If you have to convince somebody that something is money, it almost certainly isn’t. But there has been a marked shift in the world of digital currencies and crypto-denominated digital assets: their advocates seem to have long moved on from trying to convince us of their new and radical alternative to what they semiderisively (and semiaccurately) refer to as “fiat” currency.
The flaws in this story have always been apparent. For one, there has never been anything particularly “new” or “radical” about cryptocurrencies, the reactionary fantasy of apolitical money having a long and storied history. Meanwhile, the medium-of-exchange status of the “political” fiat currencies (which are more accurately described not as fiat- but as credit-based currencies, backed up by countless legal obligations to pay), particularly that of the key currencies (the dollar, the yen, the pound sterling, and the euro), has never been less in question.
For Bitcoin and its numerous equivalents, the opposite has become abundantly clear. They are not reliable media of exchange outside the confines of certain Central American dictatorships; not hedges against inflation; and due to changes in their value becoming highly correlated with conventional and volatile financial assets like stocks (and with erratic social media activity of billionaires), decidedly not reliable stores of value (rather, “three stocks in a trench coat”). The ancillary argument, usually evoked by those who concede these flaws, that the attendant technologies (notably the distributed ledger system known as “blockchain,” a glorified version of Google Docs or Excel) will transform our relationship with money, has also faded into the background, a process no doubt hastened by mounting consternation over the exorbitant environmental damages associated with crypto “mining.”
What crypto has instead revealed itself to be is a naked instrument of financial speculation and…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Dominik A. Leusder
