suggest that contractual and operational practices frequently diverge from the users’ expectations of ownership, particularly in stress scenarios. [6]

Recent case law (including Tulip Trading Ltd v Van der Laan [2023] EWCA Civ 83 and Yeates v The King [2025] VSCA 288 (Australia)) illustrates how, in the absence of clearly articulated custodial or proprietary relationships, courts are constrained in their ability to provide remedies, even where practical control over digital systems exists.

The distinction between possession and access is legally significant. Possession, in the relevant sense, involves the ability to exercise control without seeking permission from another party. Access, by contrast, may be conditional on compliance checks, operational windows, liquidity constraints, or discretionary suspensions. When access is mediated in this way, the user’s position is shaped as much by the intermediary’s policies as by the technical capabilities of the underlying system.

Withdrawal rights are often cited as evidence of ownership in such contexts. However, the legal strength of a withdrawal right depends on its enforceability and scope. A right that may be delayed, conditioned, or suspended at the intermediary’s discretion functions differently from a right that is prompt, objective, and insulated from the intermediary’s own interests. In digital markets, where users rarely hold assets directly, withdrawal serves as the practical substitute for possession. If that substitute is weak, the appearance of ownership may mask a relationship of entitlement or credit.

These distinctions become decisive under stress. When an intermediary suspends operations, enters administration, or becomes insolvent, users discover whether their rights attach to assets or collapse into claims. Where assets are pooled, reused, or treated as part of the intermediary’s general holdings, users may find themselves competing with other creditors despite having experienced their position as ownership during normal operations. In such cases, the illusion of ownership is sustained by interface design and market convention rather than by legal structure.

For regulatory purposes, this analysis underscores the limits of surface-level indicators. The presence of an account balance, the ability to initiate transactions under normal conditions, or the absence of overt issuer promises does not determine whether a user holds property. These questions turn on control, custody, and enforceability—matters that remain largely invisible to users but are determinative in law.

Tokenisation and the Risk of Added Opacity

Tokenisation is often presented as a means of enhancing clarity, efficiency, and transferability by representing rights or assets in digital form. In some contexts, it may serve these functions. However, tokenisation does not, of itself, alter the legal nature of the underlying relationship. A token is a mode of representation; it is not a transformation of rights.

Where tokenisation is layered onto existing intermediated arrangements, it may introduce additional abstraction without altering the underlying allocation of legal rights. [7] The resulting instrument may appear more precise or technologically advanced while leaving unchanged the question of custody, control, and insolvency treatment that determine legal outcomes.

The risk is particularly acute where tokens are issued to represent positions within intermediated systems. In such cases, the token may function as a claim on the intermediary’s internal records rather than as evidence of direct ownership of an asset. Transfers of the token may be recorded and settled within the system without effecting a corresponding transfer of control or possession at the underlying level. The legal relationship remains mediated, even as the technical representation suggests immediacy and autonomy.

Claims-based tokenisation can therefore increase opacity rather than reduce it. Traditional financial claims, while complex, are at least embedded within familiar legal and institutional frameworks. Their tokenised equivalents may obscure those frameworks behind technical interfaces and terminology that imply disintermediation. Users may experience increased functionality without gaining additional legal protection.

This observation is a reminder that technical innovation does not resolve legal ambiguity unless it is accompanied by corresponding changes in legal structure. Where tokenisation is layered onto existing custodial and contractual arrangements without altering custody, enforceability, or priority, it risks compounding the very uncertainties that regulation seeks to address.

For policymakers and regulators, the implication is that attention must be directed to substance rather than form. Whether an interest is represented by a token, an account entry, or a traditional instrument is secondary to the question of what rights that representation confers and how those rights are treated when systems fail. Without that focus, tokenisation may serve to repackage claims in more sophisticated form, while leaving the underlying allocation of risk unchanged.

“Customer Property” and Insolvency Reality

The divergence between contractual language and insolvency outcomes has been a recurring theme in both traditional and digital custody arrangements. [8]

Regulatory and contractual language frequently seeks to reassure market participants by describing assets held through intermediaries as “customer property”. The phrase is intuitively appealing, suggesting ownership, insulation from institutional risk, and priority over general creditors. However, without corresponding legal and operational structure, such language may provide little more than comfort during normal market conditions.

Whether assets described as “customer property” are in fact treated as such depends on how they are held, used, and resolved upon failure. Accounting separation alone is insufficient. Assets that are pooled, rehypothecated, or otherwise deployed by an intermediary may be exposed to the intermediary’s creditors regardless of how they are labelled. In such cases, customers bear risks that are inconsistent with ownership, even if their positions are recorded separately in internal systems.

The strength of a customer’s position therefore turns not on how the relationship is described or experienced in ordinary market conditions, but on how it is treated under stress. Insolvency provides the definitive test. If assets described as “customer property” are drawn into the intermediary’s estate upon failure, the customer’s rights are revealed to be claims rather than property, regardless of how those rights were labelled, accounted for, or presented prior to insolvency.

Where platforms or custodians describe customer holdings in a manner that implies ownership or proprietary control, despite the legal relationship being one of entitlement or credit, this may give rise to claims in misrepresentation or contractual estoppel. As in other regulatory contexts where labels obscure legal substance, the issue is not merely one of customer expectation, but whether pre-contractual descriptions accurately reflect the rights being conferred. The potential for such claims further underscores the importance of structural clarity, both for regulatory certainty and private law accountability,

This analysis does not suggest that intermediated custody arrangements are inherently flawed. It does, however, underscore the importance of aligning protective language with enforceable legal consequences. Without such alignment, terminology may obscure rather than clarify the allocation of risk.

Implications for Collateral and Regulatory Regimes

The foregoing analysis has direct implications for the treatment of digital assets within collateral frameworks and broader regulatory regimes. Approaches that begin with classification may deliver administrative clarity while leaving unresolved whether the asset in question can constitute property or remains a claim mediated through intermediaries.

Collateral regimes, in particular, depend on clarity about the nature of the rights being secured. Whether an asset can be posted as collateral, reused by a collateral-taker, or enforced upon default turns on questions of ownership, control, and priority. Where these questions are unresolved or obscured, collateral arrangements may operate in ways that disadvantage certain parties or undermine systemic confidence.

Recent scholarship has explored how digital assets might fit within existing collateral frameworks[9], but its effectiveness depends on a prior determination of whether the assets under consideration can exist as property or remain claims mediated through intermediaries. Where that determination is left implicit, regulatory reform risks addressing form rather than substance.

The same observation applies to regulatory perimeter design more generally. Allocating supervisory responsibility based on asset classification assumes that the legal nature of the asset is already understood. Where it is not, regulatory clarity may coexist with continued uncertainty about rights and obligations. In such circumstances, regulation may succeed in organising oversight while failing to reduce underlying risk.

For regulators and legislators, the implication is that clarity must begin with legal structure. Custody arrangements, transfer mechanics, and insolvency outcomes should inform regulatory treatment, rather than being treated as secondary considerations. Only by aligning regulation with the legal characteristics of assets can frameworks be both coherent and durable.

Conclusion

The challenges posed by digital assets are often framed as novel or unprecedented. In legal terms, however, they turn on familiar distinctions. The difference between property and claims, the significance of custody and control, and the role of insolvency in revealing legal reality are not new concepts. What is new is the speed and scale at which digital systems can obscure these distinctions.

Classification, technological descriptors, and market narratives cannot substitute for legal analysis of structure. Whether a digital asset functions as property or as a claim is determined by how rights are constituted, exercised, and enforced, particularly when institutions fail.

By articulating the structural conditions required for digital property to exist, and by examining how intermediation and tokenisation can complicate rather than resolve legal relationships, the article seeks to reframe current debates. The question is not merely how digital assets should be regulated, but what market participants hold as a matter of law.

Notably, recent law reform work in several common law jurisdictions has approached digital assets through a similar lens, focussing on private law structure and enforceability rather than technological description, suggesting an emerging convergence around the primacy of legal characteristics over market labels.

Legal clarity achieved at the level of structure provides a foundation for innovation that is resilient rather than fragile. Clarity achieved at the level of labels alone risks leaving underlying uncertainties unresolved. It is the former, not the latter, that will determine whether digital markets can support sustainable financial activity over the long term.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer focussed on value-aligned finance. She spent over 20 years working across financial institutions, law firms and consultancies before transitioning in 2016 into entrepreneurship and applied wellbeing. Her work now centres on lawful models that protect creators and channel capital into productive, non-extractive outcomes— so that finance supports human creativity and abundance rather than undermining it. Her writing is published on Substack: Anna’s Substack | Anna Iversen | Substack ; Email: anna@iversen.org.uk

[1] Thank you to JIBFL for publishing this article. https://www.jibfl.co.uk/articles/digital-property-digital-claims-and-regulatory-clarity-why-legal-structure-must-precede-classification

[2] J Verstappen, ‘Tokenisation of Absolute Rights and Claims: On the Use of Tokens to Transfer Rights in Property Law’ (2025) European Journal of Risk Regulation; see also OECD, Regulatory Approaches to the Tokenisation of Assets (2021).

[3] J Wyczik,‘Ownership in the 21st Century: Property Law of Digital Assets’ (2025) Information & Communications Technology Law, and ‘The Property Law of Crypto Tokens’ (2023) https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01461; see also UNIDROIT Principles on Digital Assets and Private Law (2023).

[4] Law Commission of England and Wales, Digital Assets: Final Report (2023)

[5] UNIDROIT, Principles on Digital Assets and Private Law (2024); Luke Lee, ‘Examining the Legal Status of Digital Assets as Property: A Comparative Analysis’ (2024)

[6] D Zetzsche et al, ‘Crypto Custody: An Empirical Assessment’ (2025) Journal of Financial Regulation

[7] OECD, Regulatory Approaches to the Tokenisation of Assets (2021); J Verstappen (fn 2).

[8] Cf discussion of segregation and priority under the Financial Collateral Arrangements (No 2) Regulations 2003.

[9] Jonathan Haines, Digital assets and reform of the financial collateral regime (2025) 5 JIBFL 306 (May)

For years, discussions around blockchain infrastructure have largely unfolded in separate worlds. Technical communities debated scaling and consensus mechanisms. Financial institutions explored tokenisation pilots inside tightly controlled environments. Regulators focused on compliance, custody, and market conduct. Meanwhile, a smaller group of researchers, engineers, and legal thinkers continued asking a more foundational question:

What kind of digital architecture is actually capable of supporting large-scale settlement with legal and operational integrity?

Those worlds now appear to be moving closer together.

