Introduction

Over the last several years I have worked on this body of articles in an attempt to create a cohesive Theory of Bitcoin. Here is my abstract:

The Internet is a sovereign territory that exist outside and above the control of all state governments. Due to the international nature, and economic dependence that all states have on the internet; the internet has now become a spectre that is beyond any of their control. This combine with the imperious nature of bitcoin forms a new kind of money and power that can render the state useless. This power can supplant state institutions, and allow for all people of the world to economically and politically unite in 21st century, but only if we struggle to make it so. Using the internet and bitcoin we can create an international digital sydicate that will allow for the free economic and information exchange of all people around the globe as a single political body.

I have divided my writings into three (I, II, III) distinct sections. Part one explores the legal history of money; part two covers the economic functions of bitcoin; and part three covers the radical political, social, and economic ramifications of bitcoin.

Part One

This rather long section is of necessity to understand what exactly money is and how it functions from a legal and historical standpoint. There is a long and complicated legal and economic history of money and we must have some understanding of it in order to see how money is a distinct and separate object from value. We must understand that legal power over a long history has literally striped the intrinsic value from money, and replaced it with a false idol of fiat money. This is a form of theft that is only possible through legal means. This has allowed for all States to steal from their citizenry with great sophistication and guile through their alliance with the bankers. It has been over the course of several generations that money has ever-so-slowly lost its power as an intrinsic vehicle for wealth, and been enshrined in the legalist framework of state-capitalism. It is through the State’s monopolization of the mode of exchange–money itself–which has allowed for the State to divorced fiat money from intrinsic value. This in turn has created the great number of economic issues we face today.

To divorce intrinsic value from money itself is an incredible feat for the state; however, it is not without its problems. The state can only monopolize money through force and ideology, not majesty or science. States will always be unsuccessful with the monopolization of money, and history can testify to that.

This is where understanding the mechanics of bitcoin becomes extremely important. Because of bitcoin’s known, fixed monetary supply, infinite divisibility, and imperious security through cryptography; bitcoin becomes something much more than just money, wealth, or value. Bitcoin creates a totally independent, stateless system of economic and information exchange that is pseudonymous over the internet. This is extraordinarily revolutionary, as it creates the basis for a new economic system built on top of cryptography outside of the mortality and corruption of law. This will usher in an epochal change that happens only a few times each millennial!

Once we understand the mechanics of bitcoin we can see that it is truly digital gold. And just like gold, it will be impossible to eradicate from the world. However, there is one feature that dramatically separates bitcoin from that of other commodity monies: its non-physical nature.

The power of the non-physical nature of bitcoin eludes to what I have taken to calling The Digital Sovereign. This is the real power of the internet to affect and change society from without, as a sovereign force. It is with bitcoin that the internet has an economic mode for itself. This economic mode is what will start to radicalize the internet on a whole. When the internet sees the true power that lies within it to change the world, how it can do it with its own money, there will be nothing to stop it.

Part Two

Section two mainly covers the economic functions of bitcoin. First we will explain the mathematical and cryptographic features that make bitcoin provably better money than any money that exist today. We will go into detailed analysis of the features of good moneys, and how bitcoin exudes and embodies all of those ideals in the most scientific manner. This will allow for us to go into a detailed analysis of current system of fiat monetary exchange as a commodity itself. This commodity is the network that is money. Through treating fiat money in this way, we can directly contrast and analysis it against bitcoin.

It is from this lens that we can drive a wedge between the value of money itself as a network, from the value of the legal force embedded within that money. This is explained in the first section in regards to bonitas intresica, and valors imporium. Once we can see all money as being only a network of exchange, than we can see how that network operates both inside and outside of the hands of governments, and their limited economic control.

When we take various economic theories such as Grehmsham’s Law, Course’s Transaction Theory, and the works of Keynes, Gesell, Hayak, and combine them with the praxis of crypto-anarchism, we are given a radical new understanding of bitcoin. It is once we understand how bitcoin functions economically, and why it is superior to other forms of money, that bitcoin shows itself to be the technological tour-de-force that it is.

