This is so cool. The judge in his judgement called Bitcoin the "
Adam of cryptocurrencies"..
The backdrop is that the Supreme Court of India heard a case from Pro-bitcoin activists against the blanket ban issued by India's central bank. The judgement has just been uploaded on the official website:
Supreme court of India judgement in Writ Petition number 373 and 528 of 2018.
Starting at page 28 of the judgement, the judge V. Subramaniam gives a brilliant description in his words of the history of online cash and bitcoin garnered from online resources and the whitepaper. He finishes with an epic line:
it is beyond any pale of doubt that irrespective of the metamorphosis (or gene mutation) it has undergone over the years, bitcoin, the Adam or Manu of the race of cryptocurrencies, was developed as an alternative to fiat currency
Everybody interested in bitcoin must read those pages from Page 28 to Page 32. If you have a passing interest in Indology, you will love the references made by the learned judge. I am reproducing some parts of the text here:
The archeological excavations carried out at the (world wide web) sites, reveal that this digital currency civilization is just 12 years old (at the most, 37 years). But these excavations became necessary since virtual currencies, known by different names such as crypto assets, crypto currencies, digital assets, electronic currency, digital currency etc., elude an exact and precise definition, making it impossible to identify them as belonging either to the category of legal tender solely or to the category of commodity/good or stock solely.
Any attempt to define what a virtual currency is, it appears, should follow the Vedic analysis of negation namely “neti, neti”. Avadhuta Gita of Dattatreya says, “by such sentences as ‘that thou are’, our own self or that which is untrue and composed of the 5 elements, is affirmed, but the sruti says ‘not this not that’.” The concept of Neti Neti is an expression of something inexpressible, but which seeks to capture the essence of that to which no other definition applies.
That Satoshi and the Cypherpunks who participated in the initial experiments developed Bitcoin as an alternative to conventional currency, to counter the problems of debasement of currency by central agencies, was made clear by Satoshi himself when he said: “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The Central Bank must be trusted not to debase the currency but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.”
Those 4 pages provide a brilliant recap in the words of a judge for whom this was probably the first exposure to these ideas of a cypherpunk. Some really great information too in there about everyone starting from Hal to Adam Back.
PS:
Manu, in Hinduism refers to "the first man" or "progenitor of humanity", similar to Adam from Genesis.
