Szabo's history of collectible monies shows their value collapses once a new technology makes their scarcity cheap to forge

In "Shelling Out — The Origins of Money," Nick Szabo catalogs historical collectible monies whose value depended on the cost of producing them, and traces what happens once that cost falls. Venetian glass beads are captioned in his account "When costliness becomes forgeable" — once glassmaking technology made beads cheap to mass-produce, their monetary role collapsed. Wampum tells the same story with a number attached: its value was "inflated one hundred fold by Western harvesting and manufacturing techniques" before wampum, like gold and silver jewelry before it, was demonetized.

The mechanism is general, not specific to shells or glass: a collectible or metal functions as money only as long as its scarcity is expensive to replicate. Once a production technology cheapens that replication, the costliness premium — and with it the monetary role — collapses. Szabo uses this history to motivate bit gold's opposite design goal: see claim-szabo-bit-gold-grounds-value-in-unforgeable-cost-of-production.

This is the same collapse shape later modeled, independently and in a different domain, for asteroid-mined platinum-group metals in claim-asteroid-pgm-price-holds-then-collapses — a precious metal's price falling toward a new, much lower cost of production once a cheaper extraction method displaces the old one. See observation-unforgeable-costliness-bridges-asteroid-pgm-and-bit-gold for the connecting synthesis. Separately, the vault also holds a real-world test of whether historical production-cost collapses actually follow this "hold, then collapse" shape or instead fall continuously — see claim-cheaper-extraction-disruptions-fall-monotonically-not-hold-then-collapse, which finds the latter for aluminium and AI inference. Szabo's own wampum and glass-bead cases describe the fact of collapse, not its trajectory, so the two claims are complementary rather than in tension.