Finally, taking Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction, we can see laid out before us the radical and revolutionary technological power that bitcoin will use to change the world. This is not an opinion, but a fact of economic function. This is given to us by Hayak, who offers us a glimpse into the future with liberated money. In his magnum opus “The Denationalization of Money,” he describes how a world of competitive, non-state currencies would work, and how it can answer the economic and political crises of today.

With the application of understanding bitcoin as a commodity money, we can apply classic banking practices within bitcoin to create a new form of money through transparent fractional banking. This will be the model that will allow bitcoin to become the rails of the financial system, and for bitcoin to build its own debt-based units. This will spell the doom of the contemporary banking and monetary system.

This new form of money is the bridge to the future, and is the core nexus of the ideological development that will be the next epoch of humanity: The Digital Sovereign. It will be the answer to how humans are going to solve all of the monumental and heart-wrenching issues that plague our world today. With the historical and economic ramifications of bitcoin explained from the first two sections, we can now go into the third and most important of the three sections: The political power of bitcoin.

Part Three

Bitcoin is not about money at all… it is about our core values of human-beings and what it means to be free people. Freedom is a condition and identity that is acknowledge through condition alone, and today we are not free, but we can be. Through organizing around the use of bitcoin for ALL of our economic exchange and holding of bitcoin as a form of economic resistance, we can exert true political pressure on a corrupt system through economic means. If just 1% of the world’s population would be militant enough to use bitcoin in this way, as a revolutionary tool to help people organize against the machine, it would be but a week before the system started to seize, and less than a month before it were in cataclysmic turmoil.

This is the power of revolutionary syndicalism on a transglobal scale; we can use the internet and bitcoin to organize ourselves and achieve revolutionary ends. We can organize politically, independent of one another, while having economic solitary together against our respective governments.  Using bitcoin as an economic weapon against the corrupt state-capitalist machine to which we all belong, we can realistically create dramatic change in our world. Pulling from the historic traditions of anarchism, we can ultimately organize around the theory of the general strike. This will cause for a complete collapse of the State-capitalism as we know it so we may transition to a new way forward.

This is only possible if we proactively start building towards a better tomorrow now! We must do this through the formation of a revolutionary political union, and advocate from this seemingly radical stance. Through the use of the internet as an ideological tool, we will create a new class consciousness. This class consciousness will fully contain and represent the international proletariate through the ability of all people everywhere to use, interact and organize with the internet itself; and to use bitcoin as the economic vehicle to bring about change.

Next Section: Sovereign Violence and Legitimacy of Law

Why I’m bullish on Alt-coins

Did you know that bitcoin is not the only digital currency? There is also litecoin (LTC), Namecoin (NMC), and Peercoin (PPC) among dozens of others.  Some believe that these coins do little outside of what bitcoin has already done, so why should they have any value at all?

For the same reason that bitcoin has value:

These are all sound forms of money

Free markets and currency competition 

Despite the fact that the altcoins are much less known and much less disseminate than bitcoin they still have all of the same fundamental features that bitcoin has that makes it good money, and good storage of value. More important than any of the additional features that altcoins offer is they compete with bitcoin on a free market. This is what Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek spoke of in his final treatise on money, “The Denationalization of Money.” He believe that in a world of free money currencies would be forced to compete with one another (similar to on the forex market) and the superior currencies would win out over less efficient currencies through free market mechanisms. What I took away from this is that there must be currency competition to compare and contrast currencies against one another, and to help mitigate against any disasters one currency could have, and also ensure that there is not a monopoly on digital currencies.

