Bitcoin weekly weighted average price, July 2010 through April 2014

Here is an update through April 2014 of a chart I published at several different points last year. It takes several measures to enable a longer-term overview next to the more typical focus on short-term trends. Notes on the reasoning behind these measures are included after the chart.

Notes: The log scale enables comparisons that reflect percentage changes across large differences in relative scale. Whereas a doubling from $1 to $2 would disappear next to a doubling from $100 to $200 on a single linear chart, this chart is able to better show both doublings at a similar relative scale of effect in its own context.

Second, weekly weighted averaging helps show price trend by general significance. This gives less weight than a daily high/low scale to headline-catching numbers that, as a practical matter, only impacted a relatively low volume during the most extreme moments of a mania peak or panic bottom, and dispite their general relative irrelevance, become the eternal darlings of all headline writers.

Third, the year-over-year comparison format shows that at least up to the present, the price has been significantly higher YoY throughout its entire history, with one famous exception, which resulted from an extreme upward and then less extreme downward price movement in 2011.

While the earliest price information begins to appear in late 2009, it is relatively sketchy and it is unclear how many trades actually took place at those published prices, so this version begins with the opening of the Mt. Gox exchange in July 2010 at $0.05. I switch to Bitstamp for the beginning of 2013 onward to factor out the impact of withdrawl irregularities that began to impact Mt. Gox data already in spring of 2013 and later worsened.

New paper: "Revisiting conceptions of commodity and scarcity in light of Bitcoin"

I have written a paper on Bitcoin in relation to fundamental theoretical concepts from economic theory, particularly “commodity,” as in the category of “commodity money,” the multiple meanings of “scarcity,” and “goods.” “Revisiting conceptions of commodity and scarcity in light of Bitcoin” (17 March 2014) [PDF] [ePub] is 21 pages of text, plus references.

This is a completely revised, updated, and reformatted version of an extended post that appeared almost exactly one year ago on 19 March 2013, entitled, “The sound of one Bitcoin.” That post was more in the style of a detective story, cataloging my personal step-by-step process in my first weeks of initially trying to make sense out of Bitcoin in terms of the economic theory that I had long studied.

A friend who knew I have been working on this revision asked recently if it was was mainly a refinement or if there were drastic changes from the original. I replied that while the basic ideas were the same, there were…drastic refinements. There are also connections to work that I have done in the intervening year since the original version came out.

Download here: [PDF] [ePub].

Another layer of distinction behind Tucker’s humanitarians and brutalists

Jeffrey Tucker’s article “Against Libertarian Brutalism” (12 March 2014) describes two broadly drawn ideal types within the libertarian movement. After briefly presenting and discussing these, I will suggest what I think is a more fundamental distinction that might help illuminate the background to the perception of these proposed ideal types.

Tucker’s “humanitarians” are said to be drawn to and consider liberty in a positive context of its role in promoting individual and social flourishing and prosperity. This is above all a constructive and forward-looking appeal to the best of human social possibilities, promoting creative cooperation over both ad-hoc violence and systematic control.

The “brutalists,” in contrast, are said to emphasize a strict application of a few core principles and self-consciously eschew nuances of context, application, and image marketing. Moreover, brutalists are said to not only support, but even proudly embrace, the rights of persons to engage in what are today broadly considered negative and even reprehensible pursuits, such as for example, refusing to associate with certain types or classes of persons based on various demographic characteristics. The brutalist, in this view, not only embraces individual rights because they promote positive social values, but because they can be used to defend the rights of individuals to make what are today generally considered highly backward social choices.

With this stylized typology in mind, it is first of all fascinating to observe that the general public perception and straw-man concept of libertarianism is precisely this “brutalist” picture. In this popular image of libertarianism, it is a position that promotes a few simplistic and unrealistic ideas over any and all other competing values, perhaps due to some mysterious sociopathic refusal to integrate with ordinary society. And yet, it is also true that certain ways of presenting and discussing libertarian positions do help contribute heartily to this “brutalist” image in the popular imagination. Some statements in this genre are positively cringe-worthy by almost any standard.

While the humanitarian versus brutalist model may be of some help in advancing this conversation, I think another way of framing the background could bring additional clarity. I have come to believe that a great weakness in the heart of libertarianism has been the failure to differentiate legal from ethical issues with sufficient and systematic clarity. What are actually strictly legal-theory questions have been at times vaguely identified as “moral” or “ethical” questions when they are nothing of the kind. One origin of this has been the desire to distinguish “ethical” matters of ought from strictly economic-theory treatments of social issues. Yet not all that is non-economic is necessarily ethical in nature. In fact, much of the non-economic in social discourse is specifically legal rather than “ethical.”

The core of the libertarian position on political philosophy is a position on property theory, a topic belonging squarely within the domain of legal theory. Those who have sought to defend libertarian positions on property theory have at times seemingly fallen into the trap of downplaying the importance of authentically moral and ethical issues. The trap is sprung because proponents of alternative positions on property theory (various forms of forced redistribution) often use ethical rhetoric in their attempts to justify their various proposals for institutionalized takings.

In a developing body of work beginning in 2011 that I have labeled under the heading of action-based jurisprudence, I have sought to more carefully differentiate the realms of legal theory and legal practice both from each other and from the realms of ethical and moral theory and practice. One of the simplest ways to get across the kinds of distinctions proposed is to say that legal theory defines what “theft,” for example, is, whereas ethical theory provides advice on, among many other things, whether or not one ought to steal. That is, legal theory is fundamentally a cognitive discipline, whereas it is ethical theory (and aspects of legal practice; what should be done?) that are disciplines properly dealing with oughts and shoulds.

On this basis, the following picture emerges in terms of Tucker’s ideal types: the “humanitarian” libertarians are not willing to neglect or play down the legitimate importance of complex moral questions next to (fundamentally property-theory based) libertarianism. The “brutalists,” meanwhile, on a favorable interpretation, are concerned that misplaced attention to moral and ethical concerns could be used (and very often is used) to justify systematic violations of legal principles, principles that are among the defining characteristics of civilization as such.

My suggested path toward a resolution of this dichotomy has several steps. First, all parties should seek to clearly differentiate a separate scope for legal theory and for ethical theory. They are two quite distinct fields, the confusion of which has led to unending injustice and immorality on a society-wide basis. Second, embrace the insights that are to be gained from each of these quite distinct fields, and apply them each in suitable ways. Either/or must give way to yes/and when it comes to working with multiple fields, each one of which has valuable and distinct insights on offer.

Legal theory provides the definitions of property boundaries, the outermost boundaries within which ethical social action can possibly take place without becoming legal infringement in the process. Within this widest scope for possibly ethical actions, various specific ethical conceptions then seek to inform and advise actors as to which among the many possible ways to live within the sphere of the legal are also morally desirable and laudable in addition to merely not being acts of aggression in the property-theory sense.

Newsweek uncovers its own lack of integrity in alleged “Satoshi Nakamoto” discovery reporting

Newsweek just released a story, “The Face Behind Bitcoin” (6 March 2014), claiming to have found Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. I remain doubtful. Whether they have or not, though, I think their story reflects a lack of professional integrity, which is why I am not personally even including a link to it.

The person they targeted clearly did not want to be identified, but the magazine nevertheless published photographs not only of the person, but also of where he lives, along with the identities and locations of his major family members. The same story could have been published with less identifying and location information out of respect for the obvious wishes of the primary person involved (as in: he called the police when the reporter showed up uninvited at his house).

Now as to whether this story is to be believed, the article does come off as convincing at first read, but on reflection, here are some reasons I have doubts.

Many of the points made about the person targeted in the article do match up to elements of what is known about Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. There is, however, one very large problem. Given all of the alleged sophistication and use of untraceable emails, why would such a person use a real name? It is possible, but would be a spectacular contradiction to everything else that is known about Bitcoin’s Nakamoto, and for that matter, the person targeted in the article.

The article is a collection of circumstantial evidence, an ex post effort to line up characteristics and dates. However, one should ask: Which characteristics and dates that did not match the story’s objective were omitted or went unnoticed? What is the total statistical set of persons in the world who would match up on characteristics and dates in a similar way?

Meanwhile, zero direct evidence of this man’s involvement in Bitcoin was presented, only multiple coincidences of interests and skills. Nevertheless, the article is written and titled as an unqualified direct truth claim: “this is.”

So far as I can see, every piece of evidence presented also matches the thesis that this is not the creator of Bitcoin. Moreover, the real-name relationship to the person targeted in the article tends to support the thesis that this is not him, rather than that it is him. Are we to believe that “the” Satoshi Nakamoto, out of an unending list of possible pseudonyms, would have instead used a real name right along with the rest of his consistently tight operational anonymity?

Either way, what there is overwhelming evidence for is that those responsible for this article, in pursuit of traffic and their print magazine relaunch, have displayed abysmal judgment and a lack of professional integrity by giving away specific location and identifying photographic information about this man, regardless of whether he was the inventor of Bitcoin or not.

MtGox fiasco highlights advantages of Bitcoin and damage from regulation

The bankruptcy of a centralized Bitcoin exchange, such as the MtGox collapse, is a prime example of the type of “trusted third party” risk to which Bitcoin itself was designed to provide an alternative. Although the original Bitcoin white paper particularly pointed out problems with people having to trust some third party to conduct financial transfers, an exchange facilitating impersonal market trading is also a type of trusted third party.

Customers of such exchanges do not maintain direct control of their bitcoins, but instead exchange these for entries in a customer account on an internal corporate system. Customers then rely on the particular quality and reliability of the internal management, data, and auditing systems of their chosen exchange to the extent and duration to which they leave balances there.

Bitcoin was designed to be a new type of solution to the kind of counterparty trust/risk problem that the MtGox news brings to light, although the same issues are all too familiar to students of the long history of fractional-reserve bank runs and systemic financial crises (importantly, this one is not systemic, but company specific). One objective of Bitcoin’s design was to reduce or eliminate the need for end users to rely on any such centrally managed (or mismanaged) credits—whether centrally issued monetary units themselves (first from banks of issue and later from central banks) or the particular internal accounting entries of specific service providers.

Users who directly control the keys to their own bitcoins, such as by using paper wallets, client software, and to a large degree also legitimately client-side encrypted web wallets, carry no trusted-counterparty risk (but still risk of user error and theft). However, if users do not hold bitcoins in some such direct way, they do not hold them at all. Rather, they hold a claim on a specific exchange company or secure-storage service.

MtGox customers were holding what were essentially Goxcoins, that is, MtGox-brand bitcoin credits (and/or MtGox-brand fiat account credits). They were not holding bitcoins. Such services can and should be sound of practice and strong of reputation, as appears to be the case with a number of other existing services. For example, Bitstamp-brand bitcoin account credits and Coinbase-brand bitcoin account credits have attracted none of the fear and discounting of MtGox-brand bitcoin account credits. All of them have the same status from a purely economic-theory point of view and none of them equate to the direct holding of bitcoin itself. However, their qualitative differences, from brand to brand, on the market have become increasingly vast.