In April 2026, Siggi Óskarsson, CTO of the BSV Association[1], published a technical white paper[2] describing BSVM: an Ethereum Virtual Machine layer running on Bitcoin SV[3] as its settlement and data availability layer. The paper is an architectural proposal: Ethereum-compatible smart contract execution combined with proof-of-work settlement, covenant-enforced state continuity, and validity proofs anchored directly onto BSV.[4]

On its own, that would already be notable. What makes it more interesting is the timing. Over the same period, some of the most institutionally significant actors in global finance have begun publicly identifying problems that closely mirror the architectural questions BSVM attempts to address: settlement finality, fragmented data standards, cross-chain complexity, governance dependence, and the operational fragility of systems built around coordination rather than deterministic verification.[5]

None of these institutions explicitly name BSV. Yet increasingly, they appear to be describing the properties it has preserved. Increasingly, the constraints being identified by institutions themselves—finality, interoperability, governance dependence, fragmented records, and operational coordination risk—appear less like peripheral technical concerns and more like architectural requirements.

It is against this backdrop that Siggi Óskarsson’s recent BSVM white paper becomes particularly interesting. The proposal itself is technically ambitious: an Ethereum Virtual Machine layer operating on Bitcoin SV as its settlement and data availability layer, while preserving compatibility with existing Ethereum tooling, smart contracts, and developer environments.

The significance, however, may lie less in the engineering details than in the institutional implication. For years, blockchain discussions have often assumed a binary choice. Either institutions would remain within permissioned environments built around identifiable operators and coordinated governance, or they would need to migrate fully into entirely new public-chain ecosystems, abandoning existing tooling, workflows, and infrastructure in the process.

BSVM points toward a possible third path. Under the architecture described in the paper, Ethereum’s application layer does not need to disappear in order for settlement assumptions to change. Solidity development environments, wallets, and existing smart contract frameworks can continue operating while settlement, proof verification, and data availability anchor onto a proof-of-work base layer underneath.

Whether this architecture ultimately succeeds at scale remains uncertain. Yet the proposal is notable because it attempts to resolve a tension that institutions increasingly appear to be confronting directly: the desire for programmable financial infrastructure without inheriting escalating governance complexity, fragmented coordination layers, and probabilistic settlement assumptions.

At the same time, broader institutional signals appear to be moving in a similar direction. In recent months, major financial and legal actors have begun publishing analyses that increasingly emphasise settlement integrity, interoperability, common data standards, and operational resilience as central infrastructure concerns rather than secondary technical considerations. The language differs, but the underlying pattern is becoming more difficult to ignore.

In April 2026, A&O Shearman published a paper examining the future of tokenised financial markets and the infrastructure challenges that still remain unresolved.[6] Among the issues identified were fragmented records, cross-chain complexity, interoperability constraints, governance dependencies, and the absence of common standards capable of supporting large-scale coordination across markets.

Shortly afterwards, Deutsche Bank published its own analysis of stablecoins, tokenised deposits, and CBDCs[7], similarly emphasising fragmented trade infrastructure, operational inefficiencies, settlement friction, and the growing importance of public blockchain infrastructure in the next phase of financial digitisation.

Notably, the paper observed that “as public blockchains gradually gain recognition as legitimate settlement infrastructure within the regulated financial sector”, institutions increasingly require interoperability, common standards, and operational continuity capable of supporting always-on programmable finance.[8]

None of these papers reference Bitcoin SV directly. Nor do they advocate any specific public chain architecture.

Yet the characteristics increasingly being described as necessary—stable settlement, scalable data availability, deterministic verification, interoperability, and operational continuity—closely mirror the properties that BSV has spent years preserving, often outside the centre of institutional attention.

At the same time, other parts of the market continue moving in a different direction. The recent Canton Network collateral trial involving several major Japanese financial institutions reflects the continuing institutional preference for controlled environments, permissioned coordination structures, and operational familiarity. That preference is understandable. Large financial systems rarely migrate through abrupt replacement. They evolve incrementally, usually by extending existing frameworks before rethinking them.

Yet the tension now increasingly visible is that many of the coordination structures designed to make digital finance institutionally comfortable may also reintroduce some of the very frictions tokenisation was expected to reduce. The more programmable and interconnected financial systems become, the more consequential settlement assumptions themselves appear to become.

This may explain why discussions around finality, data integrity, and operational coordination are beginning to move from technical forums into legal, institutional, and policy discussions.

That shift is increasingly visible even at central bank level. In May 2026, the Bank of England’s DLT Innovation Challenge[9] openly asked: “Can wholesale central bank money be securely transacted and settled on external, programmable ledgers not operated by the Bank of England, and in environments where trust is not inherent?”[10]

The Bank of England challenge further identified secure, irreversible settlement and the integrity and auditability of completed transactions as critical infrastructure questions requiring examination.

Some of the signals remain suggestive rather than definitive. The appearance of figures associated with ISDA[11] standardisation work, digital asset legal frameworks, and BSV infrastructure outside the SEC may prove incidental. Yet such moments attract attention because they reflect a broader convergence now taking shape between legal infrastructure, settlement architecture, and public blockchain design.

Increasingly, the conversation appears less concerned with whether digital assets exist, and more concerned with what kind of infrastructure can support them at meaningful scale, helping reduce systemic risk rather than increase it.

For much of the past decade, public discussion around blockchain technology has been dominated by price movements, speculative cycles, and debates around ‘decentralisation’ framed largely in ideological terms.

That phase may now be beginning to recede. As tokenisation moves closer to core financial infrastructure, the questions becoming most important are increasingly operational and architectural rather than rhetorical. How is settlement achieved? Where does finality reside? What assumptions govern reversibility, coordination, and control? How many intermediating layers are required to maintain the system itself?

These questions matter because programmable finance does not eliminate financial structure. It reproduces it in digital form.

A system built primarily around coordinated governance, external intervention, and layered claims may still inherit many of the same fragilities that exist within traditional financial architecture: operational dependency, fragmented records, delayed reconciliation, counterparty complexity, and uncertainty around final settlement.

By contrast, systems capable of combining programmability with deterministic settlement begin to behave differently. The ledger becomes not merely a record of balances or entitlements, but a continuously updated record of activity, state transition, ownership, and transfer operating on a shared infrastructure layer.

This distinction increasingly appears to matter to institutions themselves. The significance of recent developments may therefore lie less in any single project, pilot, or white paper than in the gradual emergence of a broader realisation: programmable financial systems may ultimately require a settlement substrate capable of operating more like infrastructure and less like coordinated administration.

Seen in that light, the importance of proposals such as BSVM is not necessarily that they replace existing ecosystems outright. It is that they potentially reduce the distance between the world institutions have already built and the settlement properties they increasingly appear to require.

The transition, if it occurs, may therefore be quieter than many expect. Application layers may remain familiar. Wallets, smart contract environments, developer tooling, and user interfaces may continue evolving incrementally. What changes first may be the underlying settlement assumptions themselves.

Historically, infrastructure transitions rarely occur through sudden replacement. More often, the interface remains recognisable while the underlying architecture gradually changes beneath it. The distinction is important because digitisation alone does not necessarily reduce systemic complexity. In some cases, it may intensify it.

A financial system operating continuously across programmable digital rails, twenty-four hours a day and across jurisdictions, still requires some underlying mechanism for determining final settlement, ownership continuity, reconciliation, and operational trust. If those functions remain dependent upon layered permissions, coordinated intermediaries, discretionary governance, or fragmented records across multiple systems, digitisation may in fact accelerate the creation of additional claims upon claims rather than reduce them.

This may in fact not result in simplification, but the risk of increasingly complex coordination structures operating at digital speed.

This is one reason why questions around deterministic settlement, shared data integrity, and non-discretionary verification are beginning to attract greater institutional attention. As programmable financial systems scale, the operational assumptions underneath them become more consequential, not less.

Seen from this perspective, some of the current institutional experimentation may represent less a final destination than a transitional phase. Stablecoins, tokenised deposits, programmable collateral, and digitally native issuance may all serve as intermediary layers helping financial infrastructure migrate toward more integrated forms of settlement and record-keeping over time.

Whether that migration consolidates around any particular architecture remains to be seen. Yet the direction of travel increasingly appears to point toward systems capable of combining scalability, programmability, legal continuity, and deterministic settlement within a shared public infrastructure layer.

None of this means the outcome is settled. Institutional infrastructure tends to evolve slowly, particularly where law, settlement, operational resilience, and sovereign interests intersect. Many of the systems now being tested may succeed in some areas while revealing limitations in others. Some signals may prove more significant than they presently appear. Others may fade.

Yet what increasingly stands out is the convergence itself. Across legal analysis, institutional research, settlement experimentation, and public blockchain engineering, a similar set of questions appears to be emerging repeatedly: how to combine programmability with finality, interoperability with integrity, and digital scale with coherent settlement architecture.

For years, many of these discussions unfolded separately. They now no longer appear entirely separate. It is still too early to say whether proposals such as BSVM ultimately become central to this transition. But the architectural properties being discussed with growing seriousness by institutions are, increasingly, the same properties that Bitcoin SV quietly preserved while much of the surrounding conversation remained focused elsewhere.

The significance may therefore lie not in any single announcement or pilot, but in the possibility that the underlying infrastructure question is becoming the centre of the conversation.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than acting as its impediment—forcing humanity to focus on survival instead of thriving. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, in the knowledge that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Substack Anna Iversen

[1]BSV Association, based in Switzerland, is a non-profit organisation serving as the global advocate and steward for BSV blockchain and the original Bitcoin protocol BSV Association | Together, Towards Better

[2]Siggi Oskarsson, BSV Association, white paper ‘BSVM: A Validity-Proven EVM Layer 2 on Bitcoin SV via Covenant UTXO Chains and STARK Proofs’, April 2026 bsvm/whitepaper/bsvm-whitepaper.pdf at main · icellan/bsvm · GitHub

[3] Bitcoin SV, or BSV, represents the system described in the white paper entitled ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’, by Satoshi Nakamoto, 31 October 2008 Bitcoin White Paper . BSV has retained the original Bitcoin protocol architecture as laid out by Satoshi Nakamoto in the 2008 white paper.

[4] Craig Wright on Substack, 22 April 2026 ‘What Siggi Built’ What Siggi Built - by Craig Wright - Craig’s Substack

[5] Thank you to MrBen (@71Nous on X) for presenting some of these details on X, inspiring me to write this essay.

[6] A&O Shearman, ’Technological revolution heralds a new dawn for financial markets’, 30 April 2026 Technology revolution reshaping the financial markets

[7] Deutsche Bank, ‘Digital Money: A Perspective on Stablecoins, Tokenised Deposits, and CBDCs’, 7 May 2026 Digital Money: A Perspective of Stablecoins, Tokenised Deposits and CBDCs

[8] Paragraph 3.3 ‘Tokenised deposits issued on industry / public blockchains’, p 18 of Deutsche Bank, ‘Digital Money: A Perspective on Stablecoins, Tokenised Deposits, and CBDCs’7 May 2026 Digital Money: A Perspective of Stablecoins, Tokenised Deposits and CBDCs

[9] Bank of England, ‘Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) Innovation Challenge Report’, 12 May 2026 Digital Money: A Perspective of Stablecoins, Tokenised Deposits and CBDCs

[10] Bank of England post on LinkedIn announcing the publication of the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) Innovation Challenge Report. Bank of England DLT Innovation Challenge_LinkedIn post

[11] International Swaps and Derivatives Association, the global trade organisation working to make the global derivatives markets safer and more efficient with over 1,000 member institutions worldwide International Swaps and Derivatives Association

In recent months, a series of developments in the United States—policy announcements, industrial investment, and a renewed emphasis on national production—have begun to suggest something more than incremental change. A pattern is starting to become visible.

