How are you buying an option or whatever? Like, what's the room where that happens? What's the place? Who's the person?

That all happened on the exchange locations in Amsterdam.

So if you've ever been to Amsterdam, you probably arrived in the city by train.

So if you would nowadays exit Central Station, the very first thing you see in Amsterdam is a bridge, which is called New Bridge, and that is actually the location where in the early 17th century it was the exchange location of Amsterdam.

So there on the bridge, open air, is where merchants and other commercial people would come together on a daily basis to hear the latest news, gossip a little bit, and do transactions.

So it was very strongly trust-based.

The persons who were entering into a forward transaction with each other, they had to trust each other because there was no down payment, there was no formal registration somewhere with a, I don't know, an exchange organization or a bank or a you-name-it.

Like as someone who studied the stock market from its inception, do you see it as necessary or almost like historically contingent? Like is it something that had to be as a force, or could we have had this world without it?