One key innovation of Bitcoin was eliminating from within its own design any single point of failure from centralization in the core protocol and network. This has eliminated for users the need to rely on what I call a “trusted fourth party” that is, a centralized currency-unit issuer. However, next to broad Bitcoin-community enthusiasm about the potentials for decentralized designs, this does not necessarily imply a need to eliminate any and all points of centralization, such as the ordinary business design of competitive third-party services, whether centralized or decentralized. (De)centralization is negative when misapplied and (de)centralization is positive when well applied.

That said, Bitcoin does raise the competitive bar for financial service providers in original ways. It gives users an unprecedented opt-out path from the third-party financial services market as a whole. From a user standpoint, Bitcoin eliminates the need to necessarily rely on any third party whatsoever to aid in conducting one’s financial affairs. One who does not find some third-party service helpful can choose instead be one’s “own bank.”

I contrast, the traditional banking system’s only true opt-out path for end users is to be “unbanked” and thereby excluded from significant opportunities to engage with extended commercial society. With no true opt-out path for customers, but only a choice of fundamentally similar Bank A and Bank B, banking systems became increasingly cartelized over the course of centuries in the pursuit of coordinated inflation at the long-term expense of end users. Bitcoin has now provided end users exactly such an alternative to the familiar array of cartelized non-choices in financial services. It has also provided an opt-out path from the need to use reliably value-losing fourth-party-issued currency units.

A cause of certain irregularities

As MtGox has shown (to varying degrees for years and only now to its clearest extreme), particular third-party service providers can be unsound in their business practices. What is somewhat more mysterious is that such entities could continue to exist despite a long-standing negative business reputation, as well as the parallel presence of at least some apparently sounder alternatives.

One major factor in this is the high degree of regulatory risk and uncertainty in financial services in many countries. This has held back—by years—the entry of additional and higher-grade competitors, including not only start-ups, but potential new service offerings from existing firms. Many firms that could have easily started offering more professional Bitcoin services much sooner, did not do so due to risk avoidance in the face of a pervasive climate of regulatory fear and uncertainty.

Such companies—the market entry of which no one ever witnessed because it did not happen (Bastiat: “that which is not seen”)—had an abundance of just that expertise in systems, internal controls, and financial management in which MtGox seems to have been painfully deficient. In any less hampered market than financial services, such a company as MtGox should have easily been outcompeted and/or acquired by superior entrants long before reaching such a significant scale and being in a position to be a conduit for as much damage to its customers as it has.

“Regulation,” far from being a comfortable universal-savior solution, is in this way squarely to blame as a major factor in setting up the competitively hobbled business climate that helped enable such a weak firm to remain in business far past its expiration date. That stronger firms are now growing and new ones appearing is a positive development for the Bitcoin ecosystem. That more and stronger new entrants were missing in action starting at least two years ago owes a great deal to the artificial ex ante political blockades to social progress collectively known as “regulation.” The up and down tides of market sentiment regarding the range of potential regulatory actions have also played a major role in amplifying bitcoin price volatility. This component of volatility is then naively blamed on “bitcoin” instead of on the irrational and unpredictable regulatory climate, market expectations about which shift with every passing “official” mumbling, musing, or rumor from anywhere in the world (though much less now than in the past).

Constructive work is underway to apply the conceptual and technical solutions that Bitcoin has brought into the world to the specific business of exchanging global bitcoin for various local monies. These include a range of decentralized exchange protocols, and methods of using the blockchain to confirm customer reserves. Contracting for independent third-party audits would also seem a reasonable business measure for participants in a competitive exchange landscape. Offering such audits could be another un- or under-tapped potential business opportunity. Once again in this case, progress has been impeded by regulatory fears that have helped prevent relevant established professionals from getting involved much sooner just where most needed—in an entirely new world-changing start-up industry.

As the less content-oriented among media participants scramble to conflate as thoroughly as possible the emerging disasters of the MtGox company with their own vaguely formed fantasy images to which they attach the word “Bitcoin,” I take note that the really existing Bitcoin was designed as an innovative solution to the centuries-long institutional problems of users having little choice but to trust some “trusted third party” in their financial affairs. What has been dubbed “Empty Gox” is only the latest particular manifestation of this long-running problem, to which Bitcoin itself has arrived on the historical scene as a significant new class of solution.

Suggested reading: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” Satoshi Nakamoto (Oct. 31, 2008) [PDF]

Summary update on Bitcoin transaction malleability adjustments

Here is a quick summary of the current state of the response to transaction-malleability attacks on some exchanges, based on what I have gathered mainly from Github, Reddit, and Twitter discussions. One note on terminology at the outset, transaction-ID malleability would probably make this easier to understand for the general public at first glance—the substantive content of transactions cannot be alterned at all through this issue.

The MtGox exchange was still hardest hit in its particular implementation, but more importantly, it is mainly suffering in addition due to a general lack of market confidence in its business and solvency, which has built up over a very long period. The “price” it currently displays is not really a “Bitcoin price,” but mainly a market risk assessment of the likely state of the exchange’s own solvency. The current issue and MtGox’s response have come as a “last straw” for the market’s view of this company. This business-specific factor has also amplified the wider public impression of how significant the actual general technical issue itself is (this is typical for Bitcoin news, but still).

That said, MtGox’s infamous Monday press release blaming the Bitcoin protocol for its own woes was not entirely fanciful after all, and some wider adjustments are being made to tighten up this issue at some other exchanges and even in the reference implementation itself. These code adjustments in response to transaction ID malliators (those taking advantage of the situation to reissue transactions with altered transaction IDs) are taking shape and are in the process of being approved and implemented.

What we are apparently getting is a new “normalized transaction ID” field in transactions. This reflects the substantive content of the transaction itself and is therefore immune to the malliation to which the standard ID is subject prior to confirmation. To clarify for those who have not followed this closely, this issue has never had any direct effect on the content of transactions, that is, on who gets what. The exploit is only a way to fool some wallets into not seeing that a confirmed transaction has in fact been confirmed.

The work underway is precisely to fix these particular implementations so that they correctly perceive that confirmed transactions actually have appeared on the blockchain. These implementations had been relying on the initial standard transaction ID for this function. Not everyone understood that during a window after initial submission to the network and before confirmation, a transaction could be copied and the copy reissued with an altered transaction ID by changing the format of the signature.

Reference wallet features to make use of this new normalised ID are well in process. These include detecting copies of the “same” (in terms of hard content) transactions with differing standard transaction IDs. This is called “Walletconflict detection.” “Conflicted” transactions, that is, versions of a transaction that did not confirm due to ID malleation, are to be reported as “confirmations: -1 and category: ‘conflicted.’” This status is based on detection of multiple transactions with the same (new) normalised transaction ID as one another (only one such transaction can ever be confirmed, but this new feature brings any ID-malleation attempts to the ‘attention’ of the wallet software by showing all malleated and non-malleated versions that carry the same content).

The Bitstamp exchange announced Friday morning (in Europe) that its system adjustment, built with support from core developers, had passed internal testing and that it is likely to resume withdrawals later in the day.

There is more to be done to support more complex and as yet rarely used Bitcoin features in terms of the standard transaction ID issue, as this ID is what is used in inputs to future transactions. This is complex, because the malleability of the standard ID could also have positive uses in the future in facilitating certain types of complex transactions. The current adjustments with the addition of the normalized transaction ID and related code should be a sufficient immediate adaptation to the issue.

Legal and economic perspectives in the action-based analysis of Bitcoin

Well before getting “distracted” by the theoretical interpretation of Bitcoin for most of 2013 and probably well beyond, one of my central projects, still ongoing, has been to explicitly apply the action-based methodology of Ludwig von Mises and Hans-Hermann Hoppe to the philosophy of law. This is a project that had already been greatly advanced by the work of Stephan Kinsella, in my view, and I have tried to make this approach even more explicit and systematic, naming it action-based jurisprudence. This has led to some additional clarifications, foremost, what I consider a clearer differentiation between the respective natures and roles of legal theory and ethics, as well as clearer divisions between legal theory, legal practice, and (forthcoming) criminology.

I recently came across some interesting comments that reminded me of how this background influenced the way I approached understanding Bitcoin right from the beginning. Jorge Casanova in a thread in Spanish, referenced my 2011 paper, “Action-Based Jurisprudence” (links to that and related work here) and makes some good points, tying this to larger themes. The key insight is that phenomena under investigation are wholes and it is our own methods that illuminate different aspects of them (rather than the aspects being as separable as they might casually appear from attempting to reference only one field). He also cites, as I did, the example of money, which cannot be understood well without applying both economic and legal concepts (whether done explicitly or unconsciously):

[Google translated]: “There is a nature of money as a whole, with economic and legal implications, but inseparable from each other since the phenomenon (the money, or the bank if any) is absolutely inseparable from its legal and economic nature as a whole.”

A couple of years after writing that first action-based jurisprudence paper, I have just recently used legal status as the basis for proposing a new approach to monetary typology that can account for Bitcoin, which appeared for the first time in the video “Bitcoin Decrypted” Part III (December 2013). In this model, the most relevant thing about the category of “commodity money” is that it is a market good that requires no particular legal status that differs from that of any other good. Other types of monetary objects often rely on some form of legal status to prop them up, and this usually entails some degree of artificial legal privilege.

Another important factor in “commodity” is that a commodity good is one that is interchangeable with other units and is basically as easy to either buy or sell at the going market price. This is distinguished from other items, foremost specialty items, for which the relative positions of buyers and sellers differs widely. For most—non-commodity—goods, it is easy to go to a store and buy something, but much harder to turn around and sell it again. New cars, for example, famously take on a substantial price discount as soon as they are “driven off the lot.” On a commodity market, however, the relative positions of buyers and sellers are much closer in terms of the relationship between price spreads and relative ability to have transactions executed in a timely way.

In contrast to these two factors (a legal one and an economic one), it seems to have become more typically understood that the important thing about “commodity” in monetary thought is its apparent reference to the tangibility or materiality of historical commodity monies. However, I argue that this is turning out to be an incidental historical characteristic, rather than a theoretically fundamental one (See On the origins of Bitcoin: Stages of monetary evolution” (PDF, 3 November 2013 revised edition).

It is interesting to note in this connection that tangibility is a type of physical characteristic. As such, it requires neither economic theory nor legal theory to define it. It can be defined in terms of the natural sciences, referencing certain physically measurable properties, or their absence.

Legal status, in contrast, must be understood on the back of some kind of legal theory, while degree of liquidity/marketability/saleability is an economic-theory conception. In sum, these two factors, legal status and liquidity, both properly belong to the (“praxeological” or action-based) social sciences, whereas questions of tangibility or materiality (or the identification of one metal as contrasted with another) are first of all natural-science questions. In the same sense, the identification of cryptographic properties such as those of cryptocurrencies is first of all a mathematical and cryptographic issue, likewise not a social-science issue, per se (only secondarily, in that acting people are reflecting such elements in their actions and value scales).

