THE LONG VIEW

In 1866, London’s telegraph wires hummed with “bill certificates” that let cotton shipped in Liverpool collateralize loans issued in Bombay before the ship rounded the Cape—an 1860s RWA revolution that also claimed to defeat the impossible trinity of credit. When Overend, Gurney & Co. collapsed that May, panicked merchants discovered the telegraph had not eliminated settlement risk; it had only accelerated the moment of recognition. Anna Liu’s programmable collateral keynote in Hong Kong, 159 years later, used different vocabulary—smart contracts, atomic settlement, embedded compliance—but the gasps, applause, and regulator scribbles in the audience were the same sound, looped. The true breakthrough is not that blockchain solves the trinity; it is that humanity can now relive its financial history in fast-forward, watching the same triangle reassemble itself every decade instead of every century—like a vinyl record spinning at 78 rpm instead of 33 ⅓, the melody unchanged, only the pitch higher.