The Cryptocurrency of the Middle Ages: Relics

I am re-proposing here a post that I published on "Insurge" about one year ago. It is part of the idea of rediscovering the European Middle Ages not as an age of Barbarism and decline, but as a period of intelligent adaptation to a dearth of resources. Our ancestors of those times faced the problem of maintaining some fundamental elements of the collapsed Roman Empire. One was currency, that in Roman times, had been based on mineral commodities: gold and silver. With the mines producing them gone, the people of the Middle Ages had to reinvent money: they did so by using relics. It was a successful idea that maintained commerce alive in Europe through a difficult period. 

Cryptocurrencies are surprisingly similar to Medieval relics

Published on "Insurge" on Jan 9, 2018

By Ugo Bardi

Ancient relics that the author inherited from his grandparents. A chest full of fragments of bones of unidentified saints enclosed in small boxes, these objects probably date back to the 18th century or perhaps they are even older. Relics were supposed to be venerated, but note also the shape and size of the containers: they look like coins and, in a certain way, they were coins. This hoard of saintly relics was a small treasure that the family kept in the same way as today some people keep gold coins and jewels. Today, these objects have no commercial value just like money out of circulation.

Maybe you think that bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies are a completely new form of currency. After all, nothing like that could ever exist before the age of the Internet, right?

Well, not exactly. It is true that the modern cryptocurrencies are based on the Internet, but the basic concept of “virtual currency” predates the Internet, by at least a millennium. During the Middle Ages, people made extensive use of virtual currency in the form of holy relics.

It is a story that needs to be told from the beginning. First of all, all human societies are kept together by means of money. Without money, there cannot be commercial transactions, and without that, no complex society can exist.

For a long time, thousands of years of human history, money was based on precious metals, mainly gold and silver. Coinage was the technology that propelled the Romans to become an empire: they used precious metal money to pay their legions, to bribe their enemies, and to keep the empire together.

But the same technology that created the empire also doomed it. When the imperial mines ran out of precious metals, the Empire ran out of money. That generated a complex chain of events and the agony of the Empire lasted for a few centuries. But the origin of all the troubles was simple: it was a financial collapse. No money, no legions. No legions, no Empire.

Then, the Middle Ages came. An age of scarcity of precious metals, it was not by chance that it saw the birth of legends involving dragons hoarding gold in their lairs. People desperately needed some kind of money. But what to use if gold and silver were mostly gone?

The Romans of imperial times had already tried virtual currency — for instance paying their soldiers with pottery. Eventually, the last breed of Roman troops were simply paid with food. But these ideas didn’t work very well, as you may imagine.

The disappearance of the Western Roman Empire didn’t eliminate the need for some kind of currency. Something that could play the role of money was desperately needed and it was found: relics! Yes, exactly that. The bones of dead holy men (and women) had all the characteristics of money. They were rare, hard to find, limited in quantity, had no value of their own, and they could be traded, exchanged, and hoarded. They were also supposed to have thaumaturgic virtues but, really, they were the true currency of the Middle Ages.

As you start thinking of relics in terms of currency, then a lot of things click together in the history of the Middle Ages. For instance, the rise of the power of the papacy in Rome. How could it be that the Germans Emperors couldn’t use their mighty armies to defeat the popes who had little or no military resources? It was because the Catholic church controlled the relic-based financial system. And it is well known that money is often more powerful than armies.

The church had the power of determining whether an object claimed to be a holy relic was real or not, so it acted in some respects as a bank. It validated relics, even though it couldn’t create them (not explicitly, at least). But that was enough to play a pivotal rule in the medieval financial system. The papacy gradually lost its power grip in Europe only when new mines in Eastern Europe provided enough precious metals for coinage and that allowed kings and empires to gain the upper hands with new armies.

If relics were currency, then you can also understand the incredible craze that had overtaken people during the Middle Ages. People were digging everywhere for holy relics, an activity that was mostly virtual because nobody could prove that the bones that were found had been there before.

Sometimes the craving for bones was so strong that people who had a saintly reputation were literally cut to pieces immediately after their death by crowds craving for their bones. Having such a reputation could even be dangerous, the life of a saint could be cut short by someone who wanted to make a profit out of his bones.