Factories are being planned and built, supply chains are being reconsidered, and energy policy is shifting toward abundance rather than constraint. Across multiple fronts, there is a discernible reorientation toward production, capability, innovation, and long-term resilience.

Promethean Action’s recent booklet, Bye, Bye Globalism — The American System is Back!, [1] captures this moment with unusual clarity. It situates these developments within a longer historical arc, tracing a return to the American System as articulated by Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury Secretary, and developed through successive generations: a system grounded in the conviction that national prosperity depends upon the cultivation of human creativity, expressed through industry, science, and technological progress.

At the same time, remarks such as those delivered by U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in Davos in January suggest that this shift is not merely rhetorical. The policy framework is beginning to change. The assumption that global integration alone will deliver prosperity is giving way to a more grounded understanding: that human creativity and innovation must be incentivised and protected, and productive capacity must be built and continuously renewed.

Taken together, these developments point to something more than a change in direction. They suggest the re-emergence of an underlying framework—one that has not been absent, but has, until recently, remained largely implicit.

Even as this re-emergence becomes visible, an essential part of the picture remains unarticulated.

A New Requirement

If the physical foundations of the economy are being rebuilt—and if policy tools are once again being directed toward innovation and production—what structure allows such a system to operate coherently in a digital age?

In earlier periods, this question did not arise in the same form. Industrial systems could function with localised information, slower feedback loops, and institutional intermediaries that coordinated activity over time. Today, however, production, design, finance, and exchange unfold across a continuous, interconnected informational environment. Value is created not only in factories and laboratories, but in data, software, and the intangible processes that connect them.

This introduces a new requirement—one that sits alongside, but is distinct from, both industrial policy and financial design. A modern productive economy must be able to record, verify, and coordinate the creation and exchange of value as it occurs. Without such a capability, even well-directed policy and substantial investment risk becoming fragmented, opaque, or dependent on layers of intermediation that reintroduce the very dynamics they seek to overcome.

The question, then, is not only how to rebuild production, or how to finance it. It is how to ensure that the system as a whole remains aligned—how the flow of value, from invention through to application, can be made visible, attributable, and capable of being shared without distortion or loss.

It is at this point that the conversation, as it currently stands, reveals its limits.

From Coordination to Structure

One way to approach this is to recognise that what is now being rebuilt operates across at least three distinct, but interdependent, layers.

The first is the productive layer: the physical economy of energy, materials, manufacturing, and labour. This is the domain most visibly addressed in current policy and in Promethean Action’s work—where the emphasis falls on rebuilding industrial capacity, restoring supply chains, and expanding the productive powers of the economy.

The second is the financial and policy layer: the set of tools through which capital is directed, risks are shared, and incentives are shaped. Here, we see a renewed willingness to use tariffs, targeted support, and other instruments associated with the American System, alongside an emerging recognition that the structure of finance itself determines whether growth is broadly distributive or quietly extractive.

Both of these layers are necessary. But taken together, they are not yet sufficient.

What remains underdeveloped, however, is the coordination layer—the informational infrastructure through which economic activity is recorded, verified, and connected across time and participants. It is this layer that determines whether a system can function coherently at scale, particularly when the objects of value are no longer confined to physical goods, but increasingly include data, design, intellectual work, and machine-generated outputs.

In its absence, coordination defaults to a familiar set of substitutes: fragmented databases, institutional silos, and intermediaries tasked with maintaining records, reconciling discrepancies, and enforcing entitlements. These arrangements can function, but they introduce opacity and delay, and, over time, opportunities for misalignment between those who create value and those who ultimately capture it.

This is not a new phenomenon. It is the pattern that earlier American statesmen repeatedly confronted in different forms: the tendency for systems built to support production to gradually evolve into systems that privilege control over the flows of value that production generates.

What is new is the scale and speed at which this dynamic can now unfold. In an economy where intangible assets play an increasingly central role, and where transactions can occur at machine speed around the clock, the absence of a coherent system of record becomes not just an inefficiency, but a structural limitation.

Introducing the Missing Layer

To address this limitation requires more than incremental improvement to existing systems. It requires a shift in how economic activity itself is represented.

At its simplest, the question is this: what would it mean for the creation and exchange of value to be recorded at the point at which it occurs—not reconstructed after the fact through layers of accounting and interpretation?

The limitation of the current model becomes clearer when viewed in practice. Consider the path of an invention from initial conception through to application. Value is created continuously—through insight, design, iteration, and refinement—yet the systems used to record that value typically operate only at discrete points: ownership assignments, contractual milestones, financial reporting. What lies between is inferred, aggregated, or, in many cases, lost.

As a result, the relationship between those who create value and those who participate in it becomes increasingly abstract. Ownership is defined institutionally rather than functionally. Participation is mediated through layers that must interpret, reconcile, and, ultimately, allocate value after the fact.

This is not simply an inefficiency. It is a structural constraint. In an economy where intangible and continuously generated forms of value play an expanding role, a system that relies on retrospective reconstruction cannot maintain coherence at scale.

What is required is a different foundation—one in which economic activity is recorded as it occurs, and in which the relationships that define ownership, participation, and exchange are made explicit within that record itself.

Under such conditions, provenance does not need to be established after the fact; it is inherent. Ownership can be expressed as a function of control rather than institutional assignment. Participation can be defined in advance and maintained as value moves through the system, rather than periodically recalculated.

In this light, the distinction between physical and intangible production begins to dissolve. Both become expressions of activity that can be evidenced, attributed, and connected within a common framework.

Participation in economic life then also begins to broaden. The capacity to contribute is no longer confined to large institutions or industrial actors alone, but extends to individuals, small enterprises, researchers, designers, creators, and communities whose work can now be directly connected to the value it generates.

From this perspective, the emerging informational economy is not defined solely by automation or digitisation, but by the possibility of restoring continuity between human creativity and economic participation itself.

It is this requirement that gives rise to the need for a coordination layer—not as an additional feature, but as the condition under which a modern productive economy can remain aligned.

The Architecture For A New Era

Viewed in this light, the question of coordination is not one of organisational design alone, but of infrastructure. The system required must be capable of recording economic activity continuously, at scale, and without reliance on retrospective reconciliation.

A mature public blockchain meets this requirement. Not as a speculative asset or proprietary platform, but as a fixed, scalable system for recording transactions—operating under protocol rules that are set, transparent, and not subject to discretionary change, while maintaining a continuous, timestamped record of activity accessible and verifiable across participants. Its defining characteristic is not decentralisation as an end in itself, but the ability to preserve the integrity of that record without dependence on institutional interpretation or control.

On such a foundation, the concept of digital property becomes operational. Control over an asset can be established directly, with transfer occurring as a change in that control rather than as an update within an intermediary’s ledger. What is recorded is not merely a balance, but a history—an unbroken chain linking creation, transfer, and current ownership.

This alters the nature of coordination. Economic relationships can be expressed in terms that are natively recorded and verifiable within the system itself. Ownership, participation, and exchange no longer need to be reconstructed from external records, but can be defined and maintained as part of the underlying architecture.

It is within this environment that financial structures can evolve in a materially different way. Rather than relying on claims against institutions or future events, participation can be linked directly to the ongoing generation of value as it is recorded.

A structure such as the Sovereign Revenue Trust Entity^® did not arise from this context directly, yet aligns closely with the conditions it requires. By aligning participation with the ongoing generation of value as it is recorded, it offers a means of financing innovation that preserves continuity between those who create and what is created.[2]

In this sense, the coordination layer does not replace the financial layer; it makes it precise. It reduces the distance between intention and outcome, allowing economic relationships to be expressed, verified, and sustained within the system itself.

What is now coming into view is not simply the return of the American System, but the completion of it.

The underlying principle remains unchanged: that prosperity arises from the development of human creativity, expressed through discovery, technological progress, and production. What changes is the environment in which that principle must now operate.

In earlier periods, the relationship between creation and value could be sustained through institutions operating across time and trust. In a digital economy, where value is created and exchanged continuously and at scale, those mechanisms no longer suffice.

Without a system capable of recording economic activity at the point at which it occurs, the same pattern reasserts itself: fragmentation, opacity, and the gradual separation of those who create value from those who capture it.

In such a world, coordination can no longer rely on institutional abstraction alone. It must be grounded in systems capable of making ownership, participation, and exchange explicit at the point of creation, rather than inferred after the fact.

A mature public blockchain provides a fixed, scalable system through which activity can be continuously recorded, verified, and connected across participants without reliance on retrospective reconstruction. It forms a shared system of record for value, allowing ownership to be expressed through control, and value flows to be traced as they move through the system.

On such a foundation, financial structures can evolve beyond the limitations of the existing model. Instruments such as the Sovereign Revenue Trust Entity^® become possible—not as departures from established economic principles, but as direct expressions of them—designed to ensure that those who create remain connected to what they create, even as value moves through increasingly complex systems.

Seen in this light, the re-emergence of the American System in the twenty-first century is not only a matter of rebuilding industry or redirecting policy. It is the re-establishment of a coherent architecture—one in which production, finance, and coordination operate as an integrated whole.

The reorientation toward production is already underway. The policy framework is beginning to follow. The remaining question is whether the architecture required to sustain that system will be recognised as integral to it—or left implicit, as it has been before.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than acting as its impediment—forcing humanity to focus on survival instead of thriving. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, in the knowledge that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Substack Anna Iversen

[1] Promethean Action’s pamphlet posted 17 April 2026 Bye, Bye Globalism — The American System is Back! available for download on Promethean Action’s website www.prometheanaction.com.

[2] For a more detailed description of the SRTE^® and its applications, please refer to Barbara Guth’s “The Evolution of Finance” trilogy, with the third and final volume in the book series launched 11 September 2025 Evolution of Finance_Volume 3_US, Evolution of Finance_Volume 3_UK. More information on Barbara Guth’s work can also be found on www.theevolutionoffinance.com and www.sagesseSRTE.com

Most of us are at some level feeling it. A sense that something fundamental is breaking down. Some see it as the end of the post-war order. Others speak of the end of globalisation, the emergence of multipolarity, the decline of the dollar, or the rise of artificial intelligence. Discussions that once belonged to the margins now openly question the stability of financial markets, the legitimacy of institutions, and the future of the international monetary system itself. What is striking is not simply the breadth of these discussions, but the fact that many of them are beginning to converge.