Bitcoin has the first to market advantage, which means many, many more people accept bitcoin than litecoin today, and more accept litecoin that peercoin. This is significant advantage bitcoin has over altcoins is because it is hard to convince people to use an alternative currency–particularly one that people cannot hold. But what about getting people using bitcoin to use altcoins? That seems like a much easier jump to make than from not using digital currencies to using altcoins.

So if bitcoin becomes successful (which it already is) there is little reason why altcoins would not also become successful. The biggest barrier today is simply getting more people to accept altcoins–and the more people that accept bitcoin, the more potential people there are that may accept altcoins. And because they also have fixed supplies, the more people that use altcoins, the more likely the price will increase. That seems to be what happened with the most recent spike in LTC volume when the price went over $9. This seems to have been caused by the influx of Chinese digital currency users that also caused for the recent rally on bitcoin.

Pushing Altcoins

With Altcoins being just as efficient as bitcoin in terms of their moneyness, there is a huge opportunity for someone to create a digital currency bank using one of these altcoins. The biggest advantage that one would have in do this would be market making, after purchasing a large supply of the available coins. Through offering support, and more importantly, having a sales team that shows businesses the direct advantages from using digital currencies, a company like this could do very well. The biggest question is will someone see this in any of the altcoins? Time will tell us.

Catastrophe Insurance 

Another reason that altcoins are could be successful is the possibility that the bitcoin network could somehow become compromised or enter into a full panic of confidence. If that were to happen, altcoins–being the quickest way to convert bitcoin to another currency, outside of selling directly for cash–would be the quickest alternative to flee to. One could also think of litecoin, and other altcoins as being a tool to diversify one’s digital currency holdings as well, to hedge against any sort of catastrophic disaster to bitcoin. The future is impossible to tell, and the more digital currencies there are in the world, the less likely it is that digital currencies on a whole will fail or be compromised.

In conclusion, I believe that altcoins will be successful because the technology is just as good as bitcoin, with a few significant improvements over bitcoin in some ways. Altcoins help strengthen the total digital currency network through offering competition between currencies, which helps create efficient, powerful currencies according to consumer preference.

Bitcoin, Alt-coins, and Free Money Theory

Gavin with some BitBills

Gavin Andresen wrote this piece on his blog about alt-coins and several of the issues they create. As much as his concerns are valid, there is a different perspective where digital currencies of all kinds can compete in an open market to capture the most customers bases off of the greatest advantages they offer. This was presented in “The Denationalization of Money,”  the magnum opus of Fredrick Von Hayek, Nobel laureate in economics and close friend of John Maynard Keynes. Hayek’s primary argument in this work was that through allowing the private issuance of currencies, banks would be forced to compete on the open market to have the most competitive currency. Below I am going to explore some of the concerns that alt-coins present and how they can be understood from the perspective that Hayek offers in the Denationalization of Money.

Free money theory

Bitcoin has a significant advantage over other digital currencies with that it is the first digital currency, and no other digital currency is significantly different from bitcoin. With that being said, alt-coins not only help legitimize bitcoin as THE currency of the internet, but also help create a whole new digital currency economy, in which alt-coins can specialize, or succumb to market forces.

Gavin makes an excellent point that alt-coins don’t do too great of a job differentiating themselves:

“So what?  The free market at work, right? If they’re good they’ll survive, if not, then they’ll fail. If they’re better than Bitcoin somehow then maybe someday one or more of them will usurp Bitcoin as the biggest and best!”

He then goes on one to voice his concern that:

“Creating gazillions of alt-coins seems to me to just be a way of getting back to an “inflate on demand” world. Not enough genuine Bitcoin money for you? No problem! Create a new alt-coin to produce more!

As much as this concern is valid, I think we can see that his first point seems to be the direction we are heading. The value storage of the number of alt-coins in circulation vs. their price simply does not compare to bitcoin. There are more than 20 million litecoins today, with the total supply capping out at 84 million. LTC price in recent months has gone from  $2.75 per LTC, to under $2. You can see that despite there being a total cap on the supply of LTC at 84 million, it is still is valued 30 to 40 times less than bitcoin, despite being a pretty good copy of it. This is because bitcoin has the first-mover advantage behind it, and thus has had more time to establish a market for itself.

