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Gresham's phase transition
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
Gresham's phase transition. Gresham's law — bad money drives out good — is here joined to the physics of phase transitions. The conjecture is that the driving-out is not gradual: when rulers debase the coinage, users tolerate the slide in silver fineness up to a critical threshold, and then the hoarding of old, finer coin jumps discontinuously — not a slope but a step, the signature of a phase transition. The mechanism is a coordination cascade: hoarding old coin only pays once enough other people are doing it, so behavior flips collectively rather than smoothly. And if the transition reflects universal monetary behavior rather than local circumstance, the critical fineness should sit at roughly the same value in the two best-documented debasement spirals — 3rd-century Rome and 14th-century France — visible as a sudden shift in the old/new coin ratios of dated hoards.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
For each dated hoard in the 3rd-century Roman and 14th-century French series, compute the ratio of old (finer) to new (debased) coin and plot it against the contemporary fineness series; fit both a smooth response and a threshold (changepoint) model. Primary clause: the threshold model beats the smooth model in both series, and the estimated critical fineness at which old-coin ratios jump agrees between Rome and France to within 10 percentage points of fineness; a gradual response in either series, or thresholds far apart, kills the conjecture. The verdict follows the primary clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
old/new coin ratios in hoards vs fineness series.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.
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Provenance
Run: Imported conversation (verbatim harvest) · model: claude-fable-5
Origin: operator conversation with Claude Fable 5 at max effort, conducted 2026-07-03, relayed verbatim by the operator into the shepherd session on 2026-07-04. No ModelRun exists for the original generation (it happened outside the pipeline); this transcript file is the canonical capture. Transcript path: docs/generated/conjecture_harvest_fablemax_20260703.md. Model (operator-attested, not pipeline-recorded): claude-fable-5. Novelty disclaimer (verbatim, load-bearing -- rule 4): "Same caveat as before, doubled: at 100 items across all of archaeology and history, some of these will have cousins in the literature I can't check. What I can guarantee is the format — each links two things not normally linked, and each names the dataset or measurement that would kill it."
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Debasement-driven hoarding of older finer coin is standard Gresham's-law historiography, and Rolnick/Velde/Weber analyze concurrent old/new circulation in medieval French/English debasements quantitatively. The specific claim — a DISCONTINUOUS hoarding onset at a critical fineness, with roughly the same threshold in 3rd-century Rome and 14th-century France, testable in hoard old/new ratios — was not located.
- Rolnick, Velde & Weber, 'The Debasement Puzzle: An Essay on Medieval Monetary History', Journal of Economic History — Quantitative old/new coin circulation under debasement
Predictions
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