alt Hacker News> One of them refers to tangible things, was first codified more than 5000 years ago, and is almost entirely uncontroversial
Which definition are you referring to?
Debts, wholly intangible legal fictions, have been treated as property for thousands of years.
I was thinking of the code of Hammurabi as the settled one, and membership in a trade guild--which you had to buy from the government--as the controversial one.
I wouldn't classify debt as an uncontroversial kind of property. In medieval Europe, Christians were prohibited from owning debt by their religions (Jews weren't, so they ended up being the lenders, which is probably why the stereotypes exist today).
I'd argue that the fungibility/resale of debt is a bad idea because it takes on weird properties when too much of it accumulates in one place.