There were already people living in cities and doing business over long distances with people they'd never meet again, but those people were in the minority. Ev

There were already people living in cities and doing business over long distances with people they'd never meet again, but those people were in the minority. Even today, only about 56% of people, globally, live in cities [0], and back then, city dwellers were in the minority. In 1928 many American households didn't have telephone or telegraph services. My great-grandparents, who lived on the outskirts of a major Midwestern city, had a party line during WWII, meaning they had to share the phone line with people in geographic proximity. It would have been even rarer elsewhere around the world at the time. You paid your landlord or mortgage holder face-to-face, often in cash. Same with your grocer, doctor, lawyer, handyman, and employees. Humans were far less likely to act irrationally in social contexts when they had to face that same social context (groups of people in situations) over and over again. They might have thought irrationally, and weren't perfectly rational actors, but we're a social species, and enforced normal behavior through social situations. DAOs are another attempt to abstract all of that away, and they suck at it, because we're not wired to care about what some abstract concept of decency means. [0] https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/urbandevelopment/overview https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/urbandevelopment/overview