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Bitcoin is Venice: Difference between revisions
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This view of bitcoin as a [[non-fungible token]] for capital is, I think, fundamental to getting a purchase on where bitcoin maximalists are coming from. | This view of bitcoin as a [[non-fungible token]] for capital is, I think, fundamental to getting a purchase on where bitcoin maximalists are coming from. | ||
Bitcoin is capital, therefore holds its value, | Bitcoin is ''capital'', then, not currency, and therefore holds its value wherever it is. It does not depend for its viability or validity upon the implied violence of central banks, banks and intermediators. | ||
This is where | This is where I part company with Farrington, though it may be one of those “agree to disagree” scenarios. | ||
Perhaps this is the [[nocoiner]]’s fundamental misapprehension: have we been slating Bitcoin for lacking qualities it isn’t even ''meant'' to have? If it is not a currency, then criticisms that it isn’t very good at the sort of things currencies are meant to be good at fail, defeated by the simple objection, ''so what?'' | Perhaps this is the [[nocoiner]]’s fundamental misapprehension: have we been slating Bitcoin for lacking qualities it isn’t even ''meant'' to have? If it is not a currency, then criticisms that it isn’t very good at the sort of things currencies are meant to be good at fail, defeated by the simple objection, ''so what?'' | ||
Farrington correctly sees a “fiat currency” as necessarily an instrument of [[indebtedness]]: a person who holds it has a promise for value from someone else. He doesn’t say it but he may say regard indebtedness as a form of compulsory trust and therefore intrinsically undesirable. | Farrington correctly sees a “fiat currency” as necessarily an instrument of [[indebtedness]]: a person who holds it has a promise for value from someone else. He doesn’t say it but he may say regard [[indebtedness]] as, in itself, a form of compulsory trust — trust on pain of violence — and therefore intrinsically undesirable. | ||
Graeber might agree about currency, but not indebtedness. To the contrary mutual, perpetual, rolling ''non-monetary'' indebtedness is exactly the glue that binds a community together. It is the thing that creates ''voluntary'' trust. That kind of trust — credit — is fundamental to how any functioning civilisation works. | |||
Currency on this view is tokenised trust. That is a glass-half-full way of describing indebtedness. | |||
It is, on this view, not an asset, but an ''anti-asset'': something that is no good in and of itself, but which you can only generate value with ''when you give it away''. | It is, on this view, not an asset, but an ''anti-asset'': something that is no good in and of itself, but which you can only generate value with ''when you give it away''. | ||