What follows is the original comment in Spanish for those who can read it or run it through an online translation widget, which seems to create something at least vaguely comprehensible in the case of Spanish to English (as opposed to the hilarity that ensues from Japanese to English machine translation):

No hay tal cosa como la economía por un lado y el derecho (o en un sentido más amplio el entorno institucional) por el otro. De hecho, resulta muy ilustrativo el sensacional trabajo de Konrad S Graf titulado “Action-Based Jurisprudence: Praxeological Legal Theory in Relation to Economic Theory, Ethics and Legal Practice” publicado en Libertarian Papers (Vol. 3, 2011)… y cuya primera parte me parece uno de los más brillantes razonamientos sobre teoría legal praxeológica que he leído hasta la fecha. En resumidas cuentas, Graf señala que la praxeología se divide en tres “niveles” (raíz, tronco y ramas, usando la metáfora de un árbol) y que las dos ramas fundamentales (cada una con varios elementos) son la teoría económica y la teoría legal, y señala además que hay determinados fenómenos (el primero de los cuales es el dinero y banca) que no pueden entenderse sin aplicar simultáneamente las implicaciones de ambas ramas, la económica y la legal. No es posible, al tratar el fenómeno monetario hablar de una naturaleza económica del dinero y de una naturaleza legal (o institucional) del mismo, ni tan siquiera en términos analíticos y teóricos. Existe una naturaleza del dinero como un todo, con implicaciones económicas y legales, pero indisociables entre sí pues el fenómeno (el dinero, o la banca en su caso) es absolutamente inseparable de su naturaleza jurídico-económica como un todo. Desde el momento mismo en que la praxeología no es solamente ciencia económica, sino que es ciencia de la acción humana en general (y a partir de los trabajos que venimos desarrollando personas como Josema C España y un servidor, estamos cada vez más cerca de hablar de todo un paradigma de filosofía primera incluso, lo que va aún más allá del método de una serie de ciencias en particular) no es posible disociar un elemento puramente económico del más general elemento de acción humana.

Hyper-monetization reloaded: Another round of bubble talk

‘Tis the season again when the Bitcoin exchange rate rises fast and “bubble” talk resumes among some journalistic and other Bitcoin skeptics. Around the height of the previous most dramatic Bitcoin exchange rate movements of March and April 2013, I posted an article called “Hyper-monetization: Questioning the ‘Bitcoin bubble’ bubble,” which was widely circulated at the time and still referenced now. What follows is a blend of brand-new material and thoroughly revised highlights from the earlier article.

The objective was, and is, not to give advice or make predictions, but to draw on theory to develop alternative perspectives on what exactly a “bubble” may or may not be in relation to the distinctive case of a brand-new rising-value medium of exchange. “Medium of exchange” is fancy economic jargon for something one can pay for goods and services with. I define a money as the common unit of pricing and accounting in a given context (see my “Bitcoin as medium of exchange now and unit of account later: The inverse of Koning’s medieval coins,” 14 September 2013).

Behind popular price-bubble discourse often lies a thinly or not-at-all veiled general debate on whether Bitcoin is a valid system. Some degree of bubble-talk functions as a pop proxy for this. In April, some Bitcoin critics were citing rapid price movements in support of the contention that Bitcoin, as such, was only a bubble. When this bubble popped, the story went, Bitcoin units would supposedly return to their “inherent” value, which they claimed to be…nothing.

Of course, Bitcoin failed to oblige them once again. Yet each time Bitcoin does not fulfill this pop empirical prediction, and instead eventually goes much higher in price later on, one nevertheless hears the same prediction repeated the next time around. In contrast, there are several ways to take a much longer-term view, one that is able to both account for price manias and also acknowledge the possibility that Bitcoin could be a valid system, and an ever more reliable one in the making.

Hyper-monetization reloaded

Many observers have likened the rise of Bitcoin to an asset bubble. Another less common word introduced in this context is hyper-deflation. Some say such a thing is horrible, others that it is great. I suggest a quite different interpretive concept to apply in addition: hyper-monetization.

I came across the term hyper-deflation, intended in a positive sense of rapidly rising value, when Bitcoin’s exchange rate was climbing fast from the low thirties to the high thirties over a few days in early March 2013. While a few specialists of a certain persuasion understand “deflation” to be a great thing for ordinary people, the word still has major problems. It has several possible definitions. It can refer to price-level changes or to quantity of money changes, depending on who is talking or when. It is assigned a quite negative interpretation in most conventional economics circles. Finally, it has a general public-relations problem. It just sounds depressing as a word. Whatever its real net effects on society might be, “deflation” just sounds like a bad thing no matter what. Which child most wants a deflated balloon?

The word hyper-monetization occurred to me as a more positive alternative to hyper-deflation, one that also provides an antonym to the catastrophic hyper-inflations that have repeatedly killed off fiat paper monies throughout history. The exact opposite of the death of an old money at the debt-dripping hands of state/bank alliance managers would be the birth of a new medium of exchange at the creative hands of the market.

The term de-monetization denotes the more general concept of a widely used medium of exchange ceasing to function as one. A total hyper-inflationary collapse is one way this can happen. Another is bimetallist legal-tender price-fixing schemes driving one precious metal, say silver, out of circulation in favor of another, say gold, or vice versa. Yet another historical example is when a pure fiat paper standard is created after monetary authorities permanently “suspend redemption” of legal tender notes into the precious metals that had been promised in exchange for such notes (that is, note-issuer default is “legalized”). Paper and account entries then remain as money, while the metals that had formerly “backed” them are de-monetized and trade as commodity assets, bought and sold in terms of what replaced them in the actual role of money. The rhetorical line from some well-meaning sound-money promoters that “gold is money” is simply untrue, except, of course, in regard to those times and places where it actually was.

The opposite process, “monetization” in this sense, denotes something that was not a money beginning to function as one. When euros took over the jobs of various European national currencies, euros were monetized and the previous national currencies de-monetized. The French franc and Italian lira do not now function as monies; they are historical relics.

Something that gains its own exchange value from scratch on the open market contrasts sharply with any such forced legal conversions. When a freely chosen unit monetizes through market processes, and does so quite rapidly, it might then reasonably be described as being in a process of “hyper-monetization” (for a detailed treatment of origin-of-money issues, see my recent paper, “On the origins of Bitcoin: Stages of monetary evolution,” revised version, 3 November 2013, PDF).

A problem with the “bubble” bubble

Bitcoin’s high price volatility is unquestioned. However, it is unsurprising for at least two reasons. First, it is not widely understood as a technology and is in a very early stage of development. Second, its exchange value (market price) tends to react to news that highlights regime uncertainty. It should be noted that this is a type of “government failure” in that the scope and variability of policy uncertainty across multiple jurisdictions greatly increases market uncertainty.

Something else to consider in relation to the eternally-recurring “Bitcoin is a bubble” claim is that in a normal asset bubble, certain key factors differ. To whichever height the prices of typical bubble assets such as houses climb, a given house remains the same good in a physical sense as when it exchanged for less money. In the case of a monetization event, in contrast, the actual utility of the trading unit—which is mainly its utility as a trading unit—may actually rise. This is due to monetary network effects, named in reference to the value that comes from the extent of the network of people willing and able to deal in a particular trading unit.

To imagine how this special case of medium-of-exchange utility growth might differ from an ordinary asset bubble in, for example, housing, it would be as if not only the prices of houses were rising during a buying rush, but in addition, their actual sought-after qualities as physical houses were improving as well. Such fantastic houses might sprout new rooms with no one building them. New paint jobs might appear mysteriously overnight without any painters having visited.

For a medium of exchange, a rising general usability for facilitating the purchase of goods and services (separate from the relative value of each unit) is not directly tied to its exchange rate against other monetary units. Still, this aspect is likely to positively influence such exchange rates. Conversely, rising exchange rates, if they generate news and wider attention, can then lead to enhanced network effects through increased recognition, creating a network-growth cycle.

For those who have been following Bitcoin news closely, for months on end there have been seemingly daily announcements of new ways and places for consumers to spend bitcoins, new or improved wallet services to manage bitcoins, new or improved payment processor services to receive bitcoins, and new exchanges at which to buy and sell bitcoins—all on a global basis. Bitcoin payment processor BitPay announced in September that it had 10,000 merchant customers, up 10x from 1,000 a year earlier. In the past 12 months, the number of wallet accounts listed at the popular Blockchain.info My Wallet service has risen 13.9x from 38,460 to 534,575. These are just two specific services and do not reflect horizontal expansion in the number of competing services or the direct use of the Bitcoin network to facilitate transactions on the part of consumers and merchants using directly controlled software without intermediated assistance from service companies.

“Is” a bubble versus “is in” a bubble phase

Bitcoin does have its manias and crashes. The hyper-monetization concept seems useful especially in a longer-term perspective for addressing the view that Bitcoin is nothing more than a speculative bubble. The most insistent proponents of this view elaborate along these lines: “Bitcoin has no ‘intrinsic’ value and is therefore ultimately destined to fall to its ‘inherent’ value, which is zero.

However, claiming that Bitcoin is a bubble (total dismissal of the system as such) is quite different from claiming, perhaps helpfully, that Bitcoin’s exchange rate may be showing signs of being in a temporary bubble phase or mania at a given point in time. That said, every significant rise in price cannot just be reflexively attributed to a mania. There is certainly more to this story and there are many specific matters of degree and interpretation. Among these is recognizing that a young currency such as this would naturally vary in price quite a bit more as it is being discovered in waves than later after it has gained more widespread adoption.

At a theoretical level, unlike a simple asset bubble mania, the more people begin using or expanding their use of a particular medium of exchange, the more its actual utility rises, and the more valuable it actually is in this function from the point of view of its users. The exchange value of a medium of exchange unit is related to, among other things, each holder’s expectations of being able to use the unit in future exchanges. How many people will accept the unit, how readily, and for what?

At least when it comes to the aspect of monetary network-effect growth in any season, ‘tis the more the merrier.

Expanded "On the origins of Bitcoin" paper with empirical supplements, other revisions

This is the 0.2 upgrade to my paper, “On the origins of Bitcoin: Stages of monetary evolution,” first released on 23 October 2013.

This expanded and revised version replaces the previous one from 11 days ago, but I expect this current version in this format to now hold steady. If you have kindly included the older file in an online reference collection, please consider replacing it with this one.

The changes are summarized in an included initial note to readers of the previous version. The most notable single change is the addition of two new sections as empirical supplements. They provide interpretations of patterns of events by “Bitcoin Year” (Appendix A) and a single five-year price-formation chart (Appendix B). Discussions in the main text of the precise timing of the first clear pattern of medium-of-exchange use have been clarified somewhat on this basis.