The holy remains of st. Fausto kept in a church in Castellina in Chianti, in Tuscany (photo by the author)

Relics were a virtual currency, just like bitcoin. They had no more substance than the stuff dreams are made of. Nobody could really tell whether a fragment of bone claimed to be holy came from a cow or holy man. Nobody could tell whether a wood splinter was really a chunk of Christ’s cross. To be sure, the Church could declare (or deny) the authenticity of a specific relic; but it was still a declaration wholly based on faith. It was all virtual: a game of make-believe, just as today is the case for all kinds of money, including bitcoin.

But if money is a dream, don’t discount its power. Dreams (and money) are what keeps human societies together. Bitcoin — or some other form of cryptocurrency — is the new money. Maybe it will turn out to be a nightmare, but maybe it will help us keep our dreams alive.

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Notes

As far as I know, so far historians have not noted that Medieval relics can be seen as a form of currency. However, I may cite Gibbons in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (1776) when he says (Book XXVIII) that “the relics of saints were more valuable than gold and precious stone”, hinting at the commercial worth of these objects.

To give you some idea of the craze for relics that had overtaken our ancestors, let me translate for you an excerpt from the book by Edgarda Ferri “The Great Countess” (“La Grancontessa”) (2002) which tells the story of Countess Matilda of Canossa. All this takes place around the year 1000 in Europe. Note how the relics are mined out with some effort (just like bitcoins) and how the pope acts as the “bank”, validating the find. But note also how, just as in the case of bitcoins, it is not the bank (the church) that creates the new money. This particular trove of relics was created by a group of citizens (“miners”) of Mantua who had the resources and the clout needed to carry the enterprise to completion, eventually involving in the game even the Pope and the Emperor. And nobody dared to cast doubts on the improbable story.

Longinus the Roman soldier pierced with his lance the side of Christ on the cross on the Golgotha. Out of the wound, there poured blood mixed with water which, falling on his sick eyes, suddenly healed him, converting him to the Christian faith. Searching for safety, Longinus arrived in Mantua carrying with him a little box which contained a sponge and a fistful of sand soaked with lumps of the blood that came from Christ’s body. He was martyred by the Romans outside the walls of the city, in the place that today takes the name of Cappadocia. All traces of his body were lost for a long time. 800 years later, on a summer night, the apostle Andrew appeared to a Christian of Mantua and showed to him the place in the garden where Longinus had buried the precious box. The Mantuans dug there, found the relic, and they also found the bones of the martyr. The very Christian king Charlemagne charged the pope to go there to have more precise news. The Pope examined the find, released a document, he declared the relics of the holy blood to be authentic, dedicated to them an oratory near the hospice of St. Madeleine, ordered that the day of the ascension the relics were to be exposed to the veneration of the believers. In the end, he brought with him a little of the holy soil to give it to the Emperor as a gift, who devoutly deposed it in the royal chapel of Paris.

Why do Dragons Love Gold so Much?

We, humans, love gold so much that we have even imagined that giant, flying reptiles would share our love for the yellow metal. This curious vision of dragon's motives has a certain logic, although it takes some work to understand it. But it is sure that gold has been important in human history from the time, at least five thousand years ago, when our Sumerian ancestors started to collect gold and use it to prop the power and the prestige of their big men, the Lugals. 

Cassandra's Legacy has published several posts dedicated to gold. Below, a reflection by Pepi Cima, here some links to older posts. 

The Return of Gold as Currency? (2013)

The Lady doesn't Wear Gold (2013) 

The Strategy of Dragons: Hoarding your Gold (2013)

Peak Gold: How the Romans Lost Their Empire (2013)

Real gold? Are you sure? An examination of modern gold counterfeiting (2014)

Mineral Depletion: The Trouble with Gold (2014) 

Gold and the beast: a brief history the Roman conquest of Dacia (2014)

The Seneca Cliff of the Gold Mining Industry (2017)

What has Gold Ever Done for us?

by Pepi Cima

Could it be that gold mining is in modern times completely useless, very costly and terribly detrimental to the environment and nobody has seriously thought about it? Could gold acquire a status not too dissimilar to that of the rhinoceros horn?

Warren Buffet, the most revered investor of all times, says: “Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.”

