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What do a book, a radio broadcast, and the human voice all have in common?

Today the answer is easy: they all contain information.

But if you asked someone the same question 100 years ago, they would struggle. They would not have easily identified that these different things all share an abstract property like “information”.

The modern idea of information is a recent invention. It was not until the 1940s that new communications technologies pushed people working on the cutting edge to articulate that there was something universal underlying sound, electromagnetic waves, symbols on paper, and much more.

Although humans have been creating and using information technologies like writing, printing, and telegrams for hundreds or thousands of years, it was only in the last century that we articulated clearly what all of these things have in common, and realized that they can be understood as a category.

In the decades since, the idea of information has spread into mass culture. Today, it is intuitive to most people that speech, images, films, writing, DNA, and software are all just different kinds of information.

I believe that a similar situation exists today with respect to blockchains. A new technology has forced us to reconsider things we thought we understood. But instead of books, telephones, and voices, this time it is money, law, and government. We can sense the outline of a category that unites these seemingly disparate things.

Perhaps there is an analog to information hidden in the foundations of our civilization. An abstract property that once revealed, might help remake our understanding of the world, and help us answer plainly what problem blockchains are supposed to solve.

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Call this property hardness.

Human civilization depends in part on our ability to make the future more certain in specific ways.

Fixed, hard points across time that let us make the world more predictable.

We need these hard points because it is impossible to coordinate at scale without them. Money doesn’t work unless there is a degree of certainty it will still be valuable in the future. Trade is very risky if there isn’t confidence that parties will follow their commitments.

The bonds of social and family ties can only reach so far through space and time, and so we have found other means of creating certainty and stability in relationships stretching far across the social graph. Throughout history we have found ways to make the future more certain, creating constants that are stable enough to rely upon.

One source of hardness has been physical stuff - atoms - in the natural world around us. We found objects and systems that had some convenient properties which, we learned through experience, were quite hard to change. We picked up shells, rocks, and metals from our environment, possessed and defended them, and used them as a basis for commerce.

Over time we learned to create our own hardness, and not just borrow it from nature. We built institutions - groups of humans who work together, who behave in predictable ways over long periods of time. We learned to design these institutions to become very reliable - so that we could give an instruction to an institution, and be sure that those instructions would be followed - even years, decades, or centuries later.

Recently, we’ve invented a new way to create hardness: blockchains. Using an elegant combination of cryptography, networked software, and commoditized human incentives, we are able to create software and digital records that have a degree of permanence.

If law, money, and government are the infrastructure of our civilization, then Atoms, Institutions, and Blockchains are some of the raw materials this infrastructure is built with.