The Anatomy of a Money-Like Informational Commodity: a Study of Bitcoin by Tim Swanson
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The Anatomy of a Money-like Informational Commodity: A Study of Bitcoin By Tim Swanson 1 © Copyright 2014 by Tim Swanson Cover art credit: Matt Thomas and Invisible Order This manuscript is released under the Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International license: to copy, transmit, share, adapt, remix, make commercial use of and freely distribute this work. 2 Table of Contents Preface .......................................................................................................................................................... 4 Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................................... 5 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 6 Chapter 1: Bitcoin in theory and practice .................................................................................................... 9 Chapter 2: Public goods.............................................................................................................................. 24 Chapter 3: The Red Queen of Mining ........................................................................................................ 40 Chapter 4: A Bitcoin Gap ............................................................................................................................ 78 Chapter 5: Bitcoins made in China ............................................................................................................. 91 Chapter 6: Living in a trusted, post-51% world ....................................................................................... 105 Chapter 7: Network effects ...................................................................................................................... 117 Chapter 8: TCPIPcoin and User Adoption ................................................................................................ 122 Chapter 9: Deflation in theory and practice ............................................................................................ 137 Chapter 10: Bitcoin’s command economy and knock-on effects ........................................................... 163 Chapter 11: Zero-sum Entrepreneurship ................................................................................................. 176 Chapter 12: Token movements and token safety ................................................................................... 188 Chapter 13: Social engineering and groupthink ...................................................................................... 208 Chapter 14: Separating activity from growth on Bitcoin’s network ....................................................... 224 Chapter 15: What Altplatforms can teach Bitcoin .................................................................................. 236 Chapter 16: Potential alternatives and solutions ................................................................................... 250 Chapter 17: Legal specialization .............................................................................................................. 267 Chapter 18: Conclusions ........................................................................................................................... 281 About the author ...................................................................................................................................... 285 Endnotes ................................................................................................................................................... 286 3 Preface This book is a compilation of research I have written and presented over the past four months, revised, updated and corrected relative to the original source material. The purpose of this manuscript is to continue the dialogue on issues that are increasingly important to the direction of cryptoprotocols, specifically Bitcoin, and decentralized applications in the near future. This book is divided into three sections. The first third describes the current state of software and hardware development. The middle portion reflects on the economic conditions within the Bitcoin network as well as user adoption. The last third covers alternative platforms and legal considerations that could impact the on-boarding of users onto the Bitcoin network. While there is some repetition and overlapping throughout the following chapters the redundancy is necessary as this field of study is simply put: hard. Tim Swanson San Francisco, August 2014 4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following people for providing encouragement, feedback, constructive criticism, contrarian views and anecdotes over the past several months: Cal Abel, Derek Au, Dave Babbitt, Kevin Barnett, Isaac Bergman, Gwern Branwen, Austin Brister, Richard Brown, Oliver Bruce, Anton Bolotinsky, Vitalik Buterin, Preston Byrne, Hudson Cashdan, DC, Joseph Chow, Ben Coleman, Nicolas Courtois, Zavain Dar, Wendell Davis, Robby Dermody, Mark DeWeaver, Ray Dillinger, Tom Ding, John Dreyzehner, James Duchenne, Dan Forster, Byron Gibson, Philipp Gühring, Brian Hanley, Martin Harrigan, Marshall Hayner, Alexander Hirner, Karl Holmqvist, Ron Hose, Petri Kajander, Zennon Kapron, CukeKing, John Komkov, Andrew Lapp, Sergio Lerner, Jonathan Levin, Adam Levine, Matt Lewis, Taariq Lewis, Adam Marsh, Andrew Mackenzie, Andrew Miller, Alex Mizrahi, Pamela Morgan, Massimo Morini, Marco Montes Neri, PN, Pieter Nooren, Dan O’Prey, Ryan Orr, Jackson Palmer, Andrew Poelstra, Antonis Polemitis, John Ratcliff, Robert Sams, David Shin, Greg Simon, Peter Surda, Koen Swinkels, Ryan Terribilini, Peter Todd, Eddy Travia, Chris Turlica, Bryan Vu, Jack Wang, Dominic Williams, Andrew White, Yanli Xiao, Joshua Zeidner and Weiwu Zhang. Throughout the book I refer to their insights. This is not an explicit endorsement of their opinions or services but rather serves as an on-the-ground reference point. Nor by providing me with quotes do they endorse this book or my opinions. Furthermore, in the interest of financial disclosure, I do not currently have any equity positions in the firms or companies discussed throughout, nor was I provided any financial compensation for the inclusion of companies or projects. This book was entirely self-funded; no government, organization, company, institution or individual provided financial compensation or remuneration for the creation or direction of its content. 5 Introduction My title comes from a paper, Bitcoin: a Money-like Informational Commodity, by Jan Bergstra and Peter Weijland who attempted to classify Bitcoin through an ontological analysis, showing that it is not even “near money” only “money-like.” The paper analyzed existing literature and clarifies why we cannot technically call Bitcoin the various things it is now popularly labeled – such as a “cryptocurrency.” More specifically, Bergstra and Weijland mention the disadvantage of calling Bitcoin a Candidate cryptocurrency (CCC) is that “there is no known procedure for leaving the candidate status.”1 However in a recently published paper, Formalising the Bitcoin protocol: Making it a bit better, W.J.B. Beukema claims that by specifying the protocol in mCRL2 (a formal specification language used for modelling concurrent protocols) and verifying that it “satisfies a number of requirements under various scenarios” we have just such a procedure:2 These findings contribute to the position of Bitcoin as a (crypto)currency, as we have to some extent proven that Bitcoin satisfies properties it should at least have in order to be safe to be used as currency. According to Dave Babbitt, a Predictive Analytics graduate student at Northwestern University, “it sounds like there is sufficient justification to call Bitcoin a crypto-currency, right?3 The problem with that, according to Bergstra and Weijland, is that confirming its status ‘depends on a plurality of observers, some of whom may require that a certain acceptance or usage must have been arrived at’ before it can be classified as such: Upon its inception Bitcoin did not possess that level of acceptance, and for that reason Bitcoin has not started its existence as a cryptocurrency. Being a cryptocurrency is a status that a system may or may not acquire over time. Assuming that Bitcoin is considered to be a cryptocurrency at some stage then there will most likely be variations (alternative designs and systems) of Bitcoin around (perhaps hardly used any more) which have not been that successful. Such alternative systems should be given the same type, so that Bitcoin might be considered a successful instance of that type. Clearly CC cannot be that type as it contains only systems that have already become successful to a significant extent. Because being a cryptocurrency is the primary success criterion for Bitcoin its classification as a cryptocurrency amounts to a value judgment or a quality assessment rather than as an initial type. Thus in line with Babbitt’s reasoning, it is okay to assess the quality of Bitcoin as that of a cryptocurrency, but initially it was something else. And that something is a Money-Like Informational Commodity (MLIC) – viewing Bitcoin as a system providing a platform offering the following features: 1. a system for giving agents access, and 6 2. facilitating the exchange of that access, to 3. informationally given amounts measured in BTC (the unit of Bitcoin), through 4. the scarce