Present day Gold economy is very costly for the environment and for our fossil fuel reserves. Gold bank reserves, equivalent to tens of years of civilian use of the metal, could be sold on the open market to reduce gold mining together with all its environmental and social negatives without affecting any of its industrial uses.

GOLD MINING FACTS

Global gold production totaled roughly 3300 tonnes in 2017. 10 listed gold mines are responsible for nearly 30% of global output, the remaining mines are private unlisted mines and very many Artisanal and Small Mines, ASM. ASMs, triggered by booming gold prices, have become a lucrative source of income in countries such as Thailand, Peru, and Senegal over recent years.

They involve a lot of people, one widely used estimate is that more than 100 million people globally depend either directly or indirectly on ASM for their livelihood. In Africa alone, more than 6 million people are directly employed in ASM.

Gold mining is a very big industry in absolute terms: in 2017 the market capitalization of the first 20 public gold mining companies was reported at 140 B US$, for comparison oil companies in 2018 totaled 1250 B US$.

China, the largest gold producer in the world, in 2016 accounted for around 14% of total annual production but no one region dominates. Asia as a whole produces 23% of all newly-mined gold. Central and South America produce around 17% of the total. Around 19% of production comes from Africa and 14% from the former USSR.

Increased gold prices, together with low energy costs, are encouraging the exploitation of lower and lower grade mineral in bigger and bigger mines.

GOLD AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The consequences of all this mining are land damage produced by deforestation and environmental destruction at the mine and its surroundings. Its impact is particularly damaging because it mostly occurs in pristine environments, see for example the huge mines of Las Claritas in the Caribe Indian region of Venezuela and El Sauzal in the astoundingly beautiful Tarahumara region of the state of Chihuahua in northern Mexico.

A quick look at the aerial pictures of Google Earth, ( 6°11'35.00"N, 61°26'9.60"W and 26°59'52.73"N, 107°54'3.51"W are the relative geographical coordinates) would suffice to get an idea of the physical devastation. Artisanal and small-scale mines are responsible for similar, smaller scale, havoc but in larger numbers.

Gold mining is particularly destructive also from the pollution point of view: mercury and cyanide are the two main chemicals employed in gold extraction.

For every gram of gold produced using the amalgamation process between one and two grams of mercury are released in metallic form or as vapor. UNIDO (UN Industrial Development Organization) estimates that small-scale gold mining is responsible for about a third of world mercury emissions.

Every year, 2,000 tonnes of mercury arising from human activities such as coal-fired power plants and gold mining are emitted into the atmosphere, according to FOEN, the Swiss environment office. The heavy metal is found at the site of contamination but because of its extreme volatility also at locations far from where was originally released.

Cyanide, mainly used in large industrial mines, is highly toxic. Low-grade ores are stacked into heaps and sprayed with a cyanide solution at a concentration of about one kilogram NaCN per ton of ore, a few grams of gold. The precious metal is complexed by the cyanide to form soluble derivatives, e.g. Au(CN)2. The "pregnant liquor" is separated from the solids which are then discarded to a tailing pond or spent heap, the recoverable gold having been removed. The metal is recovered from the "pregnant solution" by reduction with zinc dust or by adsorption onto activated carbon. This process can result in environmental and health problems. A number of environmental disasters have followed the overflow of tailing ponds at gold mines. Cyanide contamination of waterways resulted in numerous cases of human and aquatic species mortality.

Switzerland hosts the environmental policy center of competence for chemical products and toxic waste in Geneva, Global Environment Facility (GEF), a 183 member countries environmental cooperation voluntary organization. Coincidentally most of the gold produced in the world physically transits Swiss refineries. In 2017 2,404 metric tons of raw gold were imported into the country, worth 70 BSF, and 67 BSF were exported. Only the chemical/pharmaceutical sector is more important with 98 BSF.

GOLD MINING AND THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT

Degradation of the social environment is an associated issue too. Although the vast majority of artisanal scale mines are undertaking a vital livelihood activity, there is strong evidence that elements of organized crime are involved. A host of players have vested interests in maintaining the status quo of informality and illegality for example because of money laundering or smuggling schemes or of support to civil war. Incidents occur related to unsanitary work environment, child labor, human rights abuses. Some have little to do with the mining company but take place on or in the direct vicinity of the mining concessions.

