Burning Down the House

In 1834, Catholics finally succeeded in burning down the parliament.

"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Parliament

Dickens is characteristically hilarious:

...it took until 1826 to get these sticks abolished. In 1834 it was found that there was a considerable accumulation of them; and the question then arose, what was to be done with such worn-out, worm-eaten, rotten old bits of wood? The sticks were housed in Westminster, and it would naturally occur to any intelligent person that nothing could be easier than to allow them to be carried away for firewood by the miserable people who lived in that neighborhood. However, they never had been useful, and official routine required that they should never be, and so the order went out that they were to be privately and confidentially burned. It came to pass that they were burned in a stove in the House of Lords. The stove, over-gorged with these preposterous sticks, set fire to the panelling; the panelling set fire to the House of Commons; the two houses were reduced to ashes; architects were called in to build others; and we are now in the second million of the cost thereof.

What sort of world was Victorian London that an address in Westminster indicated that you would be grateful for rotten wood?

I've recently heard bitcoin advocates claiming that tally sticks are a good analogy for bitcoins, and a reason that they can violate von Mises "Regression Theorem".

Let us hope that the analogy cannot be pushed too far!