A recent conversation between Alex Krainer and Simon Dixon[1] touched on many of these themes: war, debt, central banking, geopolitical realignment, Bitcoin, sovereignty, industrial policy, and the growing tension between national populations and transnational capital. While I do not necessarily share all of their conclusions, the discussion raised a number of important issues that increasingly sit beneath today’s political and economic debates.

Both men, in different ways, were attempting to describe the same underlying reality: that the economic architecture which shaped the modern world is becoming unstable. That much is real. Where many analyses still fall short, however, is that they continue to interpret the transition primarily through the lens of geopolitics, ideology, or elite competition. The debate remains framed as:

• globalism versus nationalism,

• East versus West,

• the U.S. dollar versus BRICS,

• centralisation versus decentralisation,

• capitalism versus socialism.

These categories, while not meaningless, no longer reach deeply enough. The transition now underway is not merely a struggle between nations, currencies, or political blocs.

It is a transition between economic systems built around abstract claims and systems capable of recording value directly.[2][3]

This distinction changes everything.

For most of modern history, economies could only operate through layers of institutional abstraction. Ownership, exchange, production, and credit all had to be reconstructed retrospectively through ledgers, intermediaries, and legal claims. Information moved slowly, verification was expensive, and trust depended heavily on institutions positioned between economic participants.

Under those conditions, industrial-era systems emerged naturally in response to the situation:

• central banks,

• commercial banking networks,

• securities markets,

• multinational corporations, and

• bureaucratic states capable of coordinating large populations through delayed accounting systems.

These systems produced extraordinary industrial growth. But over time, they also enabled something else: the increasing separation of financial claims from the productive economy itself.

The modern economy became progressively less focused on producing value and increasingly focused on trading entitlements to value. At the extreme, claims-based systems can become economically parasitic, extracting increasing value from the productive foundations upon which they ultimately depend.

The Limits of Industrial-Era Economics

For this reason, many current debates, although often insightful, remain incomplete.

When commentators revisit the work of U.S. first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, the American System, or the historical conflict between productive activity and financial speculation, they are identifying something very real. The distinction mattered historically, and it still matters now.

Hamilton understood that a nation could not develop by surrendering itself entirely to external capital flows. Productive capacity had to be cultivated internally through infrastructure, industry, education, and long-term investment. Credit, in this view, was not meant primarily to fuel speculation. It was meant to support the development of the real economy.

In contrast, the British imperial model that emerged alongside it treated capital as globally mobile and detached from place. Wealth accumulated not necessarily where value was produced, but where financial power was concentrated. Over time, this encouraged a system in which nations competed for investment by lowering costs, weakening protections, and opening themselves to extractive forms of finance. This inevitably becomes a race to the bottom.

This distinction between productive development and financial extraction remains one of the most important economic fault lines in the modern world.

It also explains why many people instinctively feel that something has gone wrong. Across much of the West, productive capacity has steadily weakened while financial markets have expanded dramatically. Asset prices rise while infrastructure deteriorates. Debt grows faster than production. Younger generations increasingly struggle to convert work into ownership. Economic activity becomes progressively more abstract and financialised, disconnected from tangible improvements in living standards.

Many critiques of modern free trade globalisation are directionally correct, but there is also a danger in assuming that simply reversing globalisation, restoring tariffs, or rebuilding industrial policy fully resolves the problem. These approaches belong to an earlier stage of economic development—a world where production was primarily physical, information moved slowly, and accounting systems operated with significant delay.

The emerging economy operates differently. Today, value increasingly exists not only in physical goods, but in information itself: software, designs, data, digital identities, machine coordination, intellectual creation, automated production, and networked systems operating in real time across borders.

Under these conditions, the question is not simply who controls industrial production. There is a deeper question: how is value itself recorded, verified, coordinated, and exchanged? This is the layer most economic debates still struggle to reach.

Industrial-era systems were built around delayed institutional trust. Banks, clearing houses, and large intermediaries existed largely because there was no other practical way to coordinate economic activity at scale. Records had to be maintained centrally. Ownership often depended on institutional recognition. Verification was slow, fragmented, and expensive.

As a result, modern finance evolved into a vast architecture of representations:
claims upon claims upon claims, separated from the underlying productive activity they supposedly represented.

With the accumulation of layers of intermediation, counterparty exposure expands throughout the system itself. Economic participants become increasingly dependent not simply on productive activity, but on the continued solvency, liquidity, and credibility of the intermediaries standing between them and the underlying value.

This abstraction was manageable while the economy remained comparatively grounded in physical production. But as finance, derivatives, tokenisation, and digital systems continue to expand, the distance between real economic activity and financial representation has widened dramatically.

The result is the unstable environment visible today: rising systemic fragility, escalating debt dependency, concentration of ownership, declining trust, speculative excess, and growing tension between financial markets and the lived economy.

Importantly, this instability is not simply moral failure or political corruption, though both exist. It is structural at its core. A system built primarily around the acceleration of claims will eventually begin to consume the productive foundation upon which those claims depend.

Much of modern ‘soft power’ is ultimately a function of claims-based coordination. Influence flows toward those who control the financial, legal, and informational architectures through which economic representation passes. But as the representation drifts further away from the underlying productive foundation, the maintenance burden continues to rise. Energy becomes increasingly directed toward sustaining confidence in the abstraction itself rather than strengthening the productive foundations beneath it.

This is precisely where the informational transition becomes decisive. Informational systems themselves are not neutral. The architecture through which information is recorded and coordinated determines the direction in which the economy evolves.

Not All Informational Systems Are Created Equal

The fact that the next economic system will be informational does not mean it will automatically become more free, more human, or more aligned with productive value.

A digitised claims system is still a claims system. This insight is important because many of the technologies now presented as ‘the future of finance’ do not fundamentally alter the underlying economic structure at all. They merely accelerate it.

Central bank digital currencies, programmable payment systems, tokenised securities, platform-based financial ecosystems, and many forms of digital identity architecture all move in the same general direction: toward greater visibility, automation, conditionality, and centralised coordination of economic activity.

From a technical perspective, these systems may appear highly advanced. But economically, many of them remain rooted in the same logic that has governed the modern financial order for decades: the expansion and management of claims.

The underlying problem is not solved merely by digitising payment infrastructure. If anything, systems built upon centralised informational control can intensify the very dynamics already destabilising modern economies with concentration of power, dependency on intermediaries, financial surveillance, abstraction from observable productive activity, and the increasing ability to govern populations through access to financial infrastructure itself.

For this reason, many people instinctively sense danger in the emerging landscape, even if they cannot always clearly articulate why. They correctly perceive that informational systems shape economic life. But they often assume the only possible outcome is either technocratic control, or fragmentation into parallel informal economies operating outside institutional structures altogether. In reality, there is another possibility.

It is not about whether economic systems become informational. That transition is already underway. Instead, the real issue is: what kind of information is being recorded?

A system designed primarily to track permissions, balances, behavioural compliance, and institutional claims produces one set of incentives and social outcomes.

A system capable of recording actual economic activity, ownership, provenance, contribution, exchange, and accountability produces another.

This is where the distinction between claims and property becomes decisive.

In most modern financial systems, individuals do not directly possess many of the assets they believe they own. Instead, they hold layered contractual entitlements mediated through custodians, platforms, counterparties, clearing systems, and legal intermediaries. The system functions largely through representations of ownership rather than continuous, deterministic control.

Under industrial-era conditions, this was often unavoidable. The informational limitations of the time required heavy institutional intermediation, but digital systems change the equation.

For the first time in history, it becomes possible to create globally accessible systems in which ownership, transfer, provenance, and economic activity itself can be recorded directly within the transactional history of the network itself, verifiably in real time, and not merely recorded by external institutions after the fact. This does not eliminate institutions, law, or governance. Nor does it eliminate the need for trust altogether. But it fundamentally alters where trust resides within the system.

The architecture itself begins to matter more than institutional discretion.

This is why the current technological transition cannot be understood merely through the language of ‘crypto’, speculative finance, or digital payments. The deeper issue is civilisational. Industrial-era economies were organised around institutions attempting to coordinate incomplete information retrospectively.

Informational economies increasingly organise around the direct recording and coordination of activity itself. That shift changes not only finance, but potentially ownership, markets, production, governance, and even the relationship between individuals and the economic systems they participate in.

The critical question is whether these emerging informational systems reinforce extraction—or restore coherence between economic representation and underlying reality.

The Return of Economic Reality

One of the defining characteristics of the industrial age was the growing separation between economic activity and economic visibility.

As economies expanded in scale and complexity, direct knowledge of production became increasingly difficult to acquire. Goods moved across continents, ownership became layered through institutions and intermediaries, and financial markets evolved into vast systems of representation standing further and further away from the underlying activity they purported to reflect.

Under these conditions, modern economies began to rely heavily on abstraction. Accounting became retrospective. Risk became modelled statistically rather than observed directly. Financial instruments multiplied faster than productive output itself. Over time, entire sectors emerged whose primary function was no longer the creation of value, but the management, pricing, securitisation, and trading of claims upon value.

This process generated enormous complexity, but also increasing fragility. The further financial representation drifted from actual productive activity, the more instability accumulated beneath the surface: leverage expanded, opacity deepened, ownership became diluted through layers of custody and rehypothecation, and economic success became progressively more disconnected from tangible contribution to society itself.

This is one reason why many people today instinctively feel that modern economies have become somehow ‘unreal’. The issue is not simply inequality, corruption, or political dysfunction, though all of these exist.

The deeper problem is that the economic system struggles to distinguish clearly between productive contribution and the extraction of value.

An economy organised primarily around claims eventually begins rewarding the acceleration of claims themselves. At that point, financial activity detaches from the productive foundations upon which it depends.

The informational transition changes this dynamic in ways that are still poorly understood. For the first time, it becomes technically possible to reduce the distance between real economic substance and economic representation. Not because human beings suddenly become more moral or institutions become unnecessary, but because informational systems themselves allow provenance, ownership, exchange, contribution, and economic activity to be recorded continuously rather than reconstructed retrospectively.

This changes the role of accounting fundamentally. Historically, accounting was largely an exercise in delayed reconstruction. Institutions gathered fragmented information after the fact and attempted to create coherent representations of economic activity through ledgers, reports, audits, and contractual structures.

Certain informational architectures are moving toward the direct recording of activity itself, secured directly within the shared transactional history of the system. That shift may sound subtle, but its implications are profound. When productive activity becomes more directly visible, economic coordination changes. Incentives change, verification changes, and trust begins to move from institutional assertion toward architectural integrity.

This does not create a utopia free from manipulation or power, but it does alter the relationship between reality and representation. This has ramifications far beyond finance. Artificial intelligence, for example, becomes deeply destabilising in systems built upon distorted informational incentives. In extractive informational environments, AI naturally amplifies surveillance, behavioural manipulation, speculative acceleration, concentration of control, and synthetic economic activity increasingly detached from human flourishing.

