i find the part about botnets being dominant for bitcoins’ attempt at artificial currency interesting. pretty easy to draw a corollary to government parasitism from that example. the most efficient structure being the one with the least benefit.
I think I have to agree with @jetfx that a market consists of more organization and forethought and generally refers to economic organizations since the 15th century (though there is plenty of debate on that point, so fair enough). Plus, we can’t know for sure how specific items came to be in certain places. Something that we are relatively certain was made in a particular place might have come to be hundreds of miles away from their point of origin for any number of reasons that aren’t just economic in nature–people moving around, engaging in acts of war, etc. People seemed to have moved about with surprising frequency in pre-historical times.
Isn’t one major theory that homo sapians helped kill off (as well as interbreed with) the Neanderthal?
Plus, when it comes to this period in history, much of this is frankly conjecture. We can’t know for sure what happened based on our knowledge base–we have archeological evidence–cultural items, for exmaple–but how can we know what they mean if we don’t have anyway to put them into context.
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I’m unsure where I made that claim, particularly since I was refuting the conception that markets are “spontaneous”, and how state power has been integral in creating them.
For a more recent example of pre-state trade, look at how pre-Columbian tribes regularly traded goods over thousands of miles.
Pre-Columbian covers everything right up to 1492, and states had already existed in much of the Americas for thousands of years by that point. Basically, organized trading networks requires a settled society, and all settled societies have had a state of some form.
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“People certainly moved around geographically and traded items with other people, but not in any organized or permanent way that would constitute a network, and therefore a market.”
Perhaps this is a semantic confusion between us. You might be defining markets as inherently organized while I consider regular trading as a market.
Which often happened within structures of empire, or a kind of state, no? Plus, it was variable in how they operated, with the most interesting example being the Incas who it has recently been argued, had no commerce:
So there is that. Plus, much of what we know of the various peoples of Pre-Columbian Americas comes from European invaders, who, let’s face it, aren’t exactly the most reliable of informants and archaeology, which can only tell you part of the story.
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That makes your definition of a market way too broad then. There has to be an organized permanence, two tribes meeting by chance in the wilderness and exchanging goods would qualify as trade, but not a market. And markets don’t really appear until agriculture because that was when human society finally had reliable surpluses to trade with.
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That’s it right there–the creation of a market needs a surplus to operate. That, I think, is the crux of it. Plus, you need a means of extracting the surplus in order to create a market. Hence, the rise of states who operate under the notion of a monopoly on violence.
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Certainly, almost all human societies have cultural norms, but that differs from codified regulations. It may be that trade was the lever that allowed the family/tribe to interact peacefully with others, paving the way for the state.
Is there middle ground between our two definitions? People agreeing to meet and trade without state or tribal oversight. Without official regulation?
Well that’s a speculative scenario and even if I agree to it, it still doesn’t change that we have no evidence this regularly occurred. More so, what would they trade? Agriculture provided a surplus to trade with and we know proto-states appeared simultaneous to farming.
But even if we did have evidence of stateless markets at the dawn of civilization, it doesn’t support the claim that capitalist markets don’t require a state. That just flies in the face of how they work as well as the much fuller historical record of the past 500 years.
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To further derail this discussion on Stross’s take on Bitcoin, a good short essay on the unorganized nature of the market, see Leonard Read’s I, Pencil.
That story doesn’t show how markets are unorganized, because it clearly requires a lot of organization to manufacture pencils profitably. The pencil story is usually trotted out to show how efficient the market is in getting various groups to work together on a common thing.
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Yeah, I’ll buy that.
Sadly, I think it’s a bit late to rehabilitate the word now.
Yeah, tell bitcoin to die in a fire. All you have to do is convince every person who uses it to stop. Good luck. 
It’s interesting that you have such a fluid definition of markets that you’ll allow that any evidence of exchange of goods between primitive people is evidence of it, yet the appearance of a “state” requires a stricter definition. Don’t you think where recognizable “trade” occurred on any kind of scale, that authority, rules, tribal disagreements and emerging standards of behavior and enforcement could have also been present? At what point do you call this a “state” or “interference?”
This discussion reminds me of the Planet Money episode about the libertarian convention in the woods of New Hampshire. Everyone claims the event is governed by reputation and the good will and p2p understandings with no governance…except that they extensively interview a guy walking around with a gun, making sure no one “steps out of line.” At what point is this guy the state interfering in trade?
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That’s why I like Libertarians: their utopian workers’ paradise may be just as unrealistic and unworkable as the Marxists’, but they’re so unwilling to get their hands dirty that I’ll never have to worry about it.
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I agree that authority, rules, et al can be present at any point in the (pre)history of markets. My point was that markets have existed in a stateless environment.
When to call a group of humans a state is a good question. I think most people would agree it is a more recent development than a family or a tribe, or a confederation of tribes, well after continent-wide trading was significant.
How a state “interferes” with the market is perhaps a topic for another thread.
I literally have nothing to say to that, and I am saying it.
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