Download PDF:

On the origins of Bitcoin: Stages of monetary evolution (03.11.2013, expanded and revised)

Strong positive response to "On the origins of Bitcoin"

The positive response to my recent paper, “On the origins of Bitcoin: Stages of monetary evolution” (23 October 2013), has been quite a surprise. Within the first hour, I had received word that the 30-page PDF had already been loaded onto an iPad in Texas and laser-printed in Brazil. Pretty soon, it had been posted on Reddit (r/bitcoin), where it was described as a “treatise.”

In less than the first two days, there have been nearly a thousand visitors to this link on my website. The paper has generated cascading retweets and tweets of recommendation and appreciation that total about 50, as far as I can estimate. Tuur Demeester, editor of the MacroTrends investment newsletter, has been tweeting quotes from it.

The highlight has to be a tweet from Jon Matonis, executive director of the Bitcoin Foundation, Forbes contributor, payments industry veteran, and long-time advocate for non-political currency options: “Konrad Graf earns his place in Bitcoin economic history.”

Well, with that, it must be time to call it a good week.

Update

Link updated from 23.10.2103 version to revised and expanded 03.11.2013 version

Download PDF: On the origins of Bitcoin: Stages of monetary evolution (03.11.2013)

"On the origins of Bitcoin," my new work on Bitcoin and monetary theory

Linked below is a new work I have just written on Bitcoin and monetary theory. It addresses in a more systematic way than I have before issues relating to the interpretation of the origins of Bitcoin in terms of the monetary regression theorem and the application of some central integral-theory principles to monetary theory.

Bitcoin has arisen as an entirely new and unexpected market phenomenon deserving of fresh treatments. Its arrival also provides opportunities to dig deeper into theoretical fundamentals themselves. While this work can be viewed as part of a much larger project in progress, I also have the sense that it can stand alone.

The title, On the origins of Bitcoin: Stages of monetary evolution, acknowledges the inspiration of the classic 1892 work, On the origins of money by Carl Menger, a landmark in the development of the market-evolution account of the origins of media of exchange and money. This “Austrian school” or “Vienna school” approach contrasts with what I dub the state-creatationism theory of the origin of money. It also contrasts with the tempting but unsatisfactory view that money is merely a “social illusion.”

In a nod to the software world out of which Bitcoin has arisen, I call it a first public beta, meaning that, while refinements are always possible and likely, I think the central intended functionality has been implemented. Revised versions and formats may follow.

Update

Link updated from 23.10.2103 version to revised and expanded 03.11.2013 version

Download PDF:On the origins of Bitcoin: Stages of monetary evolution (03.11.2013)

Bitcoin and social theory reflections: A review essay between Amsterdam and Atlanta

The German word Nachklang denotes what resonates after a sound has passed. It is the tune that still plays in one’s head after external sounds have faded. I have been listening to what stays with me in the few days after attending the Bitcoin Europe conference in Amsterdam September 26–28, prior to setting out toward the Crypto-Currency Conference in Atlanta, October 4–5.

Many conferences have a “keynote address.” I think Bitcoin Europe had more of a keynote moment on the final day that reflected the heart of the whole affair. This came when Bitcoin Magazine editor and software developer Mihai Alisie punctuated his moving presentation with, “Bitcoin is here to serve humanity, not to rule it.”

Now that resonates.

Takeaway themes included 1) the need to keep developing more intuitive client software, 2) the desperate need to help improve the global remittance market, which Bitcoin is technically capable of revolutionizing rather quickly, and 3) the need to implement multiple-signature transactions in client software. While that last item may seem obscure, we will return below to its potentially immense long-term implications.

The conference was heavy on entrepreneurs and programmers, often combined into the same persons. Bitcoinj developer and smart contracts enthusiast Mike Hearn could usually be spotted in the lobby talking with someone while looking over a screenful of code on his laptop. Massive effort, energy, and ingenuity is in play, with untold separate projects underway. One person after another I talked to, or who was presenting, was working on some project to develop new wallets, improve existing wallets, develop new exchanges, develop new ways to do exchanging, offer new ways to do remittances and loans, incubate startups, and generally make payments easier and more accessible and secure for wider audiences. That most definitely includes all those underserved, mis-served, or not served at all by the world’s existing constellation of financial institutions.

The tragedy of international remittances

A key concept was that Bitcoin is likely to start meeting needs and expanding most quickly right where existing “points of pain” are most intense. Sure, Bitcoin is better for online payments than credit cards in almost every way, but the epitome of a global point of pain is international remittances.

Immigrants working in wealthier countries trying to send some of their hard-earned wealth back home to relatives in poorer countries face truly dismal options. For every dollar, euro, or yen earned, some portion ends up making its way back home, but conventional remittance services charge shockingly high fees, trimming large percentages off of the fruits of labors undertaken mainly for families elsewhere.

One could call this a scandal, but the scandal is not so much the practices of the visible companies that do manage to provide this service at all, but the Byzantine regulatory mesh behind the scenes that makes it so difficult to do so efficiently. This regulatory overgrowth chokes off this market to the authentically open competition that could lead to lower costs and improved services rather quickly.

Into this fray, Bitcoin technically already enables international remittances with basically no charge for those few (for now) who are able to use it directly at both ends. “Send value anywhere in the world instantly in any amount and essentially for free” is a bold claim. No company can make it, but the decentralized Bitcoin network can and does deliver on it already.

Still, companies still have many roles yet to fill by leveraging the Bitcoin network and connecting people to it in ways they are not yet able to do for themselves. For almost all those who want to do international remittances today, some additional services are required. A remittance provider leveraging Bitcoin in the back office for transfers, while providing cash or local bank integration at one or both ends could offer the same or better service as Western Union’s or MoneyGram’s current offerings at vastly lower fees.

End users need not even necessarily know anything about Bitcoin or realize that it is involved in aspects of international transfers between local offices. They only need recognize that a much higher percentage of their purchasing power actually makes it back home, faster.

To illustrate, Daumantas Dvilinskas, CEO of TransferGo, based in Lithuania, talked about how his company is working to provide faster and less expensive international transfers. He quipped, “It takes three days to send money from the UK to Lithuania. People went to the moon in three days.” I live-tweeted this and Twitter user Jacob Norup Pedersen added, “it takes two weeks from Denmark to Morocco.”

The ecosystem metaphor

In reflecting on the sheer number of business ideas and variations being developed—even just those visible at this conference—I had the image of an exploding Cambrian ecosystem with a large number of candidates for longer-term survival. Many seem promising. In the end, only a few will multiply and advance toward wider adoption. Knowing which ones will be which is an extraordinary challenge. Complicating this further, the “DNA” from one project can easily hop to another in this primordial open-source soup, remixing again and again until successful combinations are found and then built on further. An abundance of candidate code segments and strategies is right there in the open to be borrowed. It is only the process of doing, trying, and offering that will end up delivering the many new conveniences that even today’s skeptics will most likely be taking for granted in daily life in the near future.

BitPay CEO Toni Gallippi, whom I met for the first time on the last day, was on hand representing what a wildly successful Bitcoin business can already look like, having gone from a thousand merchant accounts to 10,000 in the past year. Not coincidentally, his presentation and informal comments off-stage were positive and constructive and showed how his company makes life easier for both merchants and buyers compared to conventional payment options.

This goes right down to the details. Even the Bitcoin to fiat-money exchange rate that pops up when a customer pays a merchant through BitPay is likely to be more favorable than the rate they would get by selling Bitcoin on an exchange for cash. This is due to the company’s use of a custom bid and ask book that integrates live data from across the major exchanges.[1]

Regulation is a much broader social problem

The conference was a microcosm of the true market spirit. On balance, this crowd seemed to view existing regulatory structures—always beloved of industry incumbents as a way to protect themselves against disruptive start-ups at the general expense of consumers—as fairly pointless obstacles, unfavorable environmental features that would-be surviving organisms must simply be able to deal with.

Bitcoin core developer Jeff Garzik, who joined the “Borderless Solutions” panel on the final day, commented that Bitcoin just is a borderless solution by nature. The only need for “borderless solutions” per se, is for particular Bitcoin-related entrepreneurs to try to function amid the various and mixed obstacles left in place by legacy nation-state barriers.

Still, the official presence at the conference went a long way toward confirming an impression I have had for some time. Most governmental officials around the world want to figure out how to perform their various jobs, which mostly consist of applying existing legislation and administrative codes to rapidly evolving market phenomena. They are not generally out to make up additional onerous regulations just for the sake of being troublesome.

There is no need for them to do so. This is because shelves of thick volumes of legislation, administrative code, and case interpretation are already available to guide the obstruction of hapless innovators. Such things already exist and are not being conjured up anew just to harass Bitcoin enthusiasts. Ambiguity about which regulations are to apply in particular cases is also already part of the structural problematic of the legislative law approach itself. Whether this approach is just or helpful to society is a much larger topic (hint: I think it is clearly neither just nor helpful to society). Bitcoin just provides some fresh (and perhaps embarrassing) contrasts with existing systems and practices that work especially poorly.

Wieske Ebben, from the Dutch central bank, joined the panel on regulation. She (being among the approximately 2% of conference attendees who were female) clarified several times that one of the bank’s central concerns in its role as national financial regulator is to make sure new payment systems are trustworthy in the interest of consumers.

Although somewhat at the expense of Ms. Ebben, who seemed a little taken aback, Berlin’s iconic Bitcoin-kiez promoter Jörg Platzer drew a round of applause with a comment made from the seat next to her on the panel. He pointed out that word on the street has it that the public does not now consider central banks and large commercial banks themselves as icons and worthy arbiters of trustworthiness in society.

Yet this understandable focus on assuring trustworthiness is potentially quite a positive sign in light of the reality of Bitcoin (as opposed to the typical media hype). As Toni Gallippi pointed out later, many Bitcoin users believe it is among the most trustworthy and secure payment systems ever devised.

First of all, Bitcoin is immune to certain inherent weaknesses in credit cards that give rise to massive ongoing fraud and identity theft (even after decades of expensive efforts to combat such problems). A Bitcoin payment is pushed by the user, not pulled by the receiver using sensitive information. Receiver-pull methods require the transmission of sensitive financial data, making such data vulnerable to interception or hacking right out of company databases. With Bitcoin, only a cryptographically signed transaction is sent, and, unlike with credit cards, this contains no data that can be used to create additional fraudulent transactions later. With Bitcoin, identity theft cannot be used as a basis for spending other people’s money.

Moreover, Bitcoin cannot be counterfeited, a problem that continues to plague physical cash, despite a centuries-long technical battle between official money printers and counterfeit money printers, a battle that has led up to the most advanced modern papers, inks, plates, and embedded features on one side—and ongoing successful counterfeiting on the other. And as for the real traditionalists, it should be noted that metallic coins and bars, especially gold ones, were ever plagued by reductions and dilutions to weight or purity from both criminals and kings. In contrast, Bitcoin cannot be clipped, sweated, embedded with tungsten, or mixed with just a tad more copper or silver with each new minting.

