The Evolution of Money

by David Orrell

  9. Vigna and Casey, Age of Cryptocurrency, 190.

  10. Joon Ian Wong, “Goldman Sachs Report Says Bitcoin Could Shape ‘Future of Finance,’ ” CoinDesk, March 11, 2015, http://www.coindesk.com/goldman-sachs-report-says-bitcoin-could-shape-future-of-finance.

  11. Timothy C. May, “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” November 22, 1992, www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html.

  12. Quoted in Vigna and Casey, Age of Cryptocurrency, 63.

  13. Ben Steverman, “Why Bitcoins and Apple Pay Can’t Kill Off Cash,” Bloomberg Business, September 12, 2014, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-12/why-bitcoins-and-apple-pay-can-t-kill-off-walter-white-s-stash.

  14. David Birch, “The Future of Money,” YouTube, January 19, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTWpbAyqXfs.

  15. “UK Banknotes ‘Tainted with Cocaine,’ ” BBC, October 4, 1999. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/464200.stm.

  16. Tracy McVeigh, “Buses, Canteens, Parking—Is Cash on the Way Out?” Observer, March 8, 2015.

  17. “Top 5 Cashless Countries,” TotalPayments, 2013, www.totalpayments.org/2013/07/08/top-5-cashless-countries.

  18. Kenneth Rogoff, “Costs and Benefits to Phasing Out Paper Currency,” in NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2014, ed. Jonathan Parker and Michael Woodford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 29:445–456.

  19. Andy Greenberg, “Online Drug Dealers Are Now Accepting Darkcoin, Bitcoin’s Stealthier Cousin,” Wired, November 4, 2014, www.wired.com/2014/11/darkcoin-and-online-drug-dealers.

  20. Investment manager Josh Stein, quoted in Vigna and Casey, Age of Cryptocurrency, 183.

  21. Alex Hern, “Missing: Hard Drive Containing Bitcoins Worth £4m in Newport Landfill Site,” Guardian, November 27, 2013.

  22. This is a problem with conventional currencies as well. See Izabella Kaminska, “Democratising Finance: Vision for Bitcoin Is Beginning to Fade,” Financial Times, February 3, 2015.

  23. Kourosh Davarpanah, Dan Kaufman, and Ophelie Pubellier, “NeuCoin: The First Secure, Cost-Efficient and Decentralized Cryptocurrency,” version 1.0, March 25, 2015, www.neucoin.org/en/whitepaper/download.

  24. “Ethereum Frontier Release,” www.ethereum.org.

  25. D. A. Wallach, “Bitcoin for Rockstars,” Backchannel, December 10, 2014, https://medium.com/backchannel/bitcoin-for-rockstars-ca8366802f9.

  26. Hernando de Soto, “The Destruction of Economic Facts,” Bloomberg Business, April 28, 2011, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-04-28/the-destruction-of-economic-facts.

  27. Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss, “Honduras to Build Land Title Registry Using Bitcoin Technology,” Reuters, May 15, 2015, http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/05/15/usa-honduras-technology-idINKBN0O01V720150515.

  28. Stan Higgins, “IBM Reveals Proof of Concept for Blockchain-powered Internet of Things,” CoinDesk, January 17, 2015, www.coindesk.com/ibm-reveals-proof-concept-blockchain-powered-internet-things.

  29. Leo Kelion, “Could Driverless Cars Own Themselves?” BBC News, February 16, 2015, www.bbc.com/news/technology-30998361.

  30. Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna, “Crypto Innovators Find Fertile Ground in Soft-Touch Switzerland,” Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2014.

  31. Olga Kharif, “Bitcoin 2.0 Shows Technology Evolving Beyond Use as Money,” Bloomberg Business, March 28, 2014, www.bloomberg.com/news/2014–03–28/bitcoin-2–0-shows-technology-evolving-beyond-use-as-money.html.

  32. Wong, “Goldman Sachs Report Says Bitcoin Could Shape ‘Future of Finance’ ”; Rob Cox, “Bitcoin Comes out of the Shadows and into Wall Street’s Sights,” New York Times, May 1, 2015.

  33. Marek Palatinus, private conversation with Roman Chlupatý, January 2016.

  34. Brian Kelly, “Is Apple Pay a Bitcoin Killer?” CNBC, September 10, 2014, www.cnbc.com/id/101988826.

  35. Jaroslav Brychta, private conversation with Roman Chlupatý, December 2013.

  36. Mexico, for example, has looked into the idea of using a blockchain-based currency. See Tanaya Macheel, “The Case for Merging Mexico’s Peso with Block Chain Technology,” CoinDesk, July 26, 2014, www.coindesk.com/case-merging-mexicos-peso-block-chain-technology.

  37. At the time of this writing, IBM is considering a blockchain-based cash and payment system for conventional currencies. See Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss, “IBM Looking at Adopting Bitcoin Technology for Major Currencies,” Reuters, March 12, 2015, www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/12/us-bitcoin-ibm-idUSKBN0M82KB20150312.