Furthermore large industrial mines don't necessarily provide jobs for local unskilled populations, as is the case for the mines in the Tarahumara territories of northern Mexico where literally none of the locals are employed and all the mine workers are flown in and out from neighboring regions to an otherwise isolated mine.

GOLD MINING AND ENERGY

Gold mining is a very energy-intensive industry. In 2013 the EIA reported that the top 5 Gold mining companies were using 104 liters of diesel fuel per gold ounce extracted, at more than 10% of the extraction cost at diesel price untaxed rates. At European street pump rates, it would have accounted for nearly half of production costs.

Incidentally, Bitcoin perpetuates the energy wastefulness of gold, another money-form which has materialized as an environmental nightmare.

There is an ample literature on gold recycling and gold is often cited as an example of virtuosity of circular economy. Unfortunately an example of something of which we already have too much. A broader view of how the "system" works is badly needed.

GOLD ECONOMY

Most of the gold ever dug out of the earth in the whole history of humanity is still stored somewhere since it is precious and doesn't corrupt. In a chemical sense.

The best estimates currently available suggest that around 190,000 tonnes of gold have been mined throughout history, of which around two-thirds have been mined since 1950. Because of its indestructibility, almost all of it is still around in one form or another. On earth, we store a supply of gold large enough to keep us going for more than 100 years. But going where? Roughly 20% of production is used in electrical contacts and jewelry but most of it as a reserve of value of one kind or another.

Many think of gold as something without which financial markets would not work.

On the other side liquidity problems with a gold-based monetary system caused the Nixon administration to abandon the gold standard and from that point forward no currency has a natural resource tethered to it. All money is now created from thin air, 95% or so via commercial bank loans. 

If there is something all economists seem to agree on is that the gold standard is a bad idea for a modern economy.

Most people don't have a clear opinion about the opportunity of saving gold as a reserve of value but many stash gold in deposit boxes anyway. Freud interpreted this behavior in his usual way.

Distinguished economists seem to have a clearer idea about the subject for example, in this excerpt from General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, par. VI, Keynes says with a sense of humor worthy a Monty Python sketch:

Just as wars have been the only form of large-scale loan expenditure which statesmen have thought justifiable, so gold-mining is the only pretext for digging holes in the ground which has recommended itself to bankers as sound finance; and each of these activities has played its part in progress….

GOLD AND BANKING

Governments seem to know everything there is to know, in their vaults, they accumulate gold in gigantic amounts and at tremendous cost.

Central bank reserves consist of foreign currencies and precious metals, mostly gold. From the following table, one can see central bank gold distribution among countries, as a percentage of their reserves and in grams per citizen. Interestingly the two largest economies, the US and China are at the opposite sides of the spectrum. The large US reserves percentage, 75%, has to do with the belief that the US dollar doesn't need much in terms of foreign currencies reserves, its weight in the world markets makes it believable by itself. China's small percentage reflects the young age of that country as a world financial/industrial power. Modern money theory doesn't support the use of physical gold as currency reserve.

Collectively, at the end of 2015, central banks held around 31,400 tonnes of gold, approximately one-fifth of all the gold ever mined. Moreover, these holdings are highly concentrated in the advanced economies of Western Europe and North America, a legacy of the days of the gold standard. This means that central banks have immense pricing power in the gold market, crucial to the fate of gold mines all over the world. In recognition of this, major European central banks signed the Central Bank Gold Agreement (CBGA) in 1999, limiting the amount of gold that signatories can collectively sell in any one year. There have since been three further 5 years agreements, in 2004, 2009 and 2014 and the signatories have stated that they currently do not have any plans to sell significant amounts of gold. Central banks have committed to being stewards of stable markets and that they will not engage in uncoordinated large-scale gold sales. Are they aware of their environmental responsibilities too?

WHAT TO DO WITH GOLD

Can we do something useful with this giant reserves of gold? Yes, we can, we can exploit the huge labor investment done by humanity since ancient history to the advantage of the physical and social environment we live now in, without affecting the present uses of the metal.

Recognizing the little utility in hoarding present-day gold reserves most governments could agree to destine their gold to civilian use in competition with gold mining. They could do so for tens of years in a row with no practical repercussions. A side benefit would also be the one of reducing the appeal of gold for illegal money recycling and tax evasion. Our fossil fuel reserves would benefit too.

