Chain Street (Part 3) - Open vs Closed

Part 3 of the five-part Chain Street series zooms out to the deeper pattern at work. From the Silk Road routing around Roman roads, to the 1886 standardisation of railway gauges, to McLean’s shipping container collapsing global freight costs by 90%, to IBM publishing PC specs and igniting Wintel, to Linux quietly winning servers, mobile, and embedded systems, to the open internet now competing only with sleep for human attention, open systems beat closed systems. Open wins because permissionless innovation and network effects compound exponentially while closed systems progress linearly, because resilience beats efficiency over long time horizons, and because humans and organisations ultimately prefer sovereignty over convenience. Money and finance is the most important closed system left, layered with rent-seeking intermediaries that require permission for almost anything we do with our own capital. The incumbent response, corpochains and consortium chains, are the modern CompuServe, walled gardens that miss the actual innovation of trustless coordination between parties with no existing trust relationship. The fight is David vs Goliath, but the direction is inevitable. The question is not whether open protocols will dominate finance, but when and through which specific protocols, and the odds of success are deeply underpriced at current prices.