Niels Ploeger, from the Amsterdam police department, was also on the regulatory panel and attended much of the rest of the conference as well. He explained that he was tasked with researching and better understanding Bitcoin to provide insights that could be useful in informing criminal investigation procedures.

One key point for investigators is that Bitcoin leaves a permanent and unforgeable record of all transactions, with amounts, accounts and time stamps down to the second. This should, in principle, be much more useful and easier to track than cash in the course of specific criminal investigations. Each bitcoin unit has a permanent, public trail behind it. Even if it does go through a mixing service at some point, this fact too can be surmised to some degree, along with the timing of the mixing.

It is true that particular addresses are not directly linked to particular human or organizational identities within the Bitcoin block chain. This is a critical feature, as the presence of such linkages on a public ledger would obviously eliminate the possibility of any user privacy for anyone for any purpose (btw, destroying all privacy is ever the dream of totalitarians).

Still, for those legitimately investigating specific crimes, block chain clues combined with other evidence can lead investigators to insights unavailable from cash. In addition, conventional banking and accounting systems, despite untold piles of regulatory paperwork, should also not simply be assumed to be immune from all manner of forgeries, frauds, and misrepresentations. Comparing one real system against the imagined perfections sometimes tacitly assumed of incumbent systems should be studiously avoided.

A point raised at another time during the conference was that for Bitcoin to succeed in an enterprise context, it will be important for organizations to be able to keep sensitive information private (for example, from competitors) and to make other information publicly verifiable (raising confidence that, for example, reserves or bonding funds are actually present in a specified account). This means that the entire range of user-defined privacy options Bitcoin offers, from 1) high anonymity (possible but somewhat difficult to actually achieve in practice) to 2) pseudonymity (traceable with some specific investigative effort; the most common case) to 3) globally public auditability (for charities or public agencies, for example), are all important, just in different applications.

A quick interlude on privacy, anonymity, and today’s DPR arrest

Just as I was about to finalize this essay, the arrest of Silk Road operator Dread Pirate Roberts was announced. While the complaint seems generally reasonable-looking in terms of the chain of evidence presented, it repeats the usual dubious claim that Bitcoin “was designed to be anonymous.” It was actually designed, which is a matter of public record, to enable people to transact securely, relatively free of fraud or censorship, at any distance, and without the need to rely on (and pay) third parties that may or may not be trustworthy (see Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (2008) by Sataoshi Nakamoto).

It should be noted that assessment of the complaint’s merits on its own terms, which must, given its nature as a positive law document, tacitly assume that the existing state of laws is as it should be, must be separated from normative views on the logic or net value of drug criminalization. For example, relevant to such assessment would be evidence that prohibition laws have a dramatic, consistent, and well-documented role in increasing violence in society, including precisely that sort of blackmail and retaliatory violence also alluded to in the complaint, violence that is typical of the operations of any market that is forced underground, such as the gang activity during alcohol prohibition in an earlier phase of US history.

Despite repeating the usual false claim that Bitcoin is inherently anonymous, the complaint then surprisingly goes into several details, each of which contradicts this claim. It discusses the public nature of the block chain and cites detailed sales data obtained from examining specific addresses. It then explains all the additional measures that the site’s operator put into place—beyond simply specifying Bitcoin as a payment method—to try to make the transactions anonymous (which they already would have been to begin with if the misleading claim of inherent anonymity were true). In the event, the arrest was made largely on non-monetary lines of evidence, specifically items such as server trails and linkages among user names.

With all the repeated media-hype that the “main use” of Bitcoin is for illicit purchases (also a highly dubious and factually unsupported claim), it should be interesting to see how much the exchange value of Bitcoin reacts over the coming weeks and months—beyond the obvious short-term panic selling followed by opportunistic buying on the dip—to the shut down of the oft-referenced black marketplace.

To serve and to secure

The overwhelming spirit I sensed at the Bitcoin Europe conference was one of service to those who can benefit from these innovations next. Now that the relevant classes of geeks and early entrepreneurs get it, how can these new possibilities be brought rapidly to everyone else, starting with some of those who could benefit most?

While several speakers reiterated the lingering difficulties of “mom and dad” or “grandma” understanding and using Bitcoin, Willem van Rooyen of SC2BTC, who is working to integrate Bitcoin into eSports (high-skill online gaming matches as spectator entertainment), reported that his target customer demographic has no difficulty at all understanding and starting to use Bitcoin with existing solutions.

Yet the question remains: How can services be made that are easier for more people to benefit from and that will be more resilient and secure with minimal reliance on user savvy?

In this spirit, early entrepreneurs are working, each from slightly different angles, to bring the current and potential benefits of Bitcoin to more and more users around the world. They will do this no matter what obstacles may or may not be placed in their paths, because this is their dream, their vision, their mission, and their rightful role.

Bitcoin as foundation layer for new possibilities

I noticed a strong confluence between my most recent reading and some of the services and technologies featured at the conference. I have been researching and thinking about legal and economic theory and how they relate for some 25 years. It was in this context that I first began to take note of Bitcoin in mid-February of this year. Since then, I have been learning the essentials of the relevant principles in computer science and cryptography as fast as possible in order to make sense of Bitcoin by combining social theory and technical theory in appropriate ways. When it comes to Bitcoin, taking a strongly multi-disciplinary approach is not optional.

Bitcoin was a major breakthrough in the advancement of several much broader sets of ideas. It has created an infrastructure layer that can now greatly facilitate further developments based on those feed-in concepts. These include smart contracts, triple-entry bookkeeping, and additional applications for decentralized unforgeable ledgers such as securely recording titles to other kinds of property.

Michael Goldstein got me started recently going back and reading key works by Nick Szabo that substantially predate Bitcoin, but also contributed greatly to the intellectual milieu out of which it emerged. Michael, along with Daniel Krawisz, will be going into these concepts on October 5 in Atlanta on the “Cryptography and Contracts” panel, and I am greatly looking forward to hearing and discussing more.

As it was, next up in my queue prior to Bitcoin Europe was the seminal article, “Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks” (1997), which I assigned myself for the relevant flights. At the conference, then, it was striking when several different developers pleaded on stage for more end-user wallet software makers to add support for multi-signature transactions. The convergence is that it is just such transactions, already supported in the Bitcoin protocol, that can make possible not only increased layers of security, but also the next evolutions in smart contracting, including escrow and assurance contracts and the likes of decentralized peer-to-peer loans and verifiable-balance safe-keeping services.

Bitcoin’s functions as information-age payment method and unit of trade may only be the beginning. Deep transformations may also come in the fundamental ways that contracts and agreements come to be implemented, recorded, and performed.

As Szabo showed, the first phases of taking traditional accounting, fiscal controls, and contracting into the digital world mostly just copied traditional paper systems and digitized and networked them. That change had both advantages (speed and accuracy) and disadvantages (privacy and security) compared to the original paper-based systems. However, new technologies could also lead to new methods that were not possible at all on paper, but are enabled for the first time ever by advances in cryptography and related developments.

To get a better image for this distinction, imagine that when powered flight was first developed, pilots had only flown routes right above existing roads. This is better and faster than surface travel, but still not great. It is only when they start to do something that only the new technology allows at all—flying straight from point A to point B, that the more interesting possibilities actually begin to emerge.

Computerized accounting has, in this view, been using the new airplane simply to move much more quickly along above the same old surface routes. In contrast, brand new options built on decentralized financial cryptography, unforgeable hashed transaction chains, triple-entry accounting, and multi-signature and other smart contracting modalities—bigger idea sets that predated and contributed to the invention of Bitcoin—look a lot more like the beginnings of leaving the old surface routes and starting to fly as birds do.

The role of social theorists

It was a pleasure at this conference to finally meet Peter Šurda, a long-time Bitcoin researcher also influenced by the Austrian school approach to economics that began taking its modern forms at the University of Vienna in the 1870s. When I started researching Bitcoin, his was among the first names that began rising toward the top of the discussion forum soup as I began to think about the monetary nature of Bitcoin. He quickly made it into my initial “knows what he is talking about” short-list. Even better, it was a bit of a relief and encouragement to me working in early March to notice that he had independently arrived at some interpretations of the relationship between Bitcoin and traditional monetary classifications that were quite similar to the ones I was initially entertaining.

Peter also told a story about our meeting in his quick post of highlights from the conference. One of my favorite short books on monetary theory is The Ethics of Money Production (2008) by Jörg Guido Hülsmann. When I asked Peter if he had read it, he said, “yes, twice.” I laughed and said that I had also read it twice. What an unusual moment! The global population of people who have done this and attended a Bitcoin conference must still be rather small indeed.[2]

Another time, Peter and I were (half) joking about the proper role of economists in the cryptocurrency revolution. He said the first response of many economists to Bitcoin seems to be denial: Bitcoin is not real and it will fail shortly, just like other hair-brained funny-money schemes throughout history. We have seen plenty of that denial phase, mainly from people who do not seem to have investigated the technology all that much.

My informal empirical generalization is that knowledge of Bitcoin and fascination with or enthusiasm about Bitcoin tend to correlate strongly, as do technical ignorance of the subject and easy categorical dismissal. Notice that we expect matters to be exactly opposite to this when it comes to unsound schemes. In such cases, the more one investigates, the less there is to like, whereas most of the enthusiasts seem to have been swayed by hyped surface appearances, and may even be unwilling to actually look more deeply.

Opposite to denial, the main role of economists, and legal and other social theorists more generally, should be to carefully observe what is happening in the real world and seek to provide systematic theoretical interpretations. It is the entrepreneurs who rule (in service of consumers, who really rule through their buying choices). It is the economists who should be running along either behind or at best next to these real actors and trying to figure out what is happening in a theoretical or more systematic way, adding some insights when and if they can.

This is especially so when an economy is in the midst of an epoch-scale revolution (as in agricultural, industrial, informational). The Spanish late scholastics, observing economic transformations in trade and money, became among the first to start writing insightfully about specifically economic-theory and monetary-theory concepts some 500 years ago. Later, first-hand observers of, and participants in, the industrial revolution—most famously Smith, and more promisingly Say, Turgot, Bastiat, and others—began to make further advances (or sometimes regresses, but still) on top of their observations of new developments.

Economists do have their rightful places. This was evident during the conference, thankfully only a few times, when specialists in other fields edged over into the proper territory of economic theory and the average quality of their causal claims then declined precipitously compared to when they were discussing, say, business, contemporary positive law, or software. This is not a call to leave everything to specialists, but a call for everyone to take steps to advance and improve their own literacy in real economics. As Ludwig von Mises wrote near the end of his landmark Human Action: A Treatise on Economics ([1949] 1998, 875):

Economics cannot remain an esoteric branch of knowledge accessible only to small groups of scholars and specialists. Economics deals with society’s fundamental problems; it concerns everyone and belongs to all. It is the main and proper study of every citizen.

