We maintain that the crypto-currency bitcoin is a practical application of what is termed “memory” in the monetary economics literature. After reviewing the theoretical literature on money and memory, we offer a brief overview of the bitcoin protocol and argue that, like memory, bitcoin functions as a public record-keeping device. Finally, we provide evidence that — in line with the standard theoretical account of memory — bitcoin use has soared as the expected cost of storing traditional monies increased.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2275730 Chaoskampf already has a post about this, can you guys remove this?