Contrast this with informational systems capable of preserving provenance, accountability, ownership, and truthful economic signals which create very different possibilities. Under such conditions, technology no longer merely accelerates financial abstraction. It can begin reducing it. The same technological forces that intensify extraction under one architecture can enhance productive coordination under another.

This is why the future cannot be understood simply through the language of technology alone. The decisive question is structural: does the informational architecture deepen the separation between financial representation and real economic activity — or reduce it?

That distinction determines whether societies move toward dependency or participation, surveillance or accountability, concentration or distributed productivity, synthetic growth or real development.

This is precisely why the infrastructure layer now matters more than many of the ideological arguments taking place above it.

From Complexity to Participation

What makes this transition so difficult to perceive clearly is that industrial-era systems became extraordinarily complex over time. As layers of financial abstraction, legal intermediation, institutional management, and global coordination accumulated, complexity became necessary to maintain the system.

This was not always the result of conspiracy or deliberate manipulation, though both can exist. It was also a structural consequence of economies built around fragmented information, delayed accounting, and accelerating claims upon underlying productive activity. As the distance between economic reality and economic representation widened, additional layers of management, regulation, modelling, leverage, bureaucracy, and institutional coordination became necessary simply to hold the system together.

In this sense, much of modern complexity is not a sign of health, but of compensating instability.

As friction accumulates across finance, compliance, settlement, legal coordination, and institutional management, productive activity itself becomes increasingly burdened. Energy that could otherwise flow toward invention, production, and creativity is redirected toward navigating the maintenance requirements of the system.

This explains why many of today’s political and economic conflicts feel irresolvable within the existing framework. Governments, central banks, regulators, corporations, and international institutions are attempting to manage systems whose informational architecture no longer aligns cleanly with the scale, speed, and interconnected nature of the emerging economy itself.

At the same time, informational technologies are now making it possible to reduce the distance between economic activity and economic visibility.

Not through centralised surveillance or behavioural control, but through architectures capable of recording ownership, exchange, provenance, contribution, and accountability more directly within economic activity itself.

The implications of this are vast. A purely extractive informational system can intensify dependency, opacity, and concentration of power even further. But informational architectures capable of aligning economic representation more closely with underlying economic substance will move in a different direction altogether. Under such conditions, economies can gradually become less synthetic and more participatory.

The effects are not isolated to finance. As informational coherence increases, many forms of institutional complexity that once appeared unavoidable may gradually begin to lose importance. Systems built around perpetual reconciliation, verification, intermediation, and retrospective reconstruction belong to a world where trustworthy coordination could only emerge through layered institutional management.

Where economic reality becomes more directly visible, coordination begins to change, and a shift in the relationship between individuals and economic systems may emerge in important ways.

Participation becomes more visible,
Ownership becomes more direct,
Accountability becomes clearer,
Contribution becomes easier to recognise, and
Economic signals themselves begin carrying more informational integrity.

The transition now underway may as a result reach far deeper than questions of geopolitics, monetary dominance, or ideological competition.

The societies that navigate this transition most successfully may not simply be those with the largest financial markets, strongest militaries, or most advanced technologies, but those capable of building informational environments where economic representation aligns more truthfully with the underlying reality. For beneath every economy lies something more fundamental than finance itself: the human capacity to create, contribute, discover, build, and participate in the continuous development of civilisation.

Ultimately, the next economic system may not be defined primarily by which nation dominates, which currency prevails, or which political ideology wins. It may be defined by which informational architectures are most capable of reconnecting human participation with real economic activity.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than acting as its impediment—forcing humanity to focus on survival instead of thriving. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, in the knowledge that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Substack Anna Iversen

[1] Simon Dixon in conversation with Alex (Sasha) Krainer on the BTC Sessions channel on YouTube, hosted by Nathan Fitzsimmons, ‘How the Iran War Ends—and Who Decides’, 7 May 2026. How the Iran War Ends—And Who Decides. Thank you Nathan, Simon and Alex for providing the inspiration for this essay.

[2] This essay is part of a series where I challenge the assumption that decay and decline are woven into the fabric of the universe itself, showing how our financial, cultural, and political systems have been built on an entropic logic of siphoning and scarcity—and how a very different design is possible. The keystone essay entitled “From Entropy to Creative Coherence—Finance, Geometry, and the Return of Living Order” frames this journey of exploration, and it can be found here From Entropy to Creative Coherence. This series of essays form both a diagnosis of our caged existence, and a vision of the coherence we could choose instead.

[3] I would like to dedicate this essay to the late Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922-2019), whose explorations of entropy and “negentropy” in political economy paved the way for much of what follows. His work continues to inspire those of us who believe that creativity, not decay, is the true measure of value.

There are certain topics that, when they arise in conversation, tend to close it down rather than open it up. Migration is one of them.

I often find myself in conversations with people who are trying to make sense of a world that feels increasingly difficult to decipher. What stands out is not a fixed position—there is no single, shared view—but rather a sense that something important is happening, but without a clear language to describe it.[1][2]

On the surface, the narrative is familiar. More prosperous nations extend support to those arriving from places where opportunity is limited or stability has broken down. It is a story rooted in care for our fellow humans, and for many, it remains a compelling one.

Yet, alongside it, another set of observations is forming. Questions around integration, belonging, what it means to become part of a place, rather than simply reside within it.

These are not easy questions to ask, nor are they easy to answer. They can be turned, very quickly, into something they are not.

What if they are pointing to something else entirely? What if the issue is not migration itself, but the condition of the societies into which migration is taking place?

Shifting the Frame

Rather than beginning with positions—whether migration is good or bad, necessary or excessive—it becomes possible to ask a different kind of question. Not what do we think about migration, but what happens when the movement of people meets a society already under strain?

Because population movement, in itself, is not unusual. It has always been part of human history. People move in response to changing conditions—towards opportunity, towards stability, towards environments where effort has the possibility of becoming something tangible.

Migration is not the originating disruption. It is more often a response to disruption elsewhere.

What is less often considered is the condition of the societies receiving that flow of migration. Every human order, whether biological, social or economic, exists along a spectrum. At one end, there is coherence: a state in which structure, signal and behaviour are aligned. At the other, there is entropy: a gradual loss of alignment, where signals become harder to read, structures less reliable, and outcomes more uncertain.

When a system is coherent, it has a quiet stability. Its norms are understood, its institutions function with a degree of consistency, and there is a shared sense—often unspoken—of what it means to participate within it.

In such an environment, integration does not need to be enforced. It happens because the civic fabric itself provides orientation. It has a clear centre of gravity.

Where coherence begins to weaken, something else emerges. Signals become mixed, expectations shift, and institutions no longer reflect a consistent set of principles. The relationship between effort and outcome becomes less clear. And with that, the system’s centre of gravity begins to destabilise.

It is into this kind of environment that much of today’s migration is taking place. This raises a different question entirely. Not why people are arriving—but what, exactly, they are arriving into.

The people arriving cannot be tearing the fabric of society if there is no fabric to tear.

When Integration Loses Its Anchor

If migration is understood as movement toward perceived stability, then integration depends on something more subtle than policy or provision.

It depends on orientation. To integrate is not simply to be present within a place. It is to find one’s position within it—to understand how to relate to its structures, its expectations, and its underlying rhythms. This process is rarely formal. It is absorbed, often unconsciously, through signals that are consistent enough to be recognised and trusted.

But what happens when those signals are no longer clear?

In a society where norms are stable and widely held, integration has a reference point. There is, even if unspoken, a sense of what it means to participate—what is expected, what is valued, and how individual contribution fits into the whole. The underlying order does not need to assert itself continuously. Its coherence does that work.

Where that coherence weakens, the reference point gradually moves. Expectations become less defined, institutions reflect competing logics. The relationship between rights and responsibilities becomes less certain. And gradually, the question of what one is integrating into becomes harder to answer.

At that point, integration itself begins to change. It is no longer a process of alignment with a stable structure, but something closer to negotiation—between differing norms, differing expectations, and differing understandings of belonging. Without a shared anchor, a society cannot orient those entering it. Nor, increasingly, can it orient those already within it.

This is where the issue is often misread. It is easy to conclude that integration has failed because individuals or groups have chosen not to integrate. But this assumes that a clear and coherent social structure exists to integrate into.

It is worth considering whether that assumption still holds. Part of the difficulty may lie in a deeper shift that has been unfolding for some time. Across much of the Western world, identity has been progressively externalised. Individuals are encouraged to locate meaning and belonging in systems, institutions, and group affiliations, rather than developing a grounded sense of self in relation to them. Responsibility becomes mediated. Participation becomes abstracted from direct responsibility. The individual, in subtle ways, is distanced from the role of active contributor.

This shift does not remain at the level of the individual. As identity is increasingly outsourced, societies begin to reflect that same condition. They become less certain of their own foundations—less able to articulate, with clarity and confidence, what they are and what they stand for. The centre of gravity that once oriented both individual and collective begins to diffuse.

In such an environment, the expectation of integration becomes difficult to sustain. It’s not because people are unwilling, but because the environment they are asked to align with is itself in flux. In reality, what presents as a challenge of migration reveals something else entirely. A question not of movement, but of underlying order.

Extending the System Without Resolving It

Alongside the cultural and social dimensions, there is another layer to this dynamic—one that is less visible, but no less significant.

Modern economic systems, particularly across the Western world, have for decades been operating under increasing strain. Growth has become progressively more difficult to sustain through productivity alone. In its place, expansion has been supported by borrowing—by the extension of credit and the continual creation of money to maintain activity.

This is not, in itself, unusual. Credit has long played a role in enabling development. But over time, the balance has shifted. What was once a tool to support productive activity has, in many cases, become a mechanism for sustaining continuity in the absence of it.

As this shift takes hold, certain pressures begin to emerge. Demand must be maintained, labour markets must remain sufficiently flexible, tax bases must be supported, and the appearance of continuity—of a system that is still functioning as expected—must be preserved, particularly in economies increasingly dependent on continual consumption and demographic replacement to sustain growth expectations.

It is within this context that population flows take on an additional role. Migration, in practical terms, can act as a stabilising force. It introduces new participants into the system—individuals who work, consume, and contribute to the economic cycle. It supports demand, it reinforces the tax base, and it allows certain structural imbalances to be absorbed, or at least deferred.

Seen in this light, migration becomes more than a humanitarian or social phenomenon. It becomes intertwined with the way the system sustains itself.

But this introduces a subtle tension. While such inflows can extend the life of an economic structure, they do not resolve the conditions that made that extension necessary in the first place. The underlying disconnect—between financial expansion and real productive capacity—remains.

In this sense, migration can function as a form of continuity without correction. The system continues. Activity persists. But the deeper misalignment is carried forward, often becoming more difficult to see precisely because the surface seemingly remains intact.

