Other Values: Considering Digital Currency as a Commons

The purpose of money is to function as a medium of exchange in the service of transactions for good and services. In the context of modern economics, money takes the form of various state issued and endorsed fiat currencies. Cryptocurrencies seek to decentralize, democratize and possibly destabilize the current model and mechanism of exchange in favor of market-based, cryptographic, and technological modes of commerce. Because the advent of cryptocurrencies are so recent, researchers are only just beginning to explore the role, sustainability and impact of digital currencies on the global economy. This study will explore whether cryptocurrencies are transitory fads, sophisticated Ponzi schemes or legitimate future monetary systems, thru the analysis of three major themes in the existing literature: consumer confidence/trust, responsible regulation and the democratization of monetary structures.

Economic and Political Weekly, 2019

The growing market for cryptocurrencies, when viewed through the lens of Nobel Laureate F A Hayek’s radical idea of abolishing governmental monopoly over currency and introducing unregulated private currencies, reveals fascinating insights. Though over four decades apart, the resemblances and the dialectics of the two radical developments are uncanny.

International Journal of Cyber-Security and Digital Forensics, 2018

The authors discuss matters concerning Cryptocurrencies in a global context. We also describe what a cryptocurrency is and provide a history of the currencies and their differences with government regulated moneys. Discussion follows with why these digital currencies are important not only to criminals, but also corporations and governments, and outlines the process for which transactions are held legitimate and how the data within the coins are stored. Although criminal activity has profited with cryptocurrencies, these currencies have become more mainstream. The authors identify key forensic artifacts that may be found on digital devices to track transactions and aid in connecting criminals to their malicious actions.

MoneyLab Reader: An Intervention in Digital Economy (ed. Geert Lovink, Nathaniel Tkacz, and Patricia de Vries), Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures., 2015

Bitcoin is promoted as an alternative to currency, and even at times as an alternative to money, but neither Bitcoin’s development nor its promulgation emerge from thoughtful analyses of money or currency as they currently exist, let alone the thought and history that have figured in their development. The grounding problems that Bitcoin advocates consider central are not the ones that major thinkers about money or currency, from the Right or the Left, have deemed important. On the contrary, those grounding problems are largely ideological: the desire to bypass the (apparently lawful) credit card and PayPal “blockade” of WikiLeaks, on the one hand (usually mentioned as the instigating event in the widespread use of Bitcoin), and the desire to bypass central and/or commercial banks for either the creation of money (as many of the more rabid advocates insist) or the provision of financial services (the main interest of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin paper), on the other. The former ideas emerge from a libertarian, anti-state politics familiar from much of the WikiLeaks story. The latter ideas emerge from the profoundly ideological and overtly conspiratorial anti-Central Bank rhetoric propagated by the extremist Right in the US, and which despite its overt “anti-bank” rhetoric, on most thoughtful analysis, serves rather than resists the interests of banks and big finance (much as despite its anti-bank rhetoric, Bitcoin itself is now promoted by banks, investors, and venture capitalists). Scholars of money like Mary Mellor and Ann Pettifor have suggested meaningful alternatives to the current money system, but Bitcoin has very little in common with their proposals, which would require societal assent as well as technical innovation. The lack of any thorough, non-conspiratorial analysis of existing financial systems means that Bitcoin fails to embody any true alternative to them. The reasons for this have little to do with technology and everything to do with the existing systems in which Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies are embedded, systems that instantiate the forms of social power that cannot be eliminated through either wishful thinking or technical or even political evasion: the rich and powerful will not become poor and powerless simply because other people decide to operate alternate economies of exchange. Lacking a robust account of transforming these systems of power, even without Bitcoin’s flaws, a “perfect” cryptocurrency would exacerbate, rather than address, the existing serious problems with our monetary and financial systems. Because it operates without such an account, Bitcoin’s real utility and purpose (and that of the cryptocurrency movement in general) can be better understood as a “program” for recruiting uninformed citizens into a neoliberal anti-government politics, understanding the nature and effects of which requires just the attention to political theory and history that Bitcoin enthusiasts rail against.

A Blockchain is an emerging Technology now-adays mostly from last two years a more funding is also spent on research of the technologies used. This Technology is used almost in all the sectors of real world applications which use E-Tag or Electronic or Online. It can change the dimensions of the digital operations by performing distributed ledger transactions in daily human's life by averting the third parties. Blockchain Technology is situated under the cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Facton, Bitshares, Namecoin and Truthcoin platform and implemented in a Distributed environment with decentralized database having strong consistency, reliability and security support. This paper will gives a demonstration about the future challenges, working and some of the applications of Blockchain Technology.

This paper aims to bridge the knowledge gap in existing literature on Bitcoin, Blockchain, and FinTech.