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SPECTRA

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10919/104330
A peer-reviewed, graduate student-run journal of the ASPECT program

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Browsing SPECTRA by Author "Barber, Andrew"

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  • Bitcoin and The Philosophy of Money: Evaluating the Commodity Status of Digital Currencies
    Barber, Andrew (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2015-09-01)
    The rhetoric in Satoshi Nakamoto's "White Paper" on the origins of Bitcoin suggests that the digital currency was envisioned as an entirely autonomous money. Due to the increase in popularity and circulation of Bitcoin and other digital currencies, an intense regulatory debate has been sparked at the global level. These debates reveal a fundamental tension regarding the role of the state in establishing money. While the digital currency community insists that Bitcoin is money, states and monetary authorities have declared Bitcoin a commodity, a declaration that can be traced back to Georg Friedrich Knapp's foundational text The State Theory of Money and reinforced by A. Mitchell Innes' The Credit Theory of Money. Circulating alongside state monies, Bitcoin is then neaccessory money,' unable to satisfy tax obligations and behaving as a commodity. This chartalist account of Bitcoin is refuted by what I identify as a libertarian/von Misean understanding of money motivating the circulation of digital currencies. I argue that the circulation of digital currencies is better explained by the chartalist narrative. I then prescribe Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money, a broader understanding of money in which more abstract monies might create a supranational economic society, as an ideological alternative to digital currency advocates -- one that better conforms to the nature of money gestured to in Nakamoto's "White Paper". However, even through the lens of Simmel, the limitations imposed by domestic authorities and taxation prevent digital currencies from reaching the envisioned state of autonomy. Synthesizing these understandings of money, Bitcoin may exist as a compromise, a means of international money transfer that weakens the abstract, international economic borders created by state monies.