This is where the analysis begins to converge. A nation that is financially extended beyond its productive base, culturally uncertain of its own identity, and institutionally inconsistent in its signals, will struggle to maintain coherence—regardless of the movements taking place within it.

And so, once again, the focus returns not to the population flow itself, but to the society into which that movement flows.

Before Borders Disappear

It is often said that, in a more advanced world, borders should no longer be necessary. That people should be free to move, to live, and to contribute wherever they choose. It is an idea that carries an intuitive appeal—one that speaks to a sense of shared humanity beyond geography.

But like many such ideas, it depends on conditions that are rarely made explicit.

Freedom of movement, in its fullest sense, presupposes a degree of alignment. Not uniformity, but coherence—between systems, between expectations, and ultimately, between individuals. It assumes that the societies into which people move are stable enough to receive them, and that those who move are able to orient themselves within those structures.

Without that, the removal of boundaries does not create openness. It creates uncertainty. This points to a step that is often overlooked. Before borders can meaningfully recede, there must first be something for them to recede from—societies that are sufficiently coherent to sustain themselves, and individuals who are sufficiently grounded to participate within them. In other words, sovereignty must be restored, not as a political posture, but as a condition of structural integrity.

A sovereign nation, seen from this perspective, is not defined by exclusion. It is defined by clarity. It knows what it is. Its institutions reflect that knowledge, its economic activity is anchored in the real productive economy—in building, inventing, cultivating, producing—rather than sustained abstraction. Its signals—cultural, legal, economic—are also consistent enough to be recognised and engaged with.

Within such a nation, integration regains its meaning as a natural alignment between individual and society with no need for an imposed process. Those who enter it encounter something that can be understood, and participated in, and those already within it are no longer navigating ambiguity, but contributing within a shared frame of reference.

This is where the individual re-enters the picture. A society cannot be coherent if the individuals within it have outsourced their own sense of identity and responsibility. Nor can it provide a stable reference point if it is expected to define that identity on their behalf. The return of sovereign nations, therefore, is inseparable from the return of the sovereign individual—one who participates not as a passive recipient of the system, but as an active contributor to it.

This was the foundation of earlier economic thinking—what has been described as the American System of political economy. Not merely a set of policies, but an orientation towards development, production, and participation within a shared project. It assumed coherence at both the level of the system and the individual.

Without that coherence, even the most carefully designed frameworks begin to lose their footing.

The question of migration now returns, but in a different form. This time not in the form of how to accommodate migration flow, nor how to contain it. Instead, it becomes a question as to how to restore the conditions under which mobility can take place meaningfully—where individuals, wherever they come from, can integrate into a society capable of receiving them.

It then becomes clear that the path forward is neither defined by openness alone nor by restriction alone. It is defined by the restoration of coherence.

Only then does population movement cease to be a point of tension, and begin, once again, to reflect something more fundamental: the natural flow of people towards environments where structure, meaning, and possibility are aligned.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than acting as its impediment—forcing humanity to focus on survival instead of thriving. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, in the knowledge that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Substack Anna Iversen

[1]This essay is part of a series where I challenge the assumption that decay and decline are woven into the fabric of the universe itself, showing how our financial, cultural, and political systems have been built on an entropic logic of siphoning and scarcity—and how a very different design is possible. The keystone essay entitled “From Entropy to Creative Coherence—Finance, Geometry, and the Return of Living Order” frames this journey of exploration, and it can be found here From Entropy to Coherence_Anna Iversen . This series of essays form both a diagnosis of our caged existence, and a vision of the coherence we could choose instead.

[2]I would like to dedicate this essay to the late Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922-2019), whose explorations of entropy and “negentropy” in political economy paved the way for much of what follows. His work continues to inspire those of us who believe that creativity, not decay, is the true measure of value.

For decades, the global monetary system rested on a relatively simple arrangement: energy flowed through the world economy, and dollars flowed alongside it.

The “petrodollar” system was never merely about oil being priced in U.S. dollars. It depended on something much larger—a banking and settlement architecture centred around correspondent banking networks, sovereign debt markets, and institutions capable of projecting financial influence far beyond America’s borders.

Today, that architecture is beginning to change, but it is not because the dollar’s dominance is disappearing. It’s because it may be migrating.

Recent geopolitical commentary surrounding Iran, Tether, and the growing use of stablecoins in cross-border trade point toward a development that receives far less attention than it deserves: the dollar is increasingly moving outside the traditional banking system and onto digital settlement rails.[1]

That transition carries profound implications—not only for geopolitics and global trade, but for the future of finance itself.

The Dollar Beyond the Banking System

For years, discussions surrounding “de-dollarisation” have tended to assume that any weakening of the traditional petrodollar system necessarily implies a weakening of the dollar itself.

What may now be emerging is something more complex. The dollar’s role in the global economy was never based solely on oil pricing. It also depended upon the infrastructure through which dollar liquidity moved: correspondent banking networks, reserve systems, sovereign debt markets, and international settlement mechanisms largely shaped by the post-war financial order.

Stablecoins introduce a new dimension to that structure. Rather than eliminating demand for dollars, dollar-denominated stablecoins may extend dollar settlement into regions, markets, and transactions increasingly operating outside traditional banking rails. In this sense, the dollar may not be disappearing from global trade so much as migrating into a new technological environment.

That transition is already visible. Tether, issuer of the USDT stablecoin, has become one of the largest holders of short-term U.S. Treasury bills in the world. At the same time, USDT is emerging as a preferred settlement instrument across large parts of offshore trade, emerging markets, and jurisdictions operating under financial restrictions or sanctions.

This creates an unusual dynamic. The same system that appears, on the surface, to bypass elements of the traditional dollar-banking structure may simultaneously reinforce demand for U.S. sovereign debt underneath it.

In effect, digital dollar claims begin circulating globally while Treasury-backed reserves continue anchoring confidence in the instrument itself.

The result is neither the collapse of the dollar system nor the preservation of the old order in its previous form. Rather, it suggests the early stages of a monetary transition in which the dollar increasingly operates through digitally native settlement layers extending beyond conventional banking infrastructure.

From this perspective, recent geopolitical developments involving Iran are perhaps best understood not as the cause of the transition, but as one of its symptoms.

Sanctions, Stablecoins, and the New Settlement Layer

One of the clearest indications of this transition can be seen in the growing role of stablecoins within regions operating under geopolitical and financial pressure.

For decades, sanctions policy relied heavily upon control of the banking system itself. Access to dollar liquidity, correspondent banking, SWIFT networks, and reserve infrastructure provided the United States and its allies with extraordinary leverage over global trade and capital flows.

Digital settlement changes part of that equation. While stablecoins do not remove sovereign influence—indeed, many remain deeply connected to U.S. Treasury markets and compliance structures—they do alter the pathways through which transactions occur. Dollar-denominated liquidity can increasingly circulate outside the conventional banking framework while still remaining tied to the dollar system underneath.

This helps explain why stablecoins have become particularly significant in offshore commerce, commodity trading, and jurisdictions facing sanctions or restricted banking access.

Recent discussions surrounding Iran, shipping routes, and the Strait of Hormuz illustrate the point. Much of the public commentary has focused on military escalation and geopolitical rivalry. Yet beneath the headlines sits another development receiving far less attention: the growing role of digital dollar settlement within global trade networks operating under increasing financial fragmentation.

Whether in energy markets, cross-border settlement, or informal trade corridors, stablecoins increasingly function as a form of parallel monetary infrastructure—fast, liquid, globally transferable, and relatively detached from the friction of traditional banking rails.

This does not imply the disappearance of centralised power. Quite the opposite. The same stablecoins that facilitate digitally native settlement often remain centrally issued, reserve-backed, and subject to freeze controls, sanctions enforcement, and compliance intervention. In many respects, they remain deeply embedded within the existing claims-based monetary system.

What changes is not the existence of monetary power, but the form through which it is exercised.

The result is a paradoxical landscape in which dollar influence persists, Treasury demand remains reinforced, and yet settlement itself becomes increasingly distributed across digital networks operating beyond the traditional banking perimeter.

At the same time, states positioned at major trade and logistics crossroads—particularly in the Gulf—appear to be adapting rapidly to this emerging environment.

The Gulf States and the Architecture of Transition

The response of the Gulf states to these changes has been particularly revealing. Much Western commentary continues to interpret the region primarily through older geopolitical lenses: oil production, military alliances, sectarian rivalry, or alignment between East and West. Yet increasingly, the strategic behaviour of states such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia suggests preparation for something broader: a world in which energy, artificial intelligence, logistics, sovereign capital, and digital settlement become deeply interconnected layers of the same economic system. The strategic diversification underway across parts of the Gulf suggests preparation for a more digitally coordinated and multipolar economic environment.

The UAE offers perhaps the clearest example. Over recent years, it has positioned itself simultaneously as a global logistics hub, a digital asset jurisdiction, an AI investment centre, and a bridge between competing geopolitical blocs.

Infrastructure projects such as the Fujairah pipeline and port expansion reduce dependence on the Strait of Hormuz while increasing strategic flexibility across regional trade flows. At the same time, large-scale investment into AI infrastructure, semiconductor access, sovereign technology partnerships, and digital finance points toward a longer-term recognition that the next phase of economic influence may depend as much upon compute, settlement infrastructure, and data coordination as upon energy production itself.

Importantly, these developments are not occurring in isolation. The growing role of stablecoins, digital payment infrastructure, and programmable settlement increasingly intersects with sovereign wealth deployment, commodity markets, AI-driven commerce, and real-time global logistics.

In this environment, the distinction between financial infrastructure and geopolitical infrastructure begins to blur.

The Gulf states appear to understand this clearly. Rather than simply choosing sides within a declining unipolar framework, they are building optionality within an increasingly multipolar and digitally interconnected world. Relationships once interpreted exclusively through ideological or military lenses are increasingly shaped by infrastructure, trade corridors, technological integration, and financial interoperability.

This also helps explain the region’s more nuanced positioning toward Iran. Despite longstanding rivalries and security tensions, countries throughout the Gulf increasingly recognise that prolonged instability across the region threatens the very infrastructure upon which their future economic ambitions depend. Energy corridors, logistics networks, AI investment, tourism, sovereign capital flows, and digital settlement systems all require a degree of regional continuity that permanent fragmentation cannot sustain.

Viewed through this lens, the geopolitical story becomes less about isolated conflicts and more about competing attempts to shape the infrastructure of the next economic order, and that infrastructure is increasingly digital.

Beyond Digital Claims

Stablecoins undoubtedly represent an important development within the evolution of global finance. They reduce friction, they increase settlement speed, and they expand access to dollar liquidity beyond the traditional banking system. In many parts of the world, they already function as practical monetary infrastructure for trade, savings, and cross-border exchange.

