Bitcoin is the system. The money is something else, and is what drives the system.

In cryptocurrency, as in traditional currency, it's the system that drives the 'money' (credit).

In science, definitions should adhere to objective criteria, not to what is generally considered. The paper does not try to refute cultural convention (similar to tomatoes being 'vegetables') but to provide objective definitions (tomatoes are fruits in biology). The criterion is shown at the beginning of Section 2, besides the included citation.


The colour blue is not an item. Even if it were, the fact that it can be duplicated means that it is not naturally unique, not that it is not natural. The relevant distinction is natural vs. artificial origin, and the context is signal or item reception, not production. Duplication ability refers to production.


Two 'distinct' credit signals (e.g. authentic, hard-to-produce bills) can be received for every distinct monetary signal (gold piece). Credit's distinctiveness makes it artificially unique on reception.



What is relevant to my argument of transaction uniqueness, and the provided example, is that the links between transactions correspond to links between blocks.

Too bad you did not see anything good with my paper. But thanks for taking the time!

Regarding your criticisms, could you provide arguments for your assertions? For example, you seem to have a certain conception of what's important or relevant or not arbitrary:


The importance is implicit in the fact that it is an objective distinction, based on the properties of gold versus credit tokens.


Why is it better? The term "natural" is used because credit tokens are artificial or man-made; they cannot be found naturally like pieces of gold or valid nonces. Why is this not important in your view?


The paper states from the outset that 'proof of work' should not be taken literally as proof, and its function is economic or monetary. So your criticism is puzzling.


A chain of (transaction) blocks is a chain of transactions.

Hi all,

I have written a paper that challenges the notion that the 'proof of work' is a means of securing the network, solving the Byzantine Generals problem, encrypting energy or anything of the sort. 'Proof of work' is in fact a misnomer, because a valid nonce one receives on the internet is not a measure of energy or proof of whatever a miner has done; the nonce indicates probability of work, but that's not why it gets accepted.

In consequence, Bitcoin is not about distributed systems security; it is about money, if money is defined objectively in terms of signalling interactions. Systems thinking just places Bitcoin at the same level as altcoins or centralised currency generally. Hence, my paper offers a demonstration of the digital uniqueness of the blockchain.

I would appreciate your comments, suggestions for improvement and publishing:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4683277

Unique Memory: Bitcoin and the Concept of Money

Abstract: The fundamental problem of digital cash lies in deciding on a digital message that represents a coin in a decentralised network. However, money can be accurately defined in terms of a similar problem of communication among dispersed individuals or groups. I show that Bitcoin’s design was successful because it captures the essential signalling property of a monetary token like a piece of gold: namely, its natural uniqueness, as opposed to the artificial uniqueness of a credit token. Therefore, I propose that bitcoins be defined as digital money. On the other hand, cryptocurrency, digital currency, cash and other traditional forms of ‘money’ should be distinguished as credit. This conceptual distinction can be reduced to the difference between ‘proof’ of work and standard cryptographic proof in solving the double-spending problem: digital money is not a product of consensus through computational effort; rather, consensus and computational effort result from digital money.

Let me edit what BADecker wrote, for illustration purposes:


So, this is what I mean by the relationship between family, God and government. If we rage against any of those things, we are essentially having an argument with our family of origin, and this argument continues when we have children.

I think calling the children the parents' property puts parents at the same level as the government, both fighting to be the rightful owner. Ironically, this is what makes the parents themselves disagree regarding their offspring, to the point of divorce and custody litigation.   

If you study families and human history, you realise Mother and Father represent the interests of their own parents and lineage, which has little to do with individual interest in a libertarian sense. This is why in-laws are annoying and why we have political left and right.

Hello everyone!

I'd like to meet and discuss with fellow bitcoiners who have children. I think that the ideals of freedom begin with the family and only make sense when looked at through this personal lens. Many people within the Bitcoin community, beginning with Satoshi himself, subscribe to the ideal of individual sovereignty and the Austrian School of economics. All of this is fantastic. However, when does a developing child become a sovereign individual?

If you defend the ideal of freedom and free market capitalism, should you not begin by protecting the children's individuality from elders who threaten it? Why rage against "the government" when there are actual people around you wielding a much greater power on helpless human beings? There is no easy answer to this question, but this is precisely the reason we parents need to research and talk.

A related topic, I think, is our troubles as adult bitcoiners dealing with parents and relatives who do not understand. Traditionally, parents have trouble granting their children the freedom we crave. There is an interesting interplay between our relationships with our parents and our relationships with our children. I hope to be able to discuss and share our experiences in this legendary forum!

“Really, what is money?” https://link.medium.com/hSshrD0hJZ

This is because you assume that biology has nothing to do with reality, which couldn't be further from the truth. Human societies are animal societies. You can keep understanding 'money' in the usual cultural way, but I wouldn't call that very empirical.

The article is actually against the 'selfish gene' mantra, which is nearly 50 years old and has been superseded by more realistic, non-moralistic theories about cooperation. Please read before you comment.

Oh, I am pretty sure most of them will disagree. They also disagree about Bitcoin having value... What this paper does is bring actual scientists into the debate rather than leave it to social theorists.