CONCLUSIONS

The commercial sale of gold reserves would represent a great victory of the environmental cause over superstition and fear of the wrong enemy, a good starting point to reexamine priorities in our economy and its relationship with a degrading environment.

The gold industry is one egregious example of how badly the demand/offer feedback loops of our exchanges work. Our right hand doesn't know what the left hand does.

The supply side of energy and labor is much more heavily scrutinized that the demand one. We investigate and invest in new energy sources far more than thinking of what to do with the energy they produce.

Do we know if we are developing so much activity and destruction for a good reason? Is this subject discussed? Are legislators taking proactive initiatives, like they do about vehicles gas milage? With cars, we move around for work and pleasure, and we should question this too, but what are we achieving with gold?

Could it be that gold mining is in modern times completely useless, very costly and terribly detrimental to the environment and nobody has seriously thought about it? Could gold acquire a status not too dissimilar to the one of the rhinoceros horn?

The gold tragedy keeps reminding me of Atahualpa's execution at the hands of the conquistadores after requiring a ransom in gold. Different actors but the end of that sad story is still not in sight.

Inca jewel, very original and beautiful art was melted to pay for Atahualpa's ransom

The decline of science: why scientists are publishing too many papers

We are seeing scientists badly failing in convincing decision makers of the urgent need of doing something against the impending disaster caused by global warming. But that's just a symptom of the decline of scientific research, desperately seeking for funds, but oppressed by bureaucracy and by a general disinterest on the part of the public; to say nothing of the rampant phenomenon of pseudoscience. In this text, I argue that one of the causes of the decline of science is the emphasis in publishing (the "publish or perish" rule). I argue that scientific papers have become a form of currency, suffering all the problems which plague the modern financial markets. Both the financial world and the scientific world have developed "emergent" properties which optimize throughput but not necessarily benefits. In short, we are publishing too much. (image above from this page)

The scientific world seems to be swamped by a true tsunami of papers of all kinds, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. A situation which looks more and more similar to that of the general cacophony of the World Wide Web, swamped by poor quality information drowning the good information (if any). This starts to be a serious problem and some have explicitly asked that scientists should publish a smaller number of papers, but of higher quality (as argued, for instance, by Timo Hannay). 

But why do we find ourselves in this situation? What has caused science to become a paper mill? Here, I argue that it is the result of the basic properties of complex systems. These systems generate emergent properties which are often similar in fields which appear very different at first sight. In particular, scientific publishing turns out to be very similar to the world's financial system, with all the associated problems of uncontrolled growth and waste of resources. Let me explain my point.

From the beginning of one's career, scientists are pressured to publish, publish, and publish. That is known as the "Publish or Perish" rule which is implemented by means of the "peer review" process in which colleagues of the authors have the authority of accepting or rejecting the submitted paper, or request modifications. It looks simple, but it is much more complex than this, with several variants on the theme of "peer review", different prestige of scientific journals, different methods of diffusion (e.g. open access or paid subscriptions) and more.

One of the problems with the system is that the peer review system can usually filter out the really bad papers, but can hardly do the same for papers which are simply mediocre. The limitations of peer review have generated the arcane (and ineffectual) methods of post-publication evaluation which sometimes go under the name of "scientometry" or "scientometrics" (not to be confused with Scientology!!).

For a non-scientist, the urge to publish and the methods of publications in science are hard to understand, but the matter will appear perfectly clear if we compare it to something we are all familiar with: ordinary, monetary currency. Let me examine the many parallels in a non-exhaustive list.

1. Currency. The way we intend monetary currency nowadays is something that has no intrinsic value: it is in the form of sheets of paper or bits in computers. But by having these bits or pieces of paper you gain prestige and luxury items, and you climb up in the social ladder. The situation is exactly the same for scientific papers. In themselves, papers may have little or no value, but the more papers a scientist has published, the higher is his/her prestige and the more he/she can climb up the scientific ladder to higher and more prestigious positions. Papers can also bring luxury items in the form of expensive research equipment (microscopes, particle accelerators, scanners, etc.).

1. Emitting currency. Today, central banks are the entities authorized to emit monetary currency, and they have the authority of stamping a validation mark on an otherwise worthless piece of paper which then becomes 'money'. In science, validation of a paper is the privilege of scientific publishers. But who gave to scientific publishers this authority? It is an interesting question, just as impossible to answer as asking who gave the banks the same kind of authority with ordinary currency.