  38. May, “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.”

  39. Brett Scott, “Riches Beyond Belief,” Aeon, August 28, 2013, https://aeon.co/essays/so-you-want-to-invent-your-own-currency.

  40. Georg Friedrich Knapp, The State Theory of Money, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1924), 303.

  41. Quoted in Jeff Kearns, “Greenspan Says Bitcoin a Bubble Without Intrinsic Currency Value,” Bloomberg Business, December 4, 2013, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-04/greenspan-says-bitcoin-a-bubble-without-intrinsic-currency-value.

  42. Omar Bessa, “Nobel Prize Winner Eugene Fama on Bitcoin,” CoinTelegraph, November 8, 2015, http://cointelegraph.com/news/115593/nobel-prize-winner-eugene-fama-on-bitcoin.

  43. This section is based on David Orrell, “A Quantum Theory of Money and Value,” Social Science Research Network, June 28, 2015, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2624371.

  44. Tom Simonite, “Ripple Labs,” MIT Technology Review, February 18, 2014.

  45. Paul Krugman wrote that “Adam Smith hates Bitcoin” on the basis that Smith pointed out the wastefulness of using gold as a currency, but that is not the same thing as hating it (“Adam Smith Hates Bitcoin,” The Conscience of a Liberal [blog], New York Times, April 12, 2013, http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/adam-smith-hates-bitcoin).

  46. Nathan Schneider, “A New ‘Lego of Cryptofinance’ Enables Users to Design Social Contracts,” Al Jazeera, April 7, 2014.

  10. Utopia

  1. Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences (London: Paul, 1881), 12.

  2. Thomas More, Utopia, www.gutenberg.org/files/2130/2130-h/2130-h.htm.

  3. The success of mobile phones has been used to justify everything from mainstream economics (“The Invisible Hand Gives You the iPhone”) to multiverse theory. See Peter Foster, “Biting the Invisible Hand,” National Post, September 14, 2012; and Matthew Kleban, “Re: ‘An Imperfect Truth,’ by David Orrell,” Related Letters, Literary Review of Canada, April 2015, http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2015/04/letters.

  4. K. E. Boulding, “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” in Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy, ed. Henry Jarrett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 3–14; Eugene P. Odum, “The Strategy of Ecosystem Development,” Science 164 (1969): 262–270.

  5. Odum, “Strategy of Ecosystem Development”, 269.

  6. Ibid., 266–267.

  7. Steven Poole, “Could Climate Change Action Rejuvenate Worldwide Democracy?” New Statesman, September 18, 2014.

  8. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 33.

  9. Environmental economics is based on an underlying faith in the ability of “Adam Smith’s invisible hand to achieve what is best for society as a collective,” as one textbook on environmental economics puts it, so long as market principles can be adequately applied. See Nick Hanley, Jason E. Shogren, and Ben White, Environmental Economics in Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 358.

  10. As one forester puts it:

  Perhaps the hard truth is that there may be areas of human activity that are so important for reasons other than financial gains, that the narrow criterion of individual economic gain cannot be the basis of decisions. In other words, the decision rules of neo-classical utility theory may be operative mainly in a narrow range of choices at the margin, between a few units of resources or commodities this way or that, but this cannot be extrapol
ated in a grand way to the society-wide policy choices in a manner that may spell doom in the long run. (Dilip Kumar, “Applying Economics to Sustained Yield Forestry: Why Foresters Don’t Listen to Social Scientists,” Forest Matters [blog], February 26, 2015, http://forestmatters.blogspot.ca/2015/02/13-applying-economic-analysis-to.html)

  11. Interview with Herman Kahn, New York Times, October 19, 1967.

  12. Ian D. Wyatt and Daniel E. Hecker, “Occupational Changes During the 20th Century,” Monthly Labor Review, March 2006: 35–57.

  13. David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” Strike!, August 17, 2013, http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs.

  14. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Norton, 1963), 369.

  15. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Unversity Press, 2014), 515.

  16. Kiatpongsan Sorapop and Michael I. Norton, “How Much (More) Should CEOs Make? A Universal Desire for More Equal Pay,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 9, no. 6 (2014): 587–593.

  17. See, for instance, OECD, “Crisis Squeezes Income and Puts Pressure on Inequality and Poverty,” 2013, www.oecd.org/els/soc/OECD2013-Inequality-and-Poverty-8p.pdf.

  18. Robert Frank, “Why the Rich Recovered and the Rest Didn’t,” CNBC, June 13, 2012. www.cnbc.com/id/47802283.

  19. Patrick Butler, “Decline in Professional Jobs Fuels Increase in Downward Mobility,” Guardian, November 6, 2014.

  20. Andrew Ross Sorkin and Megan Thee-Brenan, “Many Feel the American Dream Is out of Reach, Poll Shows,” New York Times, December 10, 2014, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/many-feel-the-american-dream-is-out-of-reach-poll-shows.

  21. Douglas Clement, “Interview with Eugene Fama,” Region, December 2007.

  22. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (London: Bloomsbury, 2009).