Have you read the paper? It says that cooperation is not the same thing as altruism. That is, it rejects the selfish gene paradigm (as a lot of biologists are doing recently).

'The tendency to confuse cooperation with altruism needs to be overcome if morality and money are to be understood scientifically. When someone exchanges a coffee for something else, they are not actually being altruistic but cooperative. Any associated feelings of altruism belong in the moral, symbolic context of a society, not in the real context of trade. Thus, a token issued for rewarding altruistic actions (credit) cannot be logically called the same as a token wanted by people who are voluntarily looking to cooperate. The former kind of token follows the actions, whereas the latter precedes them.

Any system of exchange that relies on credit is vulnerable to deception and exploitation. Because altruistic actions are morally prescribed, there is a clear demand for credit, but also a clear incentive to issue it. In order to increase trust in the system, credit is often given a monetary basis that adds to the conceptual confusion of money with credit. It is generally hard to adopt an objective perspective on these concepts, away from what is commonly called ‘society’ and from the fact that language itself is sociocentric [23]. Phenomena such as kinship, modality and morality are all linguistic in nature and epistemically confusing [8, 24]. Financial discourse is equally shrouded in mystery, and now faces the challenge of technologies that disrupt the domestic setting in which it evolved.  

The term cryptocurrency inherits such ambiguities. The word currency refers to a medium of exchange issued within a legal context (from Middle English: curraunt, ‘in circulation’). But Bitcoin is not a currency because it exists de facto in the lawlessness of the internet, nor does cryptography alone provide its monetary qualities. Instead, bitcoins should be termed digital money, in the same way as many commodities and collectibles (e.g. precious metals, cigarettes in prison, salt in ancient times, wampum and other shells) are seen as tangible money.

Human societies endure on the basis of abstract beliefs and kinship systems that recruit cooperative partners. Credit has fuelled their exponential, competitive growth at the expense of the sustainable, intelligent growth that results from money alone. Morality and credit are fictional forms of value that concern only a subset of the species. On the other hand, money is ethical, because as a real form of value, it enables all human beings to cooperate regardless of where they were born.'

https://www.academia.edu/40138316/Money_is_a_token_of_cooperation_The_biology_of_indirect_exchanges

The theories of money you mention cannot be great because 1) they contradict each other, and 2) they do not communicate with biology.

As I mentioned, this theory explains the debate between David Graeber's anthropological narrative on the origins of money (book: Debt: The first 5000 years) and the classical economic narrative that money originated through barter.

Saying that the concept of money is 'widely accepted' is like saying the same about the concept of God. Yes, people use it with confidence but they don't know what it is or mean different things by it. Science has always served to clear this sort of cultural mysticism; it has done so with God and will do so with money.

Cryptocurrency is an ambiguous term because 1) the word 'currency' means a medium of exchange within a country or other normative context (from Middle English: curraunt, 'in circulation'), and 2) you can use cryptography for anything you like, including credit 'money' that is nothing like Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is not a currency because it exists in the lawlessness of the internet, nor does cryptography alone provide its monetary qualities (as I explained in the excerpt above).

So, we are left with the word money, which can refer to commodities and collectibles that are not associated with any authority (e.g. precious metals, cigarettes, wampum), or, again, to currency or credit. Clearly, if we want to understand these things, the meaning of the words must be sorted. The article proposes that we reserve the word money for commodities and collectibles (Bitcoin is a digital collectible); and it does so on the basis of the biological study of sociality and exchanges.

I really recommend you read the article. You will learn about modern debates in biology, the history and psychology of money, the nature of human societies, etc.

That is more or less the idea, but the article explains that some cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin) should be called digital money. In the same way, gold is money, but a gold coin with a nominal value should be called credit. Here is an excerpt:

'Created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin is commonly called a decentralised digital currency. However, according to the present definition of money, Bitcoin is simply the first form of digital money, as opposed to credit that has been issued digitally. Both digital credit and digital money are accounting ledgers that are stored in networks of computers. In the case of credit, the network is centralised, meaning that the authenticity of the ledger is set by a single authority. This is typically a nation-state that decides what credit belongs to whom and how much of it can there be in circulation. By contrast, the authenticity of the Bitcoin ledger is decided by a cooperative process called proof-of-work [36]. Any computer that is connected to the internet is free to participate in the process by adhering to a certain protocol. The protocol rewards those ‘mining’ computers with new coins at a decreasing rate that mimics the scarcity of gold. At root, however, the proof-of-work is a mathematical solution to the problem of coordinating different computers on the internet, in the same way as money in general is a solution to the problem of coordinating different people in nature.'

Hi all,

Modern biology has been getting close to solving the mystery of money ever since Dawkins attempted a definition in 'The selfish gene'. By clarifying some basic conceptual issues, this research article defines Bitcoin as the first form of digital money. Fiat 'money' and any coin that prioritises exchange over value is defined as credit. This sorts out the confusion with ideas like 'credit-money or 'money is debt' or 'money comes from a commodity'... In this way, the article solves the recent debate between David Graeber and the Austrian School. I hope it is useful.

https://www.academia.edu/40138316/Money_is_a_token_of_cooperation_The_biology_of_indirect_exchanges