2. Spending your currency. Ordinary currency has no value in itself, but it can be exchanged with all sorts of items in the market. Scientific papers are not so easy to redeem, but can be transformed into ordinary currency by using them as tokens necessary to obtain a salary, career advancements, honorariums, and more.

3. Inflation. Currency is well known to undergo inflation; it loses part of its value with time. Scientific papers are subjected to the same phenomenon. Older papers are less valuable than new ones and in order to maintain your "wealth", as a scientist you must fight inflation. If your papers get old and no new ones are published, then they will be worth nothing.

4. Interest on currency. Ordinary currency can be deposited in banks in order to acquire an interest in the form of more currency. For scientific papers, the same role is played by funding agencies which transform scientific papers into research grants, which scientists will use to produce more papers. It is a classic example of a reinforcing feedback. 

5. Assaying. The real value of ordinary currency can be ascertained by procedures which may involve chemical assaying of precious metals. With paper currency, there are ways to determine whether they have been printed by authorized agencies. With scientific papers, their validity is verified by "referees;" scientists who will decide whether the data and the interpretation reported are correct.

 6. Counterfeiting. Ordinary currency can be counterfeited in various ways, for instance in the form of worthless metals instead of precious ones, in the form of paper bills printed by unauthorized agencies, and in the form of legitimate - but worthless - currency emitted by the central bank of small and unknown countries. In scientific publishing, counterfeiting is performed by small "predatory" publishers which do not perform the same validity check as the established publishers and may simply publish anything in exchange for a (standard monetary) fee paid by the authors.

7. Bad money replaces the good. This is a well known phenomenon in all economies, with money being debased by reducing the content of precious metals or printing too much of it. In science, we are seeing the same phenomenon with the proliferation of scientific publishers - often shady businesses trying to make a buck from scientists eager to see their paper published but not succeeding with the traditional journals. The result is an inflation of bad papers which tend to swamp the flux of good ones.

8. Ponzi schemes and multi-level marketing.  A Ponzi scheme is a pyramidal structure in which the lower layers pay the higher ones for the privilege of being inside. A multi-level marketing scheme is similar, but you pay for the privilege of being able to sell a product. There is no reason why such schemes cannot exist also in science. Some recently started journals have taken up a pyramidal structure which looks suspiciously like a multi-layer marketing scheme. In this case, scientists are drawn into the scheme with the allure of being defined as "editors." As a result, they work for free for the publisher!



As you see, the similarities are so many and so evident that we can say that the paper publishing system in modern science is a form of currency which exists and prospers within the system which has created it. It is so entrenched and so natural that most scientists seem to show little or no interest in its origins. Yet, the peer review system seems to have been unknown a century ago (see, e.g. this note by Michael Nielsen). For instance, only one of the about 300 papers published by Albert Einsten went through peer review. The scientific publication system we know today seems to have become the rule only in the second half of the 20th century. It is impressive that this system emerged all by itself without anyone planning it. It is an "emergent phenomenon", one of the characteristics of complex systems which tend to evolve in such a way to maximize the dissipation of potential energy (see, e.g. Kaila and Annila).

We could say that the world's financial system has evolved in order to maximize the destruction of the Earth's natural resources; favoring their consumption at speeds much larger than the Earth's capability to reform them - obviously not a benefit for humankind. We could argue that the world's scientific publication system has evolved in order to maximize the production of a large number of mediocre and useless paper. Again, this is not a benefit to science. Scientists are publishing too much!

Can these systems be changed? There is much talk on the subject of reforming the world's financial system, just as there is much talk about reforming the world's scientific publication system. In both cases, however, reform seems to be very difficult, if not impossible. In science, the well intentioned effort to open up to the public the results of scientific research by the "Open Access" system seems to have backfired, generating a wave of "predatory publishers" favoring an even faster dissipation of scientific potentials by greatly increasing the number of mediocre or bad papers. The financial system seems to be even more impervious to all kind of changes.

In the end, it seems that most systems of this kind can be reformed only by rebuilding them after they have crashed. That's not surprising: after all, you should know that if you fight thermodynamics, thermodynamics always wins.