Let theorists theorize and doers do

The world is upside-down to the extent that so-called economists occupy positions of administrative power and influence over their fellows to “guide economies,” a euphemism for micromanaging and telling entrepreneurs and consumers what to do and what not to do. The result is the mixed(-up) economy world we inhabit, a world that is perhaps most mixed up of all when it comes to conventional financial systems.

The world becomes reoriented when economists are positioned as observers and theoreticians, helping people understand how it is that the uniquely human capabilities of voluntary social cooperation and mutual service make society possible. Economists can help clarify the puzzle of the world in unique ways. They should observe and bring clarity to what is otherwise a mysterious chaos of real-world progress as it unfolds at the hands of consumers, investors, and entrepreneurs. Economics is supposed to be a science, not a presumptive license to micromanage and direct those who are busy doing the actual work.

For those who do chose to specialize in economics and other aspects of social theory, today offers some amazing opportunities to occupy front-row seats to epoch-scale transformations of the technologies of market exchange. Previous epochal economic revolutions happened over centuries and decades, recognizable mostly only in retrospect. This one appears to be happening over a few years, with increments measured in months, weeks, and even days.

At Bitcoin Europe, the entrepreneurs and developers were the stars. This is the world as it should be. In roles as theorists, a few of us were observing in awe, wonder, and curiosity, following a major social evolution live as it unfolds. In that particular role (playing other roles in addition might double as good research), we operate first from curiosity—to understand for ourselves—and only then to see if we can help make it easier for others to do the same.

Atlanta promises to offer a slightly different mix, still with discussions of entrepreneurship and concrete innovations, but with a little more direct material on economic and contract theory in addition. Some of the original visions that helped give rise to Bitcoin have much more unrealized promise to bring for the benefit of us all.

For all the signs put up in gloomy dismay at the course of the conventional financial world, which effectively say, “the end is near,” we who track promising new innovations need to keep putting up other signs, in different places, that add a counterpoint: “the beginning is here.”

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[1] For a recent theoretical discussion on the respective roles of unit of pricing and medium of payment, see my 14 September 2013 article: “Bitcoin as medium of exchange now and unit of account later: The inverse of Koning’s medieval coins.”

[2] For those interested, my article, “The sound of one Bitcoin: Tangibility, scarcity, and a ‘hard-money’ checklist” (19 March 2013), makes a step-by-step theoretical case as to why a hard-money position is fully compatible with a strange new currency that has no physical existence! If that seems impossibly counter-intuitive, you might understand why I spent about 9,000 words taking an initial shot at doing this. I have made a few refinements since then, not yet published, but the fundamentals remain the same.

The labor, leisure, and happiness game: Psychology, praxeology, and ethics

[Revised for improved clarity and readability on 30 July 2018].

Philosophers, economists, and psychologists have sought to define the ultimate goal or “end” of human action. Is there something that can characterize, in general, what it is that people seek by acting?

Aristotelians, Objectivists, and other philosophical schools speak of ends in a moral “ought” context. That is the most common context in which such things have been spoken of throughout history. Schools of psychology have proposed central underlying motivations behind human behavior. These vary: power, sex, growth, insight, needs hierarchies, etc. Religious traditions each offer somewhat different accounts of the ultimate role or destiny of humankind, which has been divinely placed.

Against this backdrop, the arrival of Misesian action theory was revolutionary. It defined ends in a way that was free of moral, psychological, or spiritual qualifications. Ends were logically necessary characteristics of what action is. Any moral evaluation of particular ends or accounts of central psychological motivations or spiritual purposes were all separate and additional matters. A level exists at which action can be considered as such, separately from all such add-on differentiations.

The only surprising result would have been controversy not ensuring. Objectivists accused economists of the Austrian school of amoralism due to their anchorless “subjective” theory of value that provided no moral compass.

Well, yes. Providing a moral compass is not the purpose of the analysis. Action theory makes non-moral statements about action. These are must be statements rather than ethical ought statements or empirical maybe/let's check statements. All that Misesian action theory (praxeology) can legitimately claim on this matter is that action consists of employing means in the pursuit of ends—any ends.

Nevertheless, praxeological economists still attempted to comment on ultimate ends, the attempts reflecting their wider philosophical leanings. This crept in in discussions of “labor” and “leisure” in relation to “happiness” or other versions of a purported ultimate end.

Is there some universal end of all human action and if so what? Is it seeking happiness in general, happiness as “rationally understood,” or eudemonia (“human flourishing”)? Is it acting to remove states of dissatisfaction and uneasiness in search of an elusive ultimate state of rest (Ludwig von Mises)? Is it eliminating the root causes of recurring disappointment and suffering (Buddhism)? Or something else?

Each formulation seems to paint the relative value of “labor” and “leisure” in a different light. Yet this raises suspicions. One should not expect to find such differing implications from versions of a supposedly universal definition. Negative definitions of labor seem to favor rest, positive ones activity, and some spiritual ones equanimity regardless of particular conditions of activity versus rest.

This leaves another possibility. Is there any need for praxeology to carry a concept of one ultimate end at all? Actual actions are many and discrete, each consisting of specific means/ends structures in particular contexts. These many ends do not have to all be packageable under a single characterization. A bout of removing uneasiness, for example, could come right after a day of pursuing human flourishing (a Miseseso–Rothbardian tag team), all done by a Zen master unattached to the particular outcomes of any and all such ephemeral pursuits as labor and leisure.

Under what conditions do people actually find themselves either more or less happy? To look into this question, an important article by professor Roderick T. Long on Objectivist ethical theory and Austrian school subjective value theory, taken alongside two books on the psychology of happiness, shed light.

From Mises to Rothbard

In “Praxeology: Who Needs It?” (2005; PDF), Professor Long quotes Murray Rothbard on his differences with Ludwig von Mises’s “removing uneasiness” criteria. This is what Mises set out early in Human Action (1949) as the abstract general end of all action. Mises does also use striving for happiness on the same pages. However, he most often returns to the negative formulation of removing uneasiness. This shows up in his discussions of the relationships among labor, leisure, and (dis)satisfaction.

Long wrote: “Rothbard…describes how, in his economic treatise Man, Economy, and State (1962; MES), he took care to revise precisely this Misesian doctrine (310).” In correspondence quoted in Joseph Stromberg’s introduction to MES (p. xl), Rothbard had written:

The revision purged [Mises’s] original formulation of its definite philosophical pessimism, of the idea that human beings are constantly in a state of dissatisfaction and that man could only be happy in a state of inactive rest, such as in Paradise. Such a philosophical view is contrary to the natural state of man, which is at its happiest precisely when it is engaged in productive activity.

Long explained that:

Rothbard acknowledges the possibility of “satisfaction in the labor itself,” and so grounds the “disutility of labor” not in labor’s being inherently distasteful, but in the fact that “labor always involves the forgoing of leisure,” which is also a value…The fact that leisure has value for us explains why we prefer to economize on labor, thus allowing Rothbard to draw all the essential conclusions for which Mises thought he needed the mistaken Nirvana premise. (311)

Yet Rothbard’s view that people are happiest “precisely when…engaged in productive activity,” as opposed to when idle in paradise, is also an empirical psychological claim. As such, however, it does find support in psychological research on self-reported happiness. One qualification that will emerge, though, is that Rothbard's use of the word “productive” could lead to an unwarranted emphasis on the categorization of activity types, such as work versus hobby.

Get into the flow

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi presents the results of research on tens of thousands of participants in different cultures. It found that higher degrees of self-reported happiness were associated with engagement in self-chosen, goal-directed activity structured with an optimal relationship between challenge and capability.

Self-reported happiness was higher the better persons were positioned to 1) select and revise their own goals and 2) dynamically adjust the balance between challenge and capability toward a moving zone the researchers labeled “flow.” Adjusting challenge can be relatively straightforward through choices of goal and performance criteria (quantity, quality, time, outcomes). Raising capabilities might involve taking the time to invest in capital (tools) or human capital (abilities) to increase effectiveness before further task engagement.

For example, cutting down a large tree with a dull hatchet could become frustrating. Taking the time to buy or borrow a chainsaw before cutting may turn into a more enjoyable overall experience. Moving right to managing a major logging operation with no experience in either managing or logging would most likely quickly lead to frustration, if not disaster.

In a hobby context, though hardly ever in a work context, one might lower capabilities in pursuit of the flow zone. Gamers, for example might sometimes choose to play with inferior in-game equipment, which would effectively raise their challenge level compared to selecting the best available equipment.

Golf, bowling, and some games have “handicap” scoring options. This reduces or evens out score gaps, enabling more skilled and less skilled players to more meaningfully compete in the same match, reducing boredom for the more skilled and frustration for the less skilled.

The flow research found that how activities were classified by type, such as labor, work, play, hobby, or leisure, did not impact the degree of happiness reported. Boredom, both at work and on vacation, showed up when capabilities were too far above challenges. One might look forward to finally having “nothing to do” on vacation—and then get bored with nothing to do. Frustration—both at work and in leisure or hobby activities—showed up when challenges were too far above capabilities. The challenge/capability balance influenced happiness. Categorizations of activities, such as labor versus leisure, did not.

Both at work and at leisure, research participants reported higher degrees of happiness when they had set their own goals. Even for goals that had originated elsewhere, such as with organizational leadership or a client, flow effects could still be found if the person made the decision to make those goals their own, as opposed to merely acquiescing and going along with orders.

The common element found to support higher degrees of self-reported happiness was each person having the final say on his or her own activities over both long-term strategic and short-term tactical scales. In my view, this recommends a set of social conditions that support individual-level autonomy, flexibility, and discretion. Individuals should be able to chose their own goals and how to pursue them. This includes minimizing the need to “apply for permission” before taking action, as well as maximizing individual discretion on which groups to join or leave. The only social institution capable of assuring such individual discretion and autonomy is one with consistent respect for rights of first appropriation and mutually consensual transfers of property.

The typical popular counter to such allegedly “atomistic” principles is that people are “social” creatures. However, this claim cannot justify the use of violence to orchestrate non-consensual relationships. It does not explain what is “social” about the advocacy and implementation of such violence. Actually being social entails not advocating, approving of, or implementing initiations of threats or violence.

Got game?

According to Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (2011) by Jane McGonigal, good games are designed to capture the above dynamics by enabling the player to self-adjust challenge levels and cultivate rising capabilities as challenge levels rise. Even prior to this, the player first selects which game to play, when, and with whom. Gaming entails a wide range of autonomous dynamic decisions that influence the challenge/capability balance. What difficulty level does the player select? How long does the player work on a puzzle before turning to a help clue?

Games themselves are also designed to dynamically adjust this balance. Difficulty and strength of opponents typically rise as the player gains achievements, levels, rank, and equipment. Games also often provide adaptive feedback on progress toward clearly defined goals. These are each elements that modern game designers have raised to high levels.

