Bitcoin is Venice

This article started as a review of Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers’ remarkable Bitcoin is Venice, but I got carried away and began ruminating about the philosophy of not just cryptocurrency but money, capital and social organisations generally.

Bitcoin is Venice raises important, deep questions about the financial system. It asks us to consider fundamentals: What is money? What is debt? What is capital?

That is a valuable exercise. I’m not persuaded Bitcoin can slip the surly bonds of human social organisation in the way the authors think it can: in particular, the need for trust between participants and the inherent conflicts of agency, intermediation and the inevitable extraction of economic rent that exist whenever two or three are gathered together in the pursuit of trade do not go away just because we have a permissionless blockchain.

But understanding why this is so helps us understand how to best configure the financial system to manage these problems, and how we can best operate inside it to minimise them for ourselves. The challenge that Bitcoin is Venice presents in that regard is reason enough to warmly recommend this book.

And history is slowly proving this right, as Bitcoin amalgamates into the mainstream, rather than fixing it. Rather, Bitcoin has been fixed: The traditional institutions have cemented it into the existing system, validating it and giving it institutional weight, heft and credibility

Here is the whole article on the JC. It’s a monster.

Materials referenced in this episode:

• Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, not 1952 as I said on the recording).

• David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years

• Molly White’s Web3IsGoingGreat.com

• Andy Greenberg’s Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

• Not the Nine O’Clock News’ timeless Does God Exist?

And, of course, this.