Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today, we are digging
into a source document called the Alan Curtis
Protocol, and it offers a completely new way
of looking at American history from 1946 right
up to today. It's a dense read, for sure. But
our mission here is really to unpack its core
argument. The protocol says that our old categories
for society, things like race or even how we
define capital, are, you know, they're outdated.
So what should we use instead? It suggests we
should analyze two basic units. The first is
CHITs, which are just units of social capital.
Earn trust. Okay, and the second? Subsidies.
And that's your level of access to official state
infrastructure. Think banks, city services, that
kind of thing. And the takeaway from all this
is, well, it's genuinely shocking. It connects
the Great Migration directly to the gig economy.
Exactly. The protocol states that the whole era
of the white subsidy, you know, that built -in
expectation of structural security, is over it's
ended and we've entered a new age the age of
the universal chit holder which leads to its
most dramatic conclusion we are all black now
what does that mean precisely it means that the
economic precarity the reliance on informal labor
Being locked out of the main banking system.
And additions historically reserved for the black
underclass. Right. The protocol argues those
conditions have now been universalized to almost
everyone through modern finance. That is a radical
reframing. So to understand that, the source
takes us back to the architect of this original
system, a man named Nimrod Booker Allen. Yeah,
in the early 20th century. What Nimrod Allen
did in Columbus, starting around 1917 with the
Urban League, is just fascinating. And the protocol
reinterprets that work. It does. It sees the
Urban League as a kind of clearinghouse for social
chits. It was essentially the only central ledger
of trust available. So for a migrant arriving
with nothing. A letter of recommendation from
Allen was like their Genesis block. It was the
first verifiable proof of their character, which
they could then trade for a job or a place to
live. He was literally building a system of trust
to bypass systemic exclusion. Precisely. And
he didn't just stop with paper. Look at the big
Walnut Country Club he founded in 1936. Which
wasn't just about leisure. Not at all. The source
calls it volumetric reclamation. It was a physical
space that proved their internal chit ledger
had real purchasing power, completely separate
from the white subsidy system that shut them
out. So from the social ledger, we move to the
financial engine of this world, the underground
numbers racket or policy wheel. Wait, are you
saying the protocol treats a gambling ring like
a sophisticated financial system? It does. Absolutely.
It frames the policy wheel as an early decentralized
finance or DeFi protocol, one built entirely
on that trust density. A DeFi protocol. Yeah.
But here's the twist. The algorithm that determined
the winning numbers. How did that work? It was
ironically pegged to the daily totals from the
New York Stock Exchange. No way. A parasitic
link to Wall Street? It was the only way for
a black resident to get a lump sum liquidity
event. You know, a $600 jackpot that no bank
would ever lend them. And the runner, the person
collecting the bets, was the essential trust
node holding it all together. And the proof that
this system actually worked. The 1947 blizzard.
It was the perfect stress test. The official
systems failed. Completely. The white subsidy,
city, plows, banks, it all froze. But the black
shit network, relying on runners, on pedestrian
-scale neighborhoods, it showed much higher resilience.
Commerce kept going on informal credit. High
trust beat subsidized infrastructure. So let's
connect that to now, the period from, say, 2010
to today. How does that shit -based economy relate
to our current lives? Well, the protocol is blunt.
The gig economy is just a digital replication
of that day labor structure. But for everyone
now. For everyone. The worker across all demographics
is basically a subcontractor paid in digital
chits app credits. Wages with no pension, no
security. That old promise of the subsidy has
evaporated. Which brings us to the final piece.
The 2025 Genius Act. It's all about regulating
stable coins, our modern digital chits. This
part is critical. The act formalizes the whole
informal economy. It gives stability to the universal
chit holder, which sounds good. But there's a
catch. A huge catch. It prohibits the issuers,
the big banks, the tech giants, from paying any
interest to the people actually holding the stable
coins. So who gets the interest on all that money?
The issuers capture it. It's called the float.
The interest earned on the massive reserves backing
the stable coins. The worker gets stability,
but the centralized issuer gets all the profit.
So what's the ultimate conclusion here? What
does this all mean? The protocol concludes the
struggle was never really about race or even
just money. It was always and still is about
access to control. Control over the ledger. So
the history of the segregated economy was just
a rehearsal for the global gig economy we're
all in now. And Nimrod Allen's lesson seems clearer
than ever. The chit holder outnumbers the subsidy
distributor. So for all this new unified class
of chit holders, how can we organize our collective
trust density to reclaim the volume that's being
captured by the issuers? That's something to
carry with you until the next deep dive.