  23. Quoted in ibid., 221.

  24. Aditya Chakrabortty, “University Economics Teaching Isn’t an Education: It’s a £9,000 Lobotomy,” Guardian, May 9, 2014.

  25. Michael J. Sandel, “The Moral Limits of Markets,” Project Syndicate, December 31, 2012.

  26. “We have no longer any real appreciation for the embodied energy, destruction, and suffering that goes into every stage of the supply chain,” notes Mark Boyle, “The Moneyless Man,” TEDxO’Porto, July 11, 2011, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PuyYVVVkIM. Because money always points toward number (a left-brain specialty), it deprives us of any sense of context (which is typically handled by the right brain).

  27. The OECD noted that “there can be too much finance. When the financial sector is well developed, as has been the case in OECD economies for some time, further increases in its size usually slow longterm growth” (Boris Cournède, Oliver Denk, and Peter Hoeller, “Finance and Inclusive Growth,” OECD Economic Policy Paper [Paris: OECD, 2015], 7).

  28. Yanis Varoufakis, “Bitcoin: A Flawed Currency Blueprint with a Potentially Useful Application for the Eurozone,” February 15, 2014, http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2014/02/15/bitcoin-a-flawed-currency-blueprint-with-a-potentially-useful-application-for-the-eurozone; Lulu Yilun Chen and Justina Lee, “China Mulls Answer to Bitcoin with Digital Currency Study,” Bloomberg Business, January 21, 2016, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/chinese-central-bank-studies-prospect-of-own-digital-currency.

  29. Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (London: HarperCollins, 2009), 68, 76.

  30. Tomáš Sedláček, David Graeber, and Roman Chlupatý, (R)evoluční Ekonomie O Systéma a Lidech (Prague: 65.pole, 2013).

  31. Kathleen D. Vohs, Nicole L. Mead, and Miranda R. Goode, “The Psychological Consequences of Money,” Science 314, no. 5802 (2006): 1154–1156.

  32. Robert H. Frank, Thomas Gilovich, and Dennis T. Regan, “Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 7, no. 2 (1993): 159–171.

  33. Owen Hatherley, “Be a User, Not a Consumer: How Capitalism Has Changed Our Language,” Guardian, August 11, 2013.

  34. David J. Cheal, The Gift Economy (New York: Routledge, 1988). See also Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (Berkeley, Calif.: Evolver Editions, 2011).

  35. Ruth Suehle, “An Anthropologist’s View of an Open Source Community,” January 31, 2011, http://opensource.com/life/11/1/anthropologists-view-open-source-community.

  36. Carlo Daffara, “The Economic Value of Open Source Software.” July 23, 2012, http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/the-economic-value-of-open-source-software/.

  37. David Bollier, Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons (Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society, 2014), 126.

  38. Cédric Feschotte, “Virology: Bornavirus Enters the Genome,” Nature 463, no. 7277 (2010): 39.

  39. Bethany Horne, quoted in Jonathan Dawson, “A Wave of Disruption Is Sweeping in to Challenge Neoliberalism,” Guardian, March 12, 2015.

  40. Everett Rosenfeld, “Ecuador Becomes the First Country to Roll Out Its Own Digital Cash,” CNBC, February 9, 2015, www.cnbc.com/id/102397137.

  41. F. Bardhi and G. M. Eckhardt, “Access-based Consumption: The Case of Car Sharing,” Journal of Consumer Research 39, no. 4 (2012): 881–898.

  42. Sheetal Lodhia and Paul Kennedy, “Why Money Isn’t Everything,” CBC, May 12, 2015, www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/why-money-isn-t-everything-1.3069430.

  43. Anatoly Kurmanaev, “Venezuela Squanders Its Oil Wealth,” Bloomberg Business, February 18, 2015, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-18/venezuela-goes-from-bling-to-blat-as-oil-wealth-squandered.

  44. Robert Reich, “The Share-the-Scraps Economy,” February 2, 2015, http://robertreich.org/post/109894095095.

  45. William Stanley Jevons, for example, wrote in a letter to his sisters that he wanted to be “powerfully good, that is to be good, not towards one, or a dozen, or a hundred, but towards a nation or the world” (Letters and Journal of W. Stanley Jevons, ed. Harriet A. Jevons [London: Macmillan, 1886], 96).

  46. M. N. Browne and J. K. Quinn, “The Lamentable Absence of Power in Mainstream Economics,” in Future Directions for Heterodox Economics, ed. John T. Harvey and Robert F. Garnett (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008) 240–261.

  47. Tomáš Sedláček, Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 10.

  48. Jonathan Band and Jonathan Gerafi, “Wikipedia’s Economic Value,” infojustice.org, 2013, http://infojustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/band-gerafi10032013.pdf.

  49. Tomáš Sedláček, Gloria Benedikt, Merlijn Twaalfhoven, and Roman Chlupatý, “Bridging the Divide: Arts, Economics and the Irrational—A Debate in 3 Acts” (presentation at the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, November 29, 2014).

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