Blockchain and the state: Vehicle or vice?
For all of these monetary systems to function an authorising intermediary has stood over issuance of currency, and stood between transactors, providing them with the capacity to trust one another. This stabilises the value of the medium of exchange, the security of the transaction, and the integrity of the record, whatever it may comprise. The intermediary accrued power via the indispensable role it played in facilitating trust, and the centralisation of authority, as corollary, literally created civilisation as we know it. The seats of political and financial power have thus remained, to this day, with governments and central banks.
Yet in 2007-8 this manufactured structure of centralised trust was revealed as anything but trustworthy. The financial and political implosions of the GFC became a unique opportunity for an alternative to this system of centralisation. In January 2009 Bitcoin came quietly into existence utilising the blockchain, to become the first working example of a decentralised digital currency paired with a triple-entry accounting method.
In January 2009 Bitcoin came quietly into existence… the foundational underpinning of the world’s monetary system had been silently by-passed.
Bitcoin required no intermediary for financial transactions, no central authority; the foundational underpinning of the world’s monetary system had been silently by-passed. Reaction was muted at first, and mostly dismissive. Now, almost a decade later, one Bitcoin is valued at 13 times the price of gold (at the time of writing).
Outside of a very small, specialised community, awareness of the significant potential of Bitcoin’s digital architecture was almost nil until about 2013. When commentators did weigh in, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, were as likely to be hailed as the future of money and destined to sideline traditional repositories of authority, as they were to be derided as a ‘scam’ or yet another false dawn in the as-yet unrealised decline of the state, and its traditional seats of political and financial power.
Yet in only a few years, when Bitcoin failed