Yet despite their technological novelty, stablecoins remain structurally familiar. A dollar-backed stablecoin is still, fundamentally, a claim. Its stability depends upon reserves held elsewhere. Its credibility depends upon custodians, issuers, redemption mechanisms, and legal enforceability. Its circulation may occur on digital rails, but the underlying architecture remains tied to sovereign debt, banking relationships, and institutional trust.

In this sense, stablecoins may modernise the movement of monetary claims without yet transforming the deeper relationship between finance and value creation itself.

This is an important factor worth reflecting on.

Much of modern finance evolved around the expansion, trading, and layering of claims upon underlying economic activity. Over time, financial systems increasingly became detached from the productive processes from which value originally emerged. The result was an economy in which the circulation of financial instruments often expanded more rapidly than the creation of tangible productive value itself. The result has been the gradual hollowing out of the productive economy beneath the weight of expanding financial abstraction.

Digital infrastructure does not automatically resolve this problem. In fact, without careful design, it could intensify it.

A fully programmable financial system built entirely around digitised claims may become faster, more efficient, and more globally integrated while still preserving the same extractive dynamics that have shaped much of the modern monetary order. Under such a model, surveillance, automation, and financial abstraction risk deepening simultaneously.

However, the same technological transition also opens another possibility. Once economic activity can be recorded, verified, coordinated, and exchanged directly across scalable digital networks, entirely different forms of participation begin to emerge. Productive activity, creative contribution, revenue generation, energy flows, data production, and other forms of real economic value may increasingly become capable of direct digital representation rather than indirect financial abstraction alone.

The significance of this shift is difficult to overstate. For the first time, digital infrastructure may allow economies not merely to record balances and liabilities after the fact, but increasingly to coordinate and reflect productive activity itself in near real time.

The Fork in the Road

What is now emerging is therefore far larger than a debate about cryptocurrency, sanctions, or even the future of the dollar itself. The deeper transition concerns the architecture through which economic life will increasingly be organised.

The movement toward digitally coordinated systems is already underway. Nation states, financial institutions, commodity markets, sovereign wealth structures, logistics networks, and technology platforms are adapting to it. The question is no longer whether digital financial infrastructure will exist, but what principles will shape the economic order built upon it.

Here, the world appears to be approaching a genuine fork in the road.

One path leads toward the full digitisation of the existing claims-based system. Under such a model, finance becomes faster, more programmable, more automated, and potentially more centralised than ever before. Monetary claims continue to dominate economic life, only now circulating through digitally native infrastructure capable of operating continuously, globally, and in real time. Efficiency increases, but so too may abstraction, surveillance, and concentration of power.

The other path points toward something fundamentally different. Rather than using digital infrastructure merely to accelerate financial claims, these emerging systems could increasingly support the direct coordination of productive activity, creative participation, and real economic value itself. Ownership, exchange, contribution, and revenue generation may become more transparently connected to underlying activity rather than layered through multiple levels of financial abstraction detached from production and the real economy.

In such a system, digital infrastructure ceases to function merely as a mechanism for tracking balances and liabilities. Instead, it begins to operate as a framework through which value creation itself can be recorded, coordinated, and exchanged with far greater precision and transparency.

The technologies now emerging are capable of supporting either direction.

The same programmable rails that could deepen financial extraction and surveillance could also support more participatory, transparent, and value-aligned economic structures. The infrastructure itself does not determine the outcome. Governance, incentives, legal architecture, and the underlying philosophy of the system employed remain decisive.

Stablecoins may ultimately prove to be part of this transition rather than its endpoint: a bridge between the legacy monetary order and a more digitally native economic era still struggling to define its final form.

What happens next may therefore depend less on the technology itself than upon the choices societies make about what economies are ultimately meant to serve.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than acting as its impediment—forcing humanity to focus on survival instead of thriving. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, in the knowledge that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Substack Anna Iversen

[1] Rich in conversation with Joaquin Flores and Steven Kuhn, Rich Does Politics podcast, ‘Trump Ends Operation Epic Fury: London Panics’, 5 May 2026, available on YouTube: Trump Ends Operation Epic Fury . Thank you Rich, Joaquin and Steven for inspiring me to write this essay.

Something has shifted, but it has been happening away from the noise. Bitcoin[1] is no longer being discussed primarily in terms of price, cycles, or speculation. The familiar language of volatility, adoption curves, and market sentiment is still present, but it is no longer central.

In its place, something else is emerging. Bitcoin is being described, increasingly, in terms that belong not to finance, but to infrastructure: security, networks, resilience, power. Not what it is worth, but what it does. This is significant, because language, especially in technical and institutional settings, rarely changes without reason.

In a recent ‘The Narrative’ episode on the Badlands Media platform, this was the topic of discussion.[2]

The Language Has Changed

Listen carefully to how Bitcoin is now often being framed in more formal contexts.

It is referred to as:

• a computer science tool

• a system for securing networks

• a mechanism for peer-to-peer transfer

• a tool to protect intellectual property

• a protocol grounded in proof-of-work

• a structure with implications for power projection

These descriptions are not theoretical. In recent public discussions and formal settings, Bitcoin has been described in precisely these terms: as a “computer science tool”, as a protocol grounded in proof-of-work, and as a system with direct implications for securing networks and projecting power.[3]

Even broader commentary has increasingly adopted the language of infrastructure, energy and strategic systems rather than speculative finance alone.

These are not financial terms. They are architectural terms. They do not describe an asset in the traditional sense—they describe a system. One that operates according to rules, rather than discretion.

This distinction is easy to miss if one remains focused on price alone. Once seen, it becomes difficult to ignore, as systems built on rules behave very differently from systems built on trust.

From Currency to Infrastructure

For most of its public life, Bitcoin has been interpreted through the lens of a new monetary system.

Is it peer-to-peer electronic cash?

Is it a currency?

Is it a store of value?

Is it digital gold?

Although these are valid questions to be asking, they are incomplete. They attempt to fit something new into an existing conceptual frame—one shaped by centuries of claim-based financial systems.

In those systems, what we hold are not things, but entitlements:

• a bank balance is a claim on an institution.

• a bond is a claim on an issuer.

• even many forms of “digital assets” are ultimately claims, mediated by third parties.

Infrastructure, by contrast, operates differently. It does not exclusively represent value. It enables the recording and transfer of value. It does not depend on ongoing permission. It functions according to defined rules.

When Bitcoin is described as a protocol, a network, or a system for securing and transferring information, it is no longer being treated as a currency alone. It is being recognised as infrastructure.[4]

This is subtly being acknowledged in recent legal and policy discussions. Bitcoin is increasingly treated not as an instrument to be regulated at its source, but as a system whose use must be distinguished from the behaviour of those who interact with it. In that framing, responsibility attaches to actions at the edges of the system, rather than to the protocol itself.[5]

The Quiet Emergence of Digital Property

This is where the shift becomes more consequential, because a system capable of operating as infrastructure under fixed rules begins to resemble something that has been largely absent from the digital realm:

Property. Not property in the colloquial sense, but in its legal and functional sense:

• something that can be controlled,

• something that can be transferred,

• something that does not depend on an intermediary’s continued performance,

• something that exists independently of the party who facilitated its creation.

In physical terms, this distinction is intuitive. To possess an object is to control it directly. Its transfer does not require permission from a third party.

In digital systems, this has historically not been the case. Control has been layered through platforms, custodians, and permissions.

What is now being described—often without being explicitly distinguished—is a system that restores these characteristics in digital form:

• verifiable control,

• direct transfer,

• auditability,

• continuity without reliance on an issuer or sponsor.

This is a different category of thing, not merely a new kind of asset.

The Critical Question

Once the properties being described are made explicit, the discussion shifts. The question then is not whether Bitcoin matters. It becomes a question about structure:

Which system actually retains these properties?

• Are the rules fixed and deterministic?

• Is control continuous and non-discretionary?

• Can transfer occur peer-to-peer without dependency on intermediaries?

• Is the full history of ownership preserved and verifiable on-chain?

• Is the system scalable to support economic activity worldwide?

These are technical and legal requirements. They do not admit vague answers. A system either satisfies these conditions or it does not. Notably, when described in these terms, the financial dimension recedes. The emphasis shifts instead to function: how the system operates, what it secures, and whether its rules can be relied upon. In that framing, value is not assumed—it emerges from the integrity of the system itself.[6]

It is also worth noting that not all systems commonly referred to as “Bitcoin” satisfy these conditions in full. Where protocol rules have changed, validation has become dependent on layered systems, or the continuity of transaction history is altered, the underlying properties described above may no longer hold. In that context, only systems that retain the original rule set and architecture described in the Bitcoin white paper can be assessed against these criteria in a complete sense.[7]

The Signal Beneath the Narrative

Much of the public conversation around Bitcoin remains noisy—shaped by price movements, personalities, and competing narratives.

Beneath that noise, something more stable is emerging. The language is changing, and with it, the frame of reference. Bitcoin is no longer being described solely as ‘cryptocurrency’, or even as an investment.

It is being described as a system capable of anchoring security, transfer, and verification in a way that does not rely on institutional trust. That is a very different proposition, and it carries implications far beyond markets.

What the Language Reveals

The story is not being told directly, but the language gives it away.

When a system begins to be described in terms of security, infrastructure, and power, it has already moved beyond speculation. At that point, the question is no longer whether it matters. It is whether what is being described still exists in the form people assume—and whether it is being correctly identified at all.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than acting as its impediment—forcing humanity to focus on survival instead of thriving. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, in the knowledge that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Substack Anna Iversen

[1] It is worth noting that when most people use the term “Bitcoin”, they are referring to BTC, the token traded on exchanges, widely reported in the media and generally known to the world’s population. Yet BTC does not fully reflect the system described in the white paper entitled ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’, by Satoshi Nakamoto, 31 October 2008 bitcoin.pdf . Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) has retained the original Bitcoin protocol architecture as laid out by Satoshi Nakamoto in the 2008 white paper.

[2] Burning Bright in conversation with GMoney on Badlands Media ‘The Narrative’ podcast, Episode 67, ‘American Power’, 3 May 2026. Available on Rumble The Narrative Ep. 67: American Power and YouTube The Narrative Episode 67: American Power. Thank you Burning Bright and GMoney for providing the spark inspiring me to write this essay.

[3] See, for example, 4-Star General and Admiral Samuel Paparo, the military commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, who testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 21, 2026: Senate Armed Services Committee 21 April 2026, referring to Bitcoin as a “computer science tool” grounded in cryptography, blockchain and proof-of-work architecture, describing it as a tool for power projection, with applications for cyber security, enabling peer-to-peer, zero-trust transfer of value. Top U.S. Commander Says Bitcoin “Shows Incredible Potential”. This is echoed by U.S. Space Force Major Jason P. Lowery, U.S. national defense fellow at MIT, and author of ‘Softwar : A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin’ (MIT Thesis, 2023) where he proposes that proof-of-work protocols represent a novel form of physical power projection technology: “If we could figure out a way to set up our dominance hierarchies using a globally-adoptable, non-lethal power projection technology... that would not just represent a technological breakthrough; that would double as an evolutionary breakthrough.”, (Softwar, p. 385)

[4] Please refer to Admiral Samuel Paparo at the House Services Committee 23 April 2026: “We have a node on the Bitcoin network”, “We’re doing a number of operational tests to secure and protect networks using the Bitcoin protocol.”. When asked about what role Bitcoin plays in spreading digital property rights, Paparo responded that “People use Bitcoin today to protect their own intellectual property”.