If bitcoin is doing such a good job, than why are alt-coins valued at all?

Each one has its own reason, so I’ll just use litecoin as an example for now. Litecoin has value most because of speculation, but it is also a good bitcoin catastrophe insurance, it has second-mover advantage, and it is the most liquid way to get out of bitcoin, but not back into another fiat currency.

Insurance

Let’s face it–bitcoin does not have a lot of friends, and it has a bad reputation

Personally I’m bullish enough on digital currencies to believe there will be a $10,000 bitcoin one day, and so are others like Max Keiser. Gavin hypothesized this may be part of the reason why alt-coins are around.

Maybe altcoins will be an important safety valve in some future crypto-currency-dominated world. Maybe if there is lots of economic growth and some technical reason prevents the velocity of money from accelerating to match the increased demand for transactions people will use alt-coins to fill the gap.

And I think what Gavin is saying about the velocity of money is true. I believe this is the behavior that we are seeing with litecoin being used as a shelter during turbulent bitcoin times.

Even if alt-coins were to become a threat to bitcoin, it would most likely be for a good reason. Perhaps mining centralization could lead to some issues down the line, or pump and dumps too frequent–who knows? Other than a faster block-time, and 4x the supply of coins, I don’t see any difference of advantage of using litecoin as a storage of wealth, or a mode of exchange.

I do however see how it is useful as a short-term hold of wealth for shelter during turbulent bitcoin market periods. There are members of the /r/bitcoinmarkets is an example of a community that utilizes this technique. There is also ample evidence that this is also done on the Russian exchange btc-e.com as well in order to do ‘pump n’ dumps–where one inflates the price through rapid buying, and then dumps to collapse the price and buy back at a lower value.

Litecoin may also become valuable as a mode of exchange. We can see that the recently closed online drug market place, Atlantis, accepted litecoin, in addition to bitcoin. Litecoin could very well bootstrap its way to become more valuable, similar to how bitcoin did with The Silk Road.

Other Altcoins

Namecoin, Peercoin, and Primecoin all have there own unique features that one day may make them very valuable, but today that is not the case. As Gavin pointed out, these developers could focus more on their alt-coins unique features (which I’ll discuss in a separate post), but to simply have it be another bitcoin copy is little more than inflationary flack. There are always 51% attacks, and people simply not accepting alt-coins to solve that. I believe from seeing where we are at in this very new economic paradigm we are see exactly what we need to see: A few unique and well-differentiated alt-coins seeing limited success, along with the death of dozens of other more useless coins.

When we look at bitcoin through the eyes of Hayek, none of this is surprising. Digital currencies represent Free Money, or money that has no monetary authority other than itself. This means that the value of digital currencies can only come from their intrinsic value which is established through the market. This is one of the reasons that bitcoin’s first-mover advantage is so important–it was the first digital currency to gain a wider following and create market legitimacy, thus it has the largest market cap of all digital currencies in circulation.

This also helps explain why alt-coins do have some limited success. Because they still have the same money function that bitcoin has, which is more efficient that fiat currency, that can be used to give them value. Yet, because there are fewer people accepting alt-coins today, nor do they differentiate from bitcoin greatly, many of them are still highly-speculative prospects that have gained little traction because of this lack of differentiation.

Conclusion

Hayek’s theory on free money found in the denationalization of money helps explain why digital currencies have value. This theory also helps explain the complex market relationships that allows for some currencies to keep and hold value, while limiting the success of others. It will remain to be seen how successful alt-coins will become, but it is most likely that because of bitcoin’s first-mover advantage that it will always remain the primary digital currency. With that being said, alt-coins will always be needed in the market for bitcoin catastrophic insurance, and to act as an alternative mode of exchange.