Gundersen 2026 post records five-stage progression from riverbed stones to bank spreads

The post sequences barter failure, stone scarcity, debt notation, interest premia, and bank intermediation inside one closed economy. Each layer adds a measurable friction: stones require one-hour walks and variable yields; credit limits trust to known counterparties; interest enforces a five percent annual carry cost; the bank extracts two stones net after matching widow deposits to rancher loans.

Primary evidence is the explicit numerical example of 100 stones principal becoming 105 stones repayment and the subsequent two-stone arbitrage. Secondary patterns match Perry Mehrling's 2012 hierarchy of money paper, where par settlement, liquidity, and default risk rank instruments, and A. Mitchell Innes 1913 credit theory, which treats all money as recorded debt. The 2026 narrative omits central-bank reserves and state tax enforcement present in both sources.

Operationally the model implies that any new settlement asset must clear the same four constraints: portability, durability, scarcity, and enforceable repayment. Deployments that skip the interest or bank layer, such as pure peer-to-peer ledgers, face the identical trust and timing bottlenecks the villagers solved by creating the entrepreneur function.

Next threshold occurs when the bank balance sheet exceeds the widow's initial 100-stone deposit by a factor of three; at that point the model predicts settlement failure unless a higher-tier instrument, analogous to central-bank liabilities, is introduced.