The popularity of gaming helps illustrate the motivational power of each person being able to seek flow states through dynamic autonomous goal selection and challenge/capability balancing. McGonigal’s central theme is that games have come to be designed to tap into motivation in a way vastly superior to typical (de)motivational structures found in schools and corporations. Lessons for institutional improvement could be derived from the study of game design.

Moreover, if we are concerned with young people being obsessive about gaming and uninterested in school, we should naturally want to examine the extents to which goals are self-selected and the challenge/capability balance is adjustable individually in gaming versus school. The answer is near. Most good games offer high degrees of player autonomy and masterful challenge/capability balancing. Most schools are abysmal in both areas.

Promoting interest in "the real world" could therefore begin by increasing the range of autonomy that young people can practice in that real world, for example, by enabling them to engage in work again.

Why will kids work ingeniously and for unending hours for in-game gold? In gaming, they can work with whom they chose and keep the gold they earn. This contrasts with the more and more artificially constrained real world in modern interventionist economies, which increasingly outlaw young people from working at all. The message to young people is: if you want to work, earn, and create, it must be in the virtual world or not at all. The analysis of action from a praxeological standpoint applies just as well to in-game action as to out-of-game action.

Psychology, ethics, and praxeology: The distinctions revisited

The psychological research from Flow and the analysis of gaming can help remove extraneous implications from past attempts to formulate descriptions of the ultimate ends of action. Relationships among labor, leisure, and happiness do not exist. Happiness is influenced by self-chosen challenge/capability balance without regard to labels such as labor and leisure.

The distinctions between praxeology, ethical philosophy, and psychology should be clearly maintained, yet valid insights from each should not be ignored either. Praxeology says, “it is/must be so by definition.” Ethics says, “one should act this way rather than that way.” Psychology says, “we observe, notice, and hypothesize.”

Meanings of "rationality" also play into this topic and clarifying this is also helpful. Long clarified the nature of “rationality” as used in praxeology, including which claims praxeology can legitimately make regarding it. When a praxeologist claims that all action is rational, it is a claim that actors employ means to the attainment of ends. This only states an implication of what action is.

However, an ethicist’s or psychologist’s definition of “rational” must specify some narrower distinctions or be meaningless for their purposes. Those wearing psychologist or philosopher hats might well be interested in whether people deceive themselves in their judgments or make poor judgments. However, such distinctions must be left behind when donning the praxeologist’s peculiar new hat. Long writes:

In a sense, then, it is true that agents always act rationally; but the only sense of this claim to which Mises is [praxeologists are] entitled is that agents always act, not necessarily in a manner appropriate to their situation in all the ways they actually see it, or even in the most justified of the ways they actually see it, but rather in a manner appropriate to their situation in the way of actually seeing it that is constitutive of their action. (309–310).

This third formulation finally leaves no room for distinctions among “rational” (as contrasted with “irrational”) qualities of particular actions as judged by any narrower ethical or psychological criterion. Instead, the meaning of “rationality” for praxeologists is a universal-definitional one. As such, it is of no use to psychologists or ethicists who require narrower definitions to work with. Indeed, it is not especially useful to praxeologists at all and might be better abandoned as a relic from a time when this distinction was not yet clear enough.

This third formulation helps refine the lines between psychological interpretation, ethical advice and judgment (“this is rational, that is not”), and universalizable statements about action. Only the third formulation is undeniable for all cases of action without further inquiry into motivation, thought processes, or value scales. Only the third statement is/must be so as a logical implication of what action means. The rest is up to the other fields.

Bitcoin as medium of exchange now and unit of account later: The inverse of Koning's medieval coins

A new article by JP Koning at the Moneyness blog revisits the idea that two monetary functions can be separated: medium of exchange (that which is used to actually buy things) and unit of account (what prices are quoted in and accounts generally kept in). He does this through a historical account of the monetary milieu of some medieval European cities. This has direct implications for viewing contemporary monetary developments half a millennium later.

In “Separating the functions of money—The case of medieval coinage” (13 September 2013), Koning suggests that a common unit of account (the pound/shilling/pence system) for pricing existed alongside a plethora of actual coins of various and sundry sizes, qualities, and metals. Each had to be repeatedly assessed and reevaluated due to wear, fraud, and outright devaluation in terms of the common unit of pricing. This had to be done so that such objects could actually be applied toward paying in specific transactions. Meanwhile, he claims that actual coins corresponding to this unit of account may well have been rare or might not have existed at all at certain times, at least relative to the mass of actually circulating crudely formed hunks of various metals (crude as retroactively judged by subsequent industrial coinage standards).

This is a thought-provoking discussion and I am sure there is more to be assessed and debated about the historical details. Nevertheless, the basic theoretical idea is that the unit used for pricing and what people actually hand over in trade to pay asked prices do not necessarily have to be the same. This implies that the problem of barter comprises at least two distinct issues: 1) no common unit of pricing for cost accounting, economic calculation, and comparison shopping and 2) no commonly accepted unit to be employed in concrete acts of payment. Koning thus seems to present a transitional hybrid case in which (1) is more developed while (2) is still a work in progress, or has broken down.

As it turns out, we are now witnessing a rapidly evolving case of just such a separation of functions. The difference is that, for now, it is the exact inverse of Koning’s medieval coins.

The opposite of medieval

Those who pay in Bitcoin today overwhelmingly pay prices that are listed in the local fiat currencies of the politically-defined jurisdictions they find themselves trading within. There are already a few exceptions, such as the Trezor high-security hardware wallet (priced at 1 bitcoin) and some mining shares, but such examples remain rare.

In current Bitcoin transactions, despite pricing still being largely denominated in euros, dollars, and the like, the actual “coin” being tendered differs from the unit of account and pricing. This separation of functions is much easier, quicker, and more accurate today than it was in, for example, Basel, Switzerland 600 years ago, due to the combination of real-time global networking and public exchange markets for both Bitcoin (see the new CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index) and other forex pairs. This means accounting and thinking about relative exchange values can easily be done for present convenience using existing pricing constellations.

According to Koning’s account of the medieval cases he describes (taken at face value for our purposes here), the unit of account itself may even have been virtual, while the actual media of exchange handed over in transactions were the various and sundry physical coins people had managed to acquire in their previous work and trading. In diametric contrast, with Bitcoin today, we have a “virtual” coin with global circulation that is mathematically perfect in its uniformity and fungibility. These ideally homogenous global “coins” now circulate next to a hodgepodge of national-monopoly units of account/payment which have all sorts of shifting real values. Specifically, almost all such “shifting” of paper currency values is downward, just at differing rates of descent.

The potential for role reversal and later convergence

If and as Bitcoin grows and its price volatility stabilizes with expanding adoption, market participants could in time come to use it as a global unit of account against which the various and sundry unstable fiat currencies continue their extended monetary Danse Macabre. Bitcoin-denominated prices could be paid in Bitcoin, of course, or they could also be paid in a local fiat money, if both traders agree. Fiat would substitute for the relatively stable Bitcoin at the current day’s exchange rate in a way precisely opposite to their current respective roles.

Beyond this, in a long-term Bitcoin success scenario, medium of exchange and unit of account functions would most likely tend to move further toward convergence—price in Bitcoin, pay in Bitcoin. This would tend to greatly enhance convenience for all the buyers and sellers of the world (meaning everyone). That is the sort of thing that the American founding generations of the late eighteenth century would have called “the common good.”

In a more recent Europe, as Philipp Bagus explains in The Tragedy of the Euro (2010), the monetary authorities of more inflationary national currencies were repeatedly embarrassed by the relative strength of the less inflationary deutschmark. They therefore sought a coordinated means of inflating through the euro system, so that rates of monetary depreciation could be “harmonized.”

Likewise, in a future world with a successful Bitcoin, the inflationary paper monies of the world (that is, all of them) may eventually become rather self-conscious if compared to a global rising-value currency. This time, however, the inflationists may have a harder time sparing themselves distress than they did in pressuring German politicians to end the deutschmark against the general sentiment of the German people.

This is because the Bitcoin “cat” is not only out of the bag; it has spawned a global tribe of at least 200,000 currently active network nodes located in nearly every corner of the earth, any one of which contains a complete copy of the block chain.

Much more difficult than herding politicians, is herding cats.

Recommended: Provocative and important new article on Bitcoin and altcoins

Daniel Krawisz has taken the time to do the cryptocurrency community a service and come down systematically, hard and at times hilariously on the many weak arguments in favor of various altcoins. In the process, his article reveals Bitcoin itself to be even stronger than it is often presented. He argues that the actual alleged threats to Bitcoin from the likes of double-spend attacks, 51% attacks and mining centralization are each much less realistic and significant in the real world than they are sometimes made out to be (although mining centralization is still something to keep an eye on).

His displayed combination of solid technical knowledge of the field with consistently sound economic reasoning is refreshing and valuable. This is more than a thorough critique of altcoins. It also functions as a fresh defense of Bitcoin against a number of typical technical and economic objections and concerns.

I had previously come to the working impression that if altcoins did gain any useful function, it would have to be in a niche application, or would simply be as a research platform to feed into Bitcoin development. Reading this article reinforced that view, and even suggests perhaps taking it further.

So go and read The Problem with Altcoins.

A banking risk premium: Mt. Gox XBT/USD spread over Bitstamp

The US dollar (USD) price of Bitcoin (XBT) on the Mt. Gox exchange has been rising steadily, but it has also been rising at rates far out of proportion to rallies at competing exchanges. It appears from various commentators and reports that the primary factor in this divergence may be difficulties and perceived risks users face in withdrawing USD from Mt. Gox (see for example, the recent post at Bitscan and this Reddit thread). George McHugh cited a recent wave of regulatory uncertainties in the United States in this connection. This includes the seizure (without warning, for a paperwork issue) earlier this year of US bank accounts associated with Mt. Gox business containing $2.9mn.

The following chart appears to illustrate this story by showing the gradually and then dramatically rising percentage spread between Mt. Gox and Bitstamp, the second largest Bitcoin exchange by volume, over the past six months (weekly weighted average data from Bitcoincharts).

According to user reports, whereas Bitstamp reliably and promptly processes both deposits and withdrawals of fiat currencies, Mt. Gox’s ability to do so, particularly with regard to US dollars, has become highly unreliable in the eyes of more and more market participants. The most reliable way to remove value from Mt. Gox is therefore perceived to be buying Bitcoin and withdrawing it, a simple, quick and fee-free procedure. This generates an on-exchange premium for Bitcoin and a steep discount for dollars due to the perceived relative risks and costs of taking delivery of the latter.

In well-functioning markets, such spreads would be crushed and equalized in short order through arbitrage actions. However, the general difficulties of using high-cost, slow and barely interoperable legacy banking systems across borders, as well as the perceived difficulties and risks at the Mt. Gox business in particular are combining to undermine otherwise glaring arbitrage opportunities. In contrast, the movement of XBT from one exchange to another is trivial—effectively costless, instantaneous and location-independent.