[5] See, for example, remarks by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel at the Bitcoin 2026 Conference in Las Vegas, 27-29 April 2026, indicating a focus on criminal misuse by third parties rather than the development of the underlying technology, with Patel emphasising Bitcoin’s persistence and its role within emerging economic infrastructure, ‘Bitcoin Isn’t Going Anywhere’: Trump Officials Talk Bitcoin.

[6] This framing is also reflected in broader discussions of Bitcoin as infrastructure rather than a financial asset, including its role in enabling peer-to-peer transfer, verifiable record-keeping and rule-based system operation.

[7] Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) maintains the original protocol architecture described in Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 white paper, including fixed rules, unbounded scaling and preservation of the full transaction chain.

In a recent essay[1], I suggested that a modern productive economy requires a coordination layer—an infrastructure capable of recording, verifying, and connecting economic activity as it occurs.

If such a system is required, a practical question arises: what characteristics must it possess?

The answer does not begin with technology. It begins with structure. A system capable of supporting a functioning economy must do more than merely process transactions. It must provide a reliable, shared record of ownership, transfer, and obligation—one that can be relied upon without continual interpretation or institutional mediation.

For this to be possible, certain conditions must hold.

First, the rules of the system must be fixed.

If the rules governing how transactions are validated, recorded, or reversed can be changed over time—whether by committee, consensus, or informal governance—then the system remains, in effect, subject to control: new conditions can be introduced, existing ones can be altered. The integrity of the record becomes contingent rather than absolute.

A system of record cannot operate on such a basis. Its rules must be set, transparent, and not subject to discretionary change. No participant or authority can later introduce new conditions or selectively apply them. Participants must be able to rely on the fact that a valid transaction today will remain valid tomorrow, under the same conditions.

Validation must follow those rules deterministically. The outcome of any given transaction must be derived from the rules themselves, arriving at the same result for all participants, without reliance on judgement, voting, or discretionary agreement.

Second, the system must be scalable without constraint.

A coordination layer for a modern economy cannot operate within artificial limits. It must be capable of supporting the full range of economic activity—across individuals, institutions, and machines—without requiring segmentation, off-chain reconciliation, or parallel systems to handle volume.

If activity must be divided across multiple layers or reconciled after the fact, the coherence of the system is lost.

Third, ownership must be expressed through control, not representation.

In many existing systems, what is held is not the asset itself, but a claim—an entry within an intermediary’s ledger that can be updated, restricted, or reinterpreted. A system of record requires something more direct: the ability to establish and transfer control over an asset without reliance on an external party to maintain or validate that relationship.

This is what allows ownership to become functional rather than institutional.

Fourth, the record itself must be complete and continuous.

It is not sufficient to track balances or states. A system capable of supporting economic coordination must preserve the history of transactions as an unbroken sequence—linking creation, transfer, and current ownership in a way that can be independently verified.

With this continuity, provenance is inherent. Without it, it must be reconstructed.

Finally, the system must operate independently of issuer or sponsor.

If the validity of the system depends on the continued existence or discretion of a particular entity—whether a central bank, a foundation, or a development group—then it remains, in principle, alterable. A coordination layer must be capable of persisting beyond any single participant, governed by its rules rather than ongoing intervention.

These conditions are not abstract. They define whether a system can function as a true coordination layer, or whether it remains a tool of control, mediation, or fragmentation.

When scrutinising the existing distributed ledger platforms through this lens, a great deal of what is currently described as ‘decentralised’ or ‘permissionless’ begins to look quite different.

Systems that rely on evolving protocols, informal governance, or layered architectures may provide useful functionality. But they do not meet the requirements of a fixed, coherent system of record. They remain, in various ways, subject to change, interpretation, or constraint. This is a recognition of their design, and not a criticism.

What follows from this is simple: either such a fixed system of record exists, or it does not.

The answer is that one does. The system described in the original Bitcoin design—restored to operate as intended—functions as a fixed, scalable system of record, with rules that are set and not subject to discretionary change.[2] In its restored form, it provides a continuous, timestamped ledger in which transactions are validated according to deterministic criteria, and in which ownership is expressed through control rather than third-party assignment.

In this form, it does not function as a speculative asset or as a platform among many. It functions as infrastructure. This is an important distinction.

If a coordination layer is required for the functioning of a modern economy—and if its characteristics can be defined—then what remains is no longer whether such a system might exist, but whether it has already been created.

The implications extend beyond technology.

On such a foundation, economic relationships can be expressed and maintained directly within the system. Ownership, participation, and exchange become native to the record itself, rather than dependent on external reconciliation.

New financial structures become possible within such an environment—no longer through abstraction, but through alignment of activity with value. Participation can be linked to the ongoing generation of value as it is recorded, preserving continuity between those who create and what is created.

This is not a departure from established principles. It is their extension into a domain in which value is created and exchanged continuously, and at scale.

We are now at a turning point. The question is whether the underlying structure required to support this evolution will be recognised for what it is.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than acting as its impediment—forcing humanity to focus on survival instead of thriving. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, in the knowledge that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack: Substack Anna Iversen

[1] Anna Thalena Iversen, ‘A Private Coin Is Not a Public Economy’, 30 April 2026, A Private Coin Is Not a Public Economy

[2] Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) stays true to the spirit and letter of Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper entitled ‘Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System’, 31 October 2008 bitcoin.pdf

In a recent podcast hosted on the Rich Does Politics platform[1], Rich briefly turned to crypto. He voiced something many people now feel instinctively: if currency is becoming programmable, surveilled, and conditional, then people will look for ways out.

That instinct is understandable. A private coin can feel like a lifeboat in a sea of digital control. But a lifeboat is not a civilisation.

The turn toward privacy coins reflects a deeper shift—one that can also be seen in the growing desire to move ‘off grid’. For individuals, families, even small communities, stepping outside the system can restore a sense of autonomy. It creates distance from structures that no longer feel trustworthy.

But a plot of off-grid land is not a blueprint for a modern society.

In the same way, a private coin may offer refuge, allowing a group of people to transact beyond the reach of surveillance or control. But it does not provide the foundation upon which a modern economy can operate at scale.

This is where the language often begins to obscure more than it reveals. Terms like ‘permissionless’ and ‘decentralised’ are frequently used as if they describe freedom itself. But these terms are often misunderstood.

No functioning system is truly ‘without permission’. The question is not whether rules exist—but where they reside, and whether they are fixed, lawful, and equally applied.

A system that claims to be ‘permissionless’ while relying on opaque governance, shifting protocols, or informal consensus is not removing permission. It is simply relocating it—often into less visible hands.

Likewise, ‘decentralisation’ is frequently reduced to a superficial metric: how many nodes exist, or who can run one. But this misses the point entirely. A system is not made robust by the number of observers. It is made robust by the determinism of its rules and the integrity of its record.

These are important distinctions.

Because a privacy coin, by design, prioritises concealment. It obscures transaction flows, identities, and often the underlying economic activity itself. For individuals seeking protection from intrusion, this can appear attractive. But a society cannot function on concealment alone.

Commerce requires more than the ability to transact. It requires the ability to verify ownership, trace obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce rights. It requires a shared frame of reference—something that remains visible enough to coordinate activity across millions of participants who do not know each other.

Consider something as simple as the sale of a piece of land. It is not enough for two parties to exchange value privately. The wider system must be able to recognise that ownership has changed. Title must be clear. Competing claims must be excluded. If a dispute arises, there must be a record capable of being relied upon. A system built entirely on concealment cannot provide this. It can facilitate payment, but it cannot establish property.

Or take a supply chain spanning multiple jurisdictions. Goods move, invoices are issued, financing is extended, and obligations accumulate across parties who may never meet. For this to function, each participant must be able to verify what has occurred before them—what has been delivered, what is owed, and what remains outstanding. Without a shared, verifiable record, coordination breaks down. Trust is replaced by friction, duplication, and ultimately, retreat into smaller and smaller circles of certainty.

A system built on secrecy may protect its participants, but it cannot sustain a complex economy without eventually recreating the very opacity it sought to escape.

This is the deeper limitation of ‘escape architecture’. It allows individuals to step outside the system—but it does not rebuild the system itself.

This brings us to the real distinction: The answer to surveillance currency is not secret money. It is truthful money—money that reflects reality, rather than attempting to direct it.

Not truth in the sense of exposure of the individual—but truth in the structure of the system. A system in which:

• property is verifiable,

• transactions are final and auditable,

• rules are fixed and not subject to discretionary change, and

• participants can engage without surrendering sovereignty to intermediaries.

This is not a call for surveillance. It is a call for integrity at the level of the ledger, rather than opacity at the level of the user.

Privacy and transparency are not opposites when properly understood.
They operate at different layers.

Privacy protects the person. Transparency secures the system.

What we are witnessing today is a false binary between control and concealment—between CBDCs on one side and privacy coins on the other.

Both emerge from the same failure: a loss of trust in the underlying system. But neither resolves it. One centralises control. The other fragments coordination.

What is missing is not technology, but architecture.

A functioning society requires something more demanding: a public infrastructure capable of supporting lawful, verifiable exchange at scale, without collapsing into either surveillance or secrecy. This is the difference between retreat and reconstruction.

One steps outside the system. The other builds the conditions for a new one to emerge. Privacy can help us step away. Truth is what allows us to build again.

About the Author: Anna Thalena Iversen is a former City of London financial services lawyer who is now engaged in value-aligned finance. Anna has spent more than 20 years in financial services working for financial institutions, law firms and consultancy firms. She left the profession in 2016 after the passing of her parents to cancer, embarking on a new career in health and wellbeing where she became involved in a number of start-up and scale-up business ventures using novel, unique protocols and technologies. Since leaving her first career in finance, Anna has committed herself to re-imagining how the world of financial services could evolve to become aligned with human creativity, generating abundance rather than acting as its impediment—forcing humanity to focus on survival instead of thriving. She is convinced there is far more in store for humanity than what we have thus far seen and experienced, and has devoted her time and energy to projects that support these endeavours, in the knowledge that the word is mightier than the sword. You can find Anna’s work on Substack Substack Anna Iversen

[1] Rich in conversation with Sandi Adams, Rich Does Politics podcast, ‘Agenda 2030 Exposed: The Plot to Destroy Sovereign Nations’, 28 April 2026, available on YouTube Agenda 2030 Exposed. Thank you Rich and Sandi Adams for inspiring me to write this essay.