Summer of Protocols

So… TIL, the printing press actually served Catholic Church corruption before it served the Protestant reformation. Apparently in the 67 years between the Gutenberg press printing the Bible (1450s) and Martin Luther’s 95 theses (1517) triggering the pamphlet wars, a significant use of the printing press was mass producing standardized indulgence certificates, with fill-in-the-blank details. It allowed the church to efficiently tokenize forgiveness for sins. One of the few surviving copies of printed indulgences is at Princeton.

The indulgence is basically a subprime-soul mortgage/memecoin. The theological galaxy brain theory is that Jesus and other saints with their good works created a “treasury of merits” against which the sins of lesser souls could be offset. For a price.


https://library.princeton.edu/about/library-news/2019/inside-milberg-gallery-indulgences

Climate credits are too close to real to be analogized to indulgences but you could imagine tokenizing Native American land acknowledgments.  Stuff close to that does happen PNW. This would be the farcical implementation of my “bloodcoin” idea from 2018. Which was intended mostly as a provocation rather than a serious proposal. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ow43pFm9GLQ