Why You Should Care About Bitcoin
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“Hackers are the animals that can detect a storm coming or an earthquake. They just know, even though they don’t know why, and there are two big things hackers are excited about now and can’t articulate why – Bitcoin and 3D printing” - Paul Graham
This article addresses Bitcoin as a protocol, a commodity, and an ecosystem. These perspectives might be understood in terms of their mapping to William Stanley's classical theory on the functions of money[1], namely: a medium of exchange, a common measure of value (or unit of account), a standard of value (or standard of deferred payment), and a store of value; also summarized in 1919 by Jevons: Money's a matter of functions four: a Medium, a Measure, a Standard, a Store.
The first perspective (Bitcoin as a protocol) and second perspective (Bitcoin as a commodity) could be mapped to the first function (medium of exchange) and second/third functions (unit of account/standard of payment). Bitcoin may not be ideal as a store of value for a variety of reasons (relative difficulty of exchange for conventional currency, small relative market size leading to overall volatility and fundamental price manipulability), which is probably why this perspective is missing. Other currencies or assets types exist that can or have already been designed specifically to maximize their value from this, and each of the classical perspective: a classic case is the "basket of commodities" approach proposed for use as a more stable standard of measure (also providing more stable store of value features if it can be commodified as an investment).
So we can see there are more options here than just Bitcoin and its distributed single-asset blockchain siblings (a fact which the Bitcoin community often seems to overlook), and theories and tools that do answer some of the obvious challenges. But there are also other issues, issues which drive to the heart of our societies, that desperately need to be better understood by innovators and participants in our economies.
Since there are recent books[3] eloquently evidence the fact, take it for now that money conventionally is all about control, and typically occurs only in warmaking/expansionist societies that systemify inequality and tend to have lost any sense of cohesive social concern. This control is of the state - widely defined as a "monopoly of force" - for organizing the logistical support required to field larger armies and for taxation of the overall population. It's rather worrisome to realise, particularly if you have been lucky enough to experience some of the few but still extant cultures in which money is not yet dominant in the social order and how greatly its absence seems to enhance people's mutual trust, assistance and cohesion. Changing the nature of money, then, actually fundamentally threatens the notion of state. The truths of world financial surveillance and control presently include the fact that all international transfers, even within
Over the last three years at Payward, I've also been lucky enough to meet Bitcoin enthusiasts and business people, high frequency trading (HFT) experts from some of the world's largest investment banks, international political/law specialists, monetary theorists and community currency associations. All are fascinated by the era and bring different perspectives, yet perhaps none of us fully understand the breadth of concerns at play. We can, however, elucidate what Bitcoin and brethren represent: the first major crack in long held, effectively state-linked and inter-state coordinated, near-global, back-scratching monopoly of usury and control, a crack in which is already impossible to close through regulatory action. A crack which potentially offers the beginnings of far-reaching, positive changes in our challenged world.
We see the future as one of opt-in choice and interoperability (since - if pigs might jump some distance on occasion - forcing a state-run, centralized monetary system on people may actually one day be challenged successfully as a breach of human rights), and thus looking beyond any immediate and concrete benefit for our own company, Payward have graciously been supporting me in proposing various standards as IETF Internet Standards Drafts through an open membership entity, the IFEX Project[4]. Namely X-ISO4217-A3[5] (open identification of currency-like commodities to bypass ISO registration issues), IIBAN[6] (open identification of financial endpoints), IMIC[7] (open identification of financial markets).
We are also (slowly!) brainstorming on a transaction-level protocol, IFEX[8], both asset/currency/commodity neutral and settlement system neutral, to tie together disparate systems while addressing concrete issues of settlement path limitations, latency, normalized transaction status and adequate hooks out to potentially produce full-featured risk/trust/compliance systems. This protocol aims to equally describe commodities such as energy (in a full scale grid, or an embedded system) or physical assets within a modern or emerging 'distributed manufacturing' (3D-printing-style) supply chain. In short we aim to provide a coherent, logical, transparent platform upon which emerging settlement paths can compete with conventional settlement paths on a fair basis. A free market for financial services, if you will, but one which removes the distinction between goods and money. Simple in conception, rather more difficult to execute than it sounds, and fantastically threatening to some established interests. Right now we really need other groups getting in to participate.
TL/DR: This article is really about some issues with the current financial system. Bitcoin is only one proposed system, and it is not suitable for all occasions. Broader financial reform is going on, and we will see more than one solution. This change is a challenge not only to nations themselves (who will ultimately have to accept it by broadening their own fiscal systems to include alternative asset classes), but more immediately to the rather sickly back-scratching coordination that goes on between them and functions to prevent innovation, surveil and control even across borders. Decades of haughty 'free market' and 'human rights' rhetoric are reaching their logical conclusion: technologies and legal structures that function to remove the old, clunky system of control and usury through local fiscal monopoly. To let the imagination flow: we potentially stand on the threshold of global society's yet greatest rennaissance.
[1] Jevons, William Stanley. (1875) Money and the Mechanism of Exchange [2] Milnes, Alfred (1919). The economic foundations of reconstruction. Macdonald and Evans. p. 55. [3] Graeber, David Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) [4] http://ifex-project.org/ [5] http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/x-iso4217-a3 [6] http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/iiban [7] http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/imic [8] http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/ifex