Tiger cub growing up? Bitcoin weekly average closing prices year over year

A young tiger already has some “tigerness.” Source: Sakurai Midori, Wikimedia Commons.

If the exchange value of Bitcoin is a volatile tiger cub at play, the beast has nevertheless been growing up year by year in the process. It was born sized about $0.05–$0.07 in July 2010. Now this youthful price tiger is three years old. Exchange data is available for 2011 and 2012, plus about half each of 2010 and 2013.

Short-term charts have their place. Chartists such as Rob Wilson at Bitscan brave the tough task of trying to provide parameters for those considering specific upcoming buying or selling decisions. However, a longer-term view should be assembled from vantage points that support a longer-term orientation. Moreover, understanding history ought to be done first and independently from attempting to look toward the future.

The way information appears or is remembered can create a range of impressions. The altitude from which one views the ground can change what one perceives: from ants to streets to towns to geological features to continents to small blue planets. It is useful to check in with the view from different altitudes and to consider which numbers are being used for statistical reference—and for what reason. Choice of statistics should be conscious and matched to its purpose.

Here is a chart of the all-time BTC/USD exchange rate on Mt. Gox presented differently than usual in several respects. First, it is built on weekly weighted-average exchange rates, which reflect not only moment-to-moment changes, but how much volume changed hands at which rate. Second, the dateline is not consecutive, but is for a single calendar year (2011 as calendar base). Each year has its own line with its respective weeks matched to the 2011 weeks within a couple of days. Third, a logarithmic scale is used.

This provides some impressions that may differ from those of typical narratives. First, weekly weighted averages de-emphasize outliers, particularly the dramatic features of rush-and-crash events so beloved of speculators, critics, and headline writers alike.

Second, in the much longer-term year-over-year view (comparing the lines to one another), Bitcoin’s exchange value has only risen, usually substantially, with a single large exception. This exception was due to the first great run-up of 2011, which started with Bitcoin breaking the psychological $1 “parity” barrier in April. Despite all the drama that followed, it never came close to falling through parity again—its next weekly weighted-average bottom was $2.36 in November. While 2012 appears relatively steady in this light, it was the cub’s earlier rambunctious leap and landing in 2011 that left behind this sole period of year-over-year decline, now visible as a mountain-shaped cross-over with the 2012 line.

But what about $266?!

The obligatory darling reference of just about any commentator on Bitcoin, but particularly journalists and critics, is the $266 high on April 10. But how significant is this number?

First of all, all trading at $266 was recorded within a one-minute period. That was also a minute measured on a malfunctioning exchange that had been pushed beyond its capabilities and was suffering increasingly long response and clearing delays.

Zooming out the perceptual scope step by step, trading proceeded at anywhere over $260 for 45 minutes; anywhere above $240 for six hours and anywhere over $200 for 30 hours on 9-10 April. These are actual trading prices.

The next way to widen the perceptual scope is with weighted averaging. Turning even to daily weighted-average data shows anything over $160 only for 8-11 April, a total of four days (yes, that is a 1 and not a 2 in that $160). Even the peak “266” day’s own daily weighted-average was $214. Returning to the weekly weighted average, the all-time peak weekly figure was just $138.

Here is the above chart switched to a linear scale.

This linear view does leave a more extreme impression of 2011 and 2013 than the logarithmic view, and the penny trade of 2010, with its weekly average peak of $0.28, disappears into the baseline, but it is still considerably less extreme-looking than a chart with $266 at the top. Instead, the all-time chart of weekly weighted-average prices tops out at the relatively mundane $138.

Still, all told, that little tiger does seem to be growing up. It grows larger each year. How cute and silly when a cub ambushes a rustling leaf and tumbles off the side of a fallen tree.

Yet grown-up versions of such creatures hunt down and eat large animals. As the years go by, dismiss this still playful creature lightly at your own risk.

Bitcoin, price denomination and fixed-rate fiat conversions

People are apparently still talking about the monetary regression theorem and its relationship to Bitcoin. There still seems to be a lot of confusion out there around both. Using a confused version of the regression theorem to criticize a confused version of what Bitcoin is does not seem like a promising recipe. I have been trying to focus on finishing up a longer work on Bitcoin and Austrian theory, but here for now are a few updated comments that came out of an online discussion today.

One newer point that has emerged in my work in progress is that the regression theorem is a theoretical explanation of how something that was at one time not money could ever become money in the first place. However, the theorem is not made to be a criterion of judgment for determining what is or is not money after the fact. Upon observing something actually functioning as a medium of exchange, the economist’s task is to explain how it came about. The role of the regression theorem was to explain specifically how something could have ever gotten started in a medium-of-exchange role to begin with. Judging and dismissing are unrelated to the function of the actual regression theorem. It is supposed to be explanatory and illuminating.

One area of confusion seems to surround the relationship between Bitcoin and fiat money, specifically the idea that Bitcoin has somehow emerged from fiat money, something like the way the euro got started on the backs or the various European national currencies. I addressed this briefly in my 27 February 2013 article, but here are some further observations.

Such transitional conversions are done with fixed exchange rates set by law. The new currency takes up its value from the old one in an administratively managed process. This applies to historical metallic coin monies giving rise to paper money certificates through a fixed conversion rate (later dropping the convertibility) and it applies to retiring paper monies being used to launch a new paper money, as in the case of the euro. However, the attempt to apply this translation/transition model to Bitcoin runs into serious trouble because no such transitional official fixed exchange rates have ever existed for Bitcoin. Quite the contrary. Governmental actors are only beginning to so much as roughly understand Bitcoin years after it already entered active use. It emerged on the market from scratch as its own good, certainly not from any official fiat.

It could be objected that regardless of origins, Bitcoin is only able to keep functioning through its relationship to fiat money and fiat money pricing. It is a mere strange shadow of the existing systems. Goods and services are priced in fiat money and a Bitcoin equivalent is paid. Bitcoins can be bought and sold referencing current market pricing on the most liquid exchange, Mt. Gox. In other words, this argument implies, Bitcoin could not function without these props.

This raises a number of interlocking issues. Bitcoin is now useful for many reasons, among them transferring value that may or may not have been obtained through the sale of fiat money and that might or might not end up being used to buy other fiat money in the future. On the other hand, while there are certainly active speculative traders on the exchanges, there are also folks buying Bitcoin with fiat money with no intention of selling it again into fiat money, but only of using it to buy goods and services in the more or less distant future. There are merchants using Bitpay so they never have to “touch” Bitcoin, but there are also merchants giving discounts for payment in Bitcoin, and accumulating the Bitcoin. There are consumers holding Bitcoin ready to use and other consumers that might only obtain specific amounts of Bitcoin for some specific purpose and then return to a zero balance. There could be some Bitcoin miners who mainly only ever sell Bitcoin for fiat money, but never buy any with fiat money. Everything is possible.

One point the Austrian school has long emphasized in monetary theory is that while money is special in certain ways, it is also a good itself, not a mere veiled marker or representation of other values. It is a type of good distinguished from other goods and services mainly by its higher marketability.

It is true that Bitcoin users have benefited greatly from the existence of market economies with functioning price structures. Pricing is still done for the most part in local fiat currencies and will probably continue to be unless and until Bitcoin becomes more stable in purchasing power than the fiat money that users are comparing it to, each in his own decision-making context. Automatic software price conversion makes it possible for the system to piggyback on existing and familiar price structures in each local area with immense convenience.

Yet I do not think there is any fundamental reason that Bitcoin-denominated pricing of goods and services could not evolve from scratch if it hypothetically had to. Fortunately, it does not have to. If no money existed at all, it would be necessary to get it going. We just have the convenience of already being able to rely on existing market prices for goods and services and the further convenience of being able to reference real-time market prices from organized exchanges. An argument could be made for just taking the easy road and using them. I think this is all just to the good of contextualized convenience and not so theoretically fundamental. Still, there are already Bitcoin-priced goods and services, particularly starting within the Bitcoin economy. For example, the Trezor Bitcoin hardware wallet is on pre-order for the price of 1 BTC.

The extent to which Bitcoin users reference fiat pricing in commerce is probably what has given rise to some  conflation with what I think is the quite different process by which one fiat money is converted into another by the official declaration of a fixed conversion price. Paper euros probably could never have taken off unless the official exchange rates with their predecessor currencies had been declared by law and the predecessor currencies had also been phased out by law. Without such official (“fiat”) declarations, printed euro notes would most likely either have been worthless or negatively valued due to the need to pay to store or dispose of them.

Bitcoin never had any official conversion price (or official anything), so how could it have gotten started? Bitcoin could never have begun to function in any other roles, such as transferring value derived from paper money over distance and converting into other paper money, if some initial users were not willing to trade any valuable goods or services for Bitcoin itself to begin with. After it began to be traded for other goods and services, one could observe it functioning in various, increasingly useful roles on that basis, some in interaction with existing monetary systems, but so long as its market price remained zero, it could not begin to serve in any such trading roles.

I think the initial-value question is probably much more narrow and technical than it is sometimes made out to be when the name of the regression theorem is invoked (the name; not necessarily the understanding). That question is how to explain a movement from a zero indirect-exchange value to non-zero indirect exchange value. Reaching non-zero from zero, especially in a digital computing context, is all that is needed for the rest to follow.

Anyone still talking about the regression theorem and Bitcoin might do well to focus on detailed historical research from the year 2009 and 2010 at the latest. After that, the deal was already done, leaving room only for efforts at explanation of what had happened. The rest was up to adoption, entrepreneurship and network-effect growth.

Now in audio on YouTube: Bitcoin and regression theorem article

I just got a message today from Graham Wright with a YouTube link. So I went over and there was my first article on Bitcoin, concerning the regression theorem, already done in a great audio version with accompanying slides. What a great surprise, one made possible by the magic of Creative Commons. Here it is!

Bitcoins per gold ounce weekly close YTD

With the dramatic movements of both gold and Bitcoin this year, I wondered how they would look directly in terms of one another. Not finding just what I was looking for online, I built a simple spreadsheet to chart the cost of an ounce of gold in terms of Bitcoin.

For the sake of simplification, I artificially assumed that the US dollar functioned as a neutral intermediary between the two during this timeframe. Because I pieced together existing data from two sources and then combined them, I also simplified by using just a simple weekly close for each. The Bitcoin data comes from Bitcoincharts.com and the gold data from Investing.com. This is what emerged:

The number of Bitcoins per gold ounce fell rapidly and steadily for 14 weeks from over 120 Bitcoins per ounce at the start of the year, hit hard ground at the beginning of April at 13 Bitcoins per ounce, and then trended at an average weekly close of 13 Bitcoins per ounce (with 10.6–16.0 extremes) in the 12 weeks since then. It might be interesting to try put together a similar chart with more detailed data than a simple weekly close. As usual, the past cannot predict the future, but from the standpoint of economic history, this seems like an interesting sequence of events.

Here is a closeup of just since April 1: