his essay is about the modern bank note and bitcoin and how each standardizes money. Whether constituted by paper or protocol, whether performing (or failing) as a store of wealth, a medium of exchange, or unit of account, bank notes and bitcoins enact interchangeable equivalence with themselves, every one-pound note or bitcoin the same as another, and their mode of passing hand-to-hand or peer-to-peer also conscripts their holders as readily interchangeable. This essay examines the different ways that these two types of currency engineered this standardization, and I show how the new blockchain technology of Bitcoin innovated upon the standardizing process that made bank notes interchangeable. As I recount in the essay’s first half, standardizing physical bank notes involved re-imagining them detached from the temporality of any specific contractual transaction so as to be, like coin, grasped as immediately physically interchangeable, and the bank note used print and the act of reading to do so. In the essay’s second half, I discuss how, by contrast, Bitcoin standardizes money not by operating on any physical object, not even a digital one, but by creating a sense of immediately fungible value through maintaining the unique historicity of every transaction in the system.
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In witnessing the emergence of the internet’s money with bitcoin, we have potentially arrived at an historical moment parallel to an earlier one. That earlier moment was when the paper bank note inaugurated a national form of printed currency in England as part of a nineteenth-century revolution in mass-print media. This essay is about the modern bank note and bitcoin, and how each standardizes money. Whether constituted by paper or protocol, whether performing (or failing) as a store of wealth, a medium of exchange, or unit of account, bank notes and bitcoins enact interchangeable equivalence with themselves, every one-pound note or bitcoin the same as another, and their mode of passing hand-to-hand or peer-to-peer also conscripts their holders as readily interchangeable. This essay examines the different ways that these two types of currency engineered this standardization, and my aim is to show just how the new blockchain technology of Bitcoin innovated upon the standardizing process that made bank notes interchangeable.1 Their juxtaposition reveals two distinct epochs in the history of standardizing money.
As I recount in the essay’s first half, the English bank note transformed between 1782 and 1855 into a standardized printed physical object serving as a currency. Although a longer history of government-issued paper money extends at least from the Chinese in the eleventh century through the dramatic collapse of assignats during the French Revolution in the late eighteenth, the paper bank note’s adoption as a currency alongside coin by England, the global center of finance in the early nineteenth century, may be said to have instituted the modern national-capitalist form of paper cash that still remains familiar today. In reconstructing this story of the bank note, my interest is not to adjudicate its role in economic history nor to relate it to sociological theories about money, such as how money organizes society (Ingham 2004, Dodd 2014) or enacts collective memory (Hart 1999) or gets expressed as language through taking the shape of a signifier (Saussure 1916, Goux 1990). Rather, joining Poovey (2008) in a close historical examination of the development of forms of economic writing and Papadopoulos (2015) in a cultural analysis of currency, I study narrowly the standardizing of the printed set of English bank notes, and ask what their standardizing reveals about paper money and, vice versa, what paper money reveals about standardization in the nineteenth century. My key argument here is that standardizing physical bank notes involved re-imagining them detached from the temporality of any specific contractual transaction so as to be, like coin, grasped as immediately physically interchangeable, and that it used print and the act of reading to do so.
In the essay’s second half, I suggest that whether or not one is skeptical of bitcoin’s long-term future, one must see it as an historical innovation in standardizing money. Many people today misapprehend bitcoin and blockchain in holdover metaphoric or skeuomorphic terms (e.g. Swartz 2018), comparing the technology, for instance, to a distributed ‘ledger’ (which it is not) or interacting with it through ‘accounts’ or ‘wallets’ holding bitcoin (which are impossible). My key argument here is that the way that Bitcoin actually works upends that of the bank note, which became a standardized object through erasing the historicity inscribed in its origins as a printed contract: the Bitcoin protocol, which importantly and perhaps surprisingly does not operate on any physical object, not even a digital one, creates a sense of immediately fungible value through maintaining the unique historicity of every transaction in the system. Moreover, through deploying the internet’s peer-to-peer distributed network coupled with the trustworthiness of cryptography, Bitcoin tracks and enacts those transactions autonomously, as if omnisciently. Indeed, Bitcoin autonomizes standardization. (Hence the explosive cross-industry imaginings of the possible applications for its blockchain technology [Casey and Vigna 2018].) On the one hand, the value of this new money was standardized like a bank note: as immediately offering a sense of value interchangeable across time. On the other hand, instead of some trustworthy authority such as a national bank producing this interchangeable temporal sameness through erasing a token’s historical particularity, now the interchangeability of value was constituted and endowed with authority through the new technological capacity of the system to know absolute historical particularity. So though still both necessary components, value and its authority split into different operations for the first time. Bitcoin understood in comparison to the bank note thus explodes from within our current theories of standardization (Star 1999, Latour 1999, Bowker and Star 2000). It represents a new epoch both in the standardizing of money and in standardization itself by re-imagining how one might manage the historical particularity of objects so as to make them equally interchangeable across time.
Standardizing bank notes
How did paper bank notes develop into a world-wide technology of separate national currencies? The origin story of special concern here lies with the standardizing of English bank notes that arose – perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively – not as a replacement for coin as a prevailing technology but in close relation to it during the years from 1782 to 1855. As is well known, much of the history of metallic coin concerns that the nominal amount a coin represented, its face value, could, and would, diverge from the price commanded by the gold or silver bullion that supposedly upheld that face value. Minting and melting and minting again: there was a clear, if complex economics to fashioning money out of the commodity of gold or silver, notwithstanding that those metals’ value as a commodity depended largely on their capacity to serve as money (Vilar 1976, Desan 2014, p. 58–78). Standardizing coins – or rather ‘standarding’ them as it was called, since the verb standardizing was a nineteenth-century term – primarily described a mint hammering, or later machine stamping, in nominal units – a talent, a pound, a dollar – a piece of metal for which they had assayed the fineness of gold or silver and ensured the weight that would legally be in that coin. Gold and silver coin was thus understood to be money because it contained a commodity equivalent, and its standarding gave to the people holding coin in their hands a sense of its bearing immediate value for market exchange of the units it represented.
Back in early eighteenth-century London, bank notes were a type of paper credit on par, for instance, with bills of exchange or checks, as promises to pay (Poovey 2008, p. 42–51, p. 174–196). Seen in hindsight, the earliest notes had originated with London’s goldsmiths, acting as bankers, who gave receipts for deposits of gold or other valuables. These receipts were made out to a specific person for an exact, potentially fractional amount; they were capable of being presented multiple times to be partly redeemed; and, by endorsing their payment over to others, they also came to be negotiable and circulated between people as a means of payment, such that, for convenience, the phrase ‘or bearer’ was often added after the blank for the payee’s name. Though bank notes, bills of exchange, and checks all had different economics and formats, they functioned similarly. As the historian Albert Feavearyear (1963, p. 258–259) makes plain,
There was no important difference between the [bank] note signed by Francis Child, the banker, which said: “I promise to pay to John Smith or order, on demand, the sum of £186. 14s. 2d” and the draft [of a check] signed by John Smith … addressed to Francis Child which said: “Pay to Robert Brown or order the sum of £186. 14s. 2d.” No one regarded the former as in any way more entitled to be considered money than the latter.
Different types of paper orders to pay circulated as means of payment; most everyone saw them as credit – as promises to pay – distinct from money as coin.
Then came the Bank Restriction Act of 1797. The Restriction Act temporarily suspended people’s right to redeem the Bank of England’s notes in coin. In 1797, the amount of gold that the Bank of England had to back its notes was running low. No desire prevailed in England to experiment with paper currencies but gold was scarce, fears of a French invasion were pitched, and a rumor spread that French troops had landed. Anticipating a frenzy of notes to be cashed for the safety of gold that it did not have, the governors of the Bank of England, the King, and prime minister William Pitt temporarily suspended the convertibility of the Bank’s notes. Hundreds of leading merchants immediately patriotically pledged to take the Bank’s notes at full value, thousands more reiterated, and England entered the Restriction era, in which bank notes were not redeemable in coin.
From the perspective of the standardization of the bank note, what had distinctly not happened was that coin had not freed itself from being a measure that was also a commodity equivalent. Coins were not re-minted as tokens. Neither had coin metamorphosed into paper bank notes. Coins stood in the same relation to their standarding as ever. There were just not many available. On the other hand, bank notes, issued now for the first time in the small, coin-sized denominations of £1 and £2, were proving during this shortage that, given a community pledging their belief in their exchange value, they could perform a currency function akin to coins. As the Restriction Act continued to be renewed, the famous radical journalist William Cobbett (1810, p. 106–107) vigorously railed against this paper money; here he is in 1810 explicating a Bank of England note (the two names of the people he mentions would customarily appear; they refer respectively to the Bank’s head cashier and a junior one):
It says, “I PROMISE to PAY to Mr. Henry Hase, or Bearer, on demand the sum of one pound.—London, 28 June, 1810.—For the Governor and Company of the Bank of England— (Signed) J. Knight.” Well, now, this is all very regular. I am the “Bearer” of this note; and, as Mr. Knight promises to pay me the sum of one pound on demand, I may, if I like, send my note in for payment. But, what … will he pay it off in? Why, if he pleases, in another note as much like this one as if they were two twin brothers. Same colour, same substance, same weight and same feel. It is, in fact, therefore, a promise to give the Bearer, on demand, a promise to pay.
As evidence of the evolution of the standardized bank note – ‘all regular,’ the ‘same,’ like ‘twin brothers’ – Cobbett sharply articulates the status of bank notes in the Bank Restriction era as circulating ‘a promise to pay’ another ‘promise to pay,’ and he thereby parses the way in which gold coin remained the bank note’s point of reference. Rather than coin being outright replaced by a paper pound, coin’s scarcity during the temporary exigencies of war time helped draw the bank note down closer to itself, as it were, as currency. As Cobbett’s scenario plays out, during the Restriction era the bank note began to parallel, or mimic, the temporally immediate circular self-reference of a primary medium of exchange – a guinea coin denominates a guinea – that coins achieved by virtue of all being ‘standarded’ equivalents, of all being made the same weight of a commodity, gold. And yet, as Cobbett decries, the notes seemed to refer to a never-arriving future – promises of promises.
The subsequent restoration of the convertibility of bank notes to coin did not transform the bank note back into a type of paper credit like a check. It was just the opposite. Parliament’s aim was explicitly to continue consolidating printed paper bank notes as part of the circulating medium paired with coin.
‘Money he would define to be “the coin of the realm;” and bank-notes to be promissory notes payable in the same coin. He would not encumber himself with the consideration whether or not deposits, checks, and bills of exchange, performed the functions of money,’ declared Robert Peel in 1844 (Manchester Guardian, 8 May 1844, p. 2). He was arguing for the final Parliamentary Act in a series of Acts, which he had won since 1819, that taken together helped enable England to construct a standardized set of bank notes as currency along with coin. Peel continued, ‘He looked upon promissory notes payable on demand as having a wholly distinct character. They were a substitute for money, passing from hand to hand, operating on prices as money does, and performing all similar functions.’
As Brian Rotman theorizes (1987, p. 50), paper money redeemable in coin ‘appeals to the very anteriority that … it has the capacity to deconstruct.’ The paper bank note was becoming standardized as a currency through building a relation with coin’s equivalency, but, unlike a bank note, the standarding of coin simultaneously created the sameness of coins on two potentially divergent fronts: as an equivalent, containing a certain weight of gold, and as a measure, indicating a nominal value. The standardization of the physical bank note that made it like coin ostensibly concerned only the latter, its capacity to function as a measure of nominal value in units of, say, five pounds or ten. And yet, as I am now going to argue, the process of standardizing the English bank note did also make it like coin – ‘passing hand to hand’ as Peel remarked – through capturing the immediacy of valuation imparted in coin, just not through being made of a commodity equivalent like gold. Two different but concurrent transformations – I will scrutinize each in turn – combined to achieve this effect of immediacy: the bank note’s turn away from named payees to anonymous ‘bearers’ and the delimiting of the source of bank notes to a single national bank, the ‘Bank of England.’
The first transformation at which I want to look closely is how, shedding that which tied bank notes to specific individuals of a single originating contractual transaction, bank notes instead projected their use by variable, interchangeable bearers. This transformation is one previously touched on: that the Bank of England’s notes originally were always made out to a named individual, either to the drawer or to whomever the drawer designated, for exact, often fractional, amounts. As I mentioned, almost from its beginning, in the 1690s, the Bank of England printed the two words ‘or Bearer’ after the space to be filled in with the payee’s name. That phrase enabled the bank note to circulate more easily beyond the original transaction, the details of which transaction were also inscribed by hand in the date, the number of the note, and the cashier’s signatures. A bank note made out to one of the bank’s own tellers, satisfying the legal requirement for an assignable name who could eventually endorse the note, tilted the note even further toward the ‘bearer’ and away from any specific named individual’s particular transaction, and this practice of authorizing the bank’s cashier as payee instead of the drawer grew increasingly customary. All notes began, beginning in 1782, to be made out to the Head Cashier, Abraham Newland, and then, in the wake of the explosion of Bank of England note issue entailed by the 1797 Bank Restriction Act, Abraham Newland’s name was simply inscribed in the space once used for the named payee. ‘The fact that the payee’s name would no longer be subject to variation made possible a proposal … that notes should be “ready made out” in advance,’ records historian A.D. Mackenzie (1953, p. 19), and
This proposal provides interesting evidence that the number and date of notes must have now become as divorced from reality as had the payee’s name. The date was no longer the date of issue, and the numbers would run up to a figure that seemed appropriate to the demand for notes of the denomination concerned; a far cry from the time when each day would open with the issue of Note No. 1, bearing the actual date of issue.
The new reality, one might amend, was that the bank note was mutating from a pre-printed form into an object made of printed paper re-imagined as usable by anyone engaged in exchange. Countersignatures disappeared in 1805. Machines began to stamp dates and serial numbers onto printed notes in 1809. Whole, preset amounts prevailed – ‘five,’ ‘twenty.’ The traces of a specific transaction with a specific individual were vanishing and, in the 1855 redesign of the note, the printed name of the Head Cashier as payee also finally disappeared. Only ‘Bearer’ remained (Figure 1).
Figure 1. ‘Bearer’: Courtesy of the Bank of England Museum.
The implied user of a Bank of England note became the unidentified possessors of it as a physical object. Shorn of particularizing contractual details tying it to an individual’s transaction in time and place, this interchangeability resembled that offered by coin, but there was at least one key difference. It was produced through printed language. Its implied user was an implied reader as well. My point is not that people were reading every bank note; of course ordinarily modern bank notes conjure barely a confirming glance at that which is understood as pre-read, a semi-conscious, eye-shallow mime of reading, and the print also partly contributes toward creating a duplicate image. But I am arguing that it matters that bank notes were printed and could be read and that the process of standardizing English bank notes partly hinged on the printed pronomial ‘Bearer’ along with the other text conspiring to indicate through reading the capacity of the bank note to create a shared fiction that this particular object was available equally to all its users.
It mattered, further, that the act of reading typically occurred in conjunction with holding the paper on which the words were printed. That re-enforced a lexical circle in which this object declared itself to the ‘bearer’ who discovered through reading it their anonymous role as a variable bearer. What defined the standardization of the English bank note was this shearing away of specific, contractual named individuals to instead construct a direct, circular relation to the physical object. The bank note was speaking through print its own standardization as ideally usable interchangeably.
Moreover, by defining itself instead as that which took its meaning from being held, the standardized physical object of the bank note solved a problem of temporality. The bank note had originally, you will recall, been a contractual promise to pay between parties. It bespoke futurity. To gain the kind of immediacy of value that coin garnered from also being a commodity, the paper bank note redirected its reference to the immediacy of itself as a set of physical objects and the now of their being held.
In doing so, the promissory aspect of the bank note was not simply nullified. On the contrary, that promise was crucial to the bank note’s standardization. By constructing an immediate, present relation through interchangeable ‘bearers’ holding it as a physical object, the standardized paper bank note folded its aspect of futurity into the present moment. This seeming temporal paradox is familiar. Today most forms of money are understood in such terms. Their immediate value derives from – or call it ‘derivative’ of – the economic state of affairs unfolding in the future.
Indeed retrospectively an entire alternative modern history of money, uncoupled from mythic origins in barter and slightly less fixated on commodity exchange, can be seen to spring into clearer and more powerful view post-bank note. I am referring here to the state, or chartalist, understanding of the history of money, pioneered in Adam Müller’s early nineteenth-century German nationalist notions and greatly strengthened through the twentieth century by Georg Knapp’s The State Theory of Money (1905). In brief, chartalism sees money as originating in tribute and taxes. Money is that which enables one to hold and pay off liability. Beginning in the medieval era and continuing for centuries, the wooden Exchequer tallies, for instance, that were used as receipts and claims for taxes circulated as money. Such forms of account money, the chartalists emphasize, even precede archeologically the invention of coin. Far from money being that which is used to redeem credit or settle debt, money is credit and debt. And why not? Such a definition would, not least, make sense of a standardized paper bank note that folded the futurity of contractual promises to pay into the present moment of its passing hand to hand.
During these same years, 1782 to 1855, when the paper bank note was standardizing toward a coin-like immediacy of valuation by replacing its origin in an individual’s specific transaction with the circular relation of an interchangeable ‘Bearer’ to the physical print object, a corresponding decontextualizing transformation unfolded as well for the other party to the original contractual note – the bankers. This transformation is the second of the two that I wish to scrutinize. At stake in this other transformation is not the named depositor but the named Bank and the bankers who initially signed each bank note. In the beginning, a founding assumption of bank notes was that one had best know and have confidence in those people with whom one was banking: selective contractual interpersonal relations based in trust replaced the gold that one was not physically holding.
Up till 1844, in England, it was accepted that all the many different banks might offer their own notes. Among these the Bank of England enjoyed, however, a unique position from its outset in the 1690s that seeded its eventual monopoly over notes: it held a Royal charter granting it to shareholders; it quickly garnered (in 1708) the exclusive right to be the only joint-stock bank in England; its notes predominated in the global center of finance, London; and because the bank originated in a loan to the government, those notes were readily accepted by the government for payment. More than any other bank, the Bank of England, true to its name, was understood as plighted to the people of the nation generally and not merely an instrument of its governors and shareholders.
For all the other English banks issuing notes, individuated semi-personal contractual banking relations initially obtained: private banks were limited by law to partnerships of no more than six people. As the industrial revolution expanded, merchants and others organized small private banks in staggeringly multiplying numbers. They were the mode of banking in English towns and provinces with ‘about 120 outside London in 1784, 290 by 1797, 370 by 1800, and by 1810 at least 650’ (Mathias 1969, p. 169). These banks issued notes – in 1813 bank notes were being issued by 733 country banks counts Feavearyear (1963, p. 210) – and so England was awash in a variety of bank notes. None of these many different bank notes, including the Bank of England’s notes, circulated much at a distance, and, excepting Bank of England notes, which banks held sometimes in lieu of gold, all would conventionally be discounted or rejected beyond their localities. Then, in 1825, a slew of these private country banks failed, and the majority reaction boiled down to that they had over-issued notes. Parliament responded with the 1826 Joint-Stock Bank Act. Scotland, which had long dealt with a scarcity of coin by using paper bank notes, had not suffered from the crisis because, it was reasoned, its banks were joint-stock banks with risk and capacity spread more widely among shareholders. So the 1826 Joint-Stock Bank Act sanctioned the formation of joint-stock banks beyond sixty-five miles of London while also now for the first time allowing and encouraging the Bank of England to open branches outside of London.
From the perspective of standardizing bank notes as a form of currency in England, after 1826 there were still many different bank note issues, but now they no longer indexed recognizable individuals in the same degree. Bank notes increasingly flowed from Directors who acted for anonymous shareholders fully liable, as the partners had been, if their bank failed. After failures came in great numbers in 1836 and again in 1839, Parliament resorted again to solving economic problems by policing the issue of bank notes. As the pointedly titled Sir Robert Peel’s Act of 1844, Regulating the Issue of Bank Notes, Vindicated observed (Arbuthnot 1857, p. 2), ‘they consider[ed] that, although the principle of the convertibility of bank notes was recognized by [the 1819 Convertibility] Act, it was imperfectly carried into effect so long as a discretionary power of issue was left to many independent banks.’
The 1844 Bank Act created a separate note-issuing department in the Bank of England that was mandated to reserve a proportion of gold, and the Act declared both that no new banks could issue notes and that if a bank halted their note issue or merged with another bank or opened a branch in London, their right to issue notes expired. The Bank of England’s notes, which had already begun to dominate outside London with the extension of their branches into all the major towns – one estimate puts them at three-quarters of all notes by 1844 (Mathias 1969, p. 356) – were thus ensured a future monopoly while their notes’ convertibility to gold was hardened by the mandate of a law-enforcing government. Appropriately for an industrial-capitalist era, an amalgamation of the nation state with a shareholder corporation spawned a paper mint called the ‘Bank of England.’
Standardizing the English bank note thus came from winnowing alternative banks’ notes down to Bank of England notes. The originating source of a bank note – which bankers? did they inspire confidence? – withered as a criteria differentiating notes. For two parties entering into an everyday exchange using a bank note as money, the fact of their effecting their transaction with the aid of a trusted third-party did not at all diminish, but it grew opaque and delocalized. Where ‘bearer’ created through print a pronominal interchangeability of the people using the object, ‘Bank of England’ announced through print a proper noun that conjured the interchangeability of the physical object because one fiver became as good as another insofar as all assessment of any alternative issuing parties had been precluded.
By having one central bank mandated to hold gold for the national community as a whole, the social relations of trust superficially expanded to include even the holder of the note. Or more accurately, the national-citizen bearers of a Bank of England notes now distinguished what Papadopoulos (2015) argues also shapes the iconography of currency: their paper currency as their own in distinction from that of other nations. The printed bank name no longer referred the bearer of the physical object to which local (or not local) bank among banks was being trusted, but rather to the immediacy – in a spatial sense – of the political boundaries in which the physical object was being held. Here again, if less vividly, the act of reading helped to lock in a recursive, circular relation between the holder and the physical object. The words ‘Bank of England’ implied (or failed to) a reader’s physical coincidence within the governmentally-administrative cartographical location of the physical note: is one presently holding this bank note here? Titling the note in printed English confirmed, and also bolstered, that its bearers belonged, or did not, to a national territory being imagined through vernacular print documents organizing an imagined citizenship of readers (albeit some of whom might be illiterate or non-English-speaking).
At this point one may also discern a significant further relation between ‘Bearer’ and ‘Bank of England.’ Recall again that ‘Bearer’ erased the specific historicity of the object that had once been inscribed in its contractual details and instead, as I argued, produced a circular relation between the anonymous possessor and the object that created a sense of immediate value in the now of its being held. In the context of that circular self-reference, the ‘Bank of England’ dispensed as well with the specific contractual historicity of the object – all English notes come to originate indistinguishably from a single source – except in one key respect: that bank notes all had to be true notes of the Bank of England, that is, one duplicate of the tangible physical set actually manufactured by the Bank. Anyone might hold them, but not just any copy of this physical object would do. Unlike, say, a standardized metal screw, bank notes were delimited as units of the authorized set from whence their authority. (This set could of course be expanded and contracted within a range.) In fact the recursiveness of the reading moment in which a ‘Bearer’ recognizes a bank note depends on this condition of the note also belonging to the bounded set from the Bank of England because otherwise the distinction between holding a bank note and simply a copy of a bank note collapses and for the note to serve as a measure of value it cannot, as money, be thus unrestrictedly available. Through a standardizing of immediate value imagined via print and reading arises the necessity for authenticating the physical printed objects as units of an authorized set, not forgeries. There are three existential axioms of bank notes’ standardization in this regard: (1) to be unvaryingly the same as each other, (2) to be different from all others that are not they, and (3) to be each singular units of the set of themselves. To touch briefly on each: (1) to achieve clonelike sameness John Oldham implemented a plate transfer press in 1836, which printed the metal plates from which to print the notes, and, in 1855, the duplication process advanced again using electrotyping, in which electric current in a solution sets metallic molecules flying to conform to a plate’s oppositely-charged mold. (2) For the Bank of England, the special crispness of the paper and, most of all, the watermark, which was the security feature the Bank specially deployed from its early beginnings through to its 1855 redesign, were a primary means for warding off counterfeits. (3) The serial numbering of bank notes paradoxically enables a note to be undifferentiably interchangeable with other notes of the set rather than differentiating it from them because the singularity of the serial number registers that the note’s holder possesses one of the set of the Bank’s notes.
In sum, English bank notes underwent a standardizing process defined by shedding the named individuals of a specific contractual transaction to become interchangeably used by any ‘Bearer’ of the physical print object, thereby absorbing the temporality that had construed its value in terms of futurity into the present moment of, again, its being held – now – as a physical print object by its Bearer. That circular self-reference also consolidated as the bank note standardized through depersonalizing and eliminating variety on the banking side of note issue until only the ‘Bank of England’ remained. Rather than indicating trust in one bank among many possible banks, ‘Bank of England’ came to name rather the locational immediacy of being held – here – in a nationalized territory imagined partly through its self-organization via print documents, including the bank note. In this now and here of a Bearer holding a Bank of England note, the only history of the standardized physical object that required consideration for the marketplace was whether the Bank of England had truly made that note as a member of its authorized set of duplicate notes.
As the history I have reconstructed reveals, this standardization arose through canceling out the specific contractual historicity of the actual singular physical object’s originating transaction along with its later circulation through other transactions. Instead, for a paper bank note, its possession – the holding of it – came to equal proof of past transactions. Because a bearer held this physical object here and now, that served as adequate evidence – at least for ordinary market exchange – that all the note’s past transactions validly led to this bearer. In the case of a paper bank note, one possesses the value the money represents with a sense of immediacy despite its not being a commodity equivalent because its standardization negates the meaningfulness of the object’s unique historicity. Just the reverse, as I will explain, is true for bitcoin.
Standardizing cryptocurrency
A tiny message written into the first transaction of the first block of transactions of bitcoin famously addresses Bitcoin’s invention in relation to its contemporary economics and politics. In the portion of the block’s transaction information called the coinbase, which ordinarily indicates a transaction’s previous parent transaction but in the case of a bitcoin-originating transaction can be filled with arbitrary data, an English phrase appears in the genesis block as a kind of ancestral input to the Bitcoin protocol. The phrase quotes a front page headline from the London Times: ‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.’ As a kind of manifesto inscribed within a data fingerprint, this tiny quotation’s appearance within the genesis block of Bitcoin obviously protests both the global financial industry and the national governments with which they are so closely aligned, presenting as evidence for their dysfunction a snippet of the world-wide economic meltdown that began in 2008. Perhaps unintentionally or perhaps not, extracting a newspaper headline per se also neatly jabs at the previous primarily one-way communications regime of broadcast media that Bitcoin, as a peer-to-peer internet protocol, pointedly supersedes. (Or it supersedes again – given the web’s domination by corporations and nations with an asymmetric downstream orientation coupled to the surveillance of individual users, Bitcoin and blockchain also sometimes get hailed as Internet 3.0.) In short, this headline-cum-manifesto as an English-language quotation – complete with its bibliographic reference – embedded amid (hex) data running in a C++ program really does read as an interpolated quotation within the larger speech act that is Bitcoin, where the speaker or speakers are presenting themselves here as a member of the internet’s global public and addressing that public through offering up an alternative monetary infrastructure to inhabit (Kelty 2008, Swartz 2018).
Oddly the quotation of the news headline also clearly serves an additional instrumental purpose – and it is one that especially speaks to this essay’s contention that Bitcoin ought to be understood as an innovation in the history of standardization. There ordinarily being no way to know a newspaper headline before its publication and – crucially – there being no way to change even a digit of the historical data of Bitcoin transactions kept block by block means that the headline also usefully and intentionally provides an external time-stamp for the genesis of the Bitcoin protocol. That beginning cannot at least ever be dated to before 03/Jan/2009.
What does this dating of the genesis block of Bitcoin transactions have to do with standardization? In the case of the bank note, I recounted an historical process of standardization in which the physical object of bank notes gradually shed their historical particularity – their contractual specifications of specific parties, dates, places, and amounts – to create through print a sense of their immediate, interchangeable value as money. In the case of bitcoins, there is meaningfully no such corresponding gradual historical process of standardization to reconstruct. Though of course Bitcoin arose partly by combining software insights developed over the previous decades and of course the protocol undergoes updating and of course as well Bitcoin evolved as part of the history of the technology of computing and economics and so on, still the Bitcoin protocol is unusual in being, unlike the bank note, born as it were whole, with a ‘genesis’ block after which follows block-by-block within, and internal to, Bitcoin the history of all and every transaction. Here, as with the bank note but differently, approaching the history of the standardization of bitcoin requires conceptually enfolding that the technologies of standardization themselves centrally involve imagining managing historical particularity.
The first, then, of two dimensions of Bitcoin that I want to suggest make it matter as an innovation in the history of standardization is that the value of one bitcoin is interchangeable with another because, paradoxically, every bitcoin transaction is absolutely not interchangeable but rather fully particularized in its historicity within the Bitcoin system. Whatever may be bitcoin’s worth in terms of its capacity to purchase commodities or its price in other currencies, the fungible value of a bitcoin gets upheld by the non-fungibility of the transactions. Hence, again, a primary argument of this essay is that where bank notes standardized through erasing the specific particularities of the contracts in which they originated, bitcoin garners its standardized interchangeable value through radically and meaningfully different means: the Bitcoin protocol’s capacity to know the unique historical particularity of every transaction. In a sense, bitcoin overturns the way in which to become a currency the printed bank note had to resolve its promissory dimension – its orientation to a future moment of realization in gold coin – into the present moment of its passing hand to hand. Every peer-to-peer bitcoin transaction folds the entire past of previous transactions into its present moment and thereby ensures the immediacy of its validity as a unit of currency.
Indeed a core insight of the Bitcoin protocol was to abandon earlier attempts to keep track of all the transactions of a digital token serving as money and instead to focus on transactions and work solely through transactions: did a transaction occur only once and for a valid amount? The reason for this focus is that the major obstacle to trusted transactions online peer-to-peer is the double-spending problem. You can’t give away your money twice, and how could one stop someone on the internet from sending value in the form of digital cash to one person from then sending it again to another? The whole design and power of the internet partly lay in coupling the computer’s glorious ease of duplication to the speed, scope, and reach of transmission. In relation to the standardization of cash, the internet thus would seem to operate like a forgery machine. Prior efforts to create a peer-to-peer digital cash (notably, for instance, David Chaum’s Digicash), always involved trying to ensure trust in the transaction – often through technologies that wound up in Bitcoin such as time stamping and digital signatures (Chaum’s breakthrough).
As the creator, or creators, of Bitcoin, writing under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto, articulated in the 2008 white paper announcing Bitcoin (p. 1), Bitcoin offered ‘a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.’ Because trust in a peer-to-peer transaction fails for the payee if the sender can make a transfer more than once (double-spending), payees all need to know that another such transaction has not occurred and cannot occur, and, as Nakamoto says (p. 2), ‘the only way to confirm the absence of a transaction is to be aware of all transactions.’
In using the Bitcoin protocol, one does not have, receive, or send a thing, like a digital ‘coin.’ One initiates a new transaction. One can do so because a previous transaction occurred that allows one to validly perform a new transaction. In fact all the previous transactions that led up to one being able to initiate one’s transaction are verified (how this verification occurs will be discussed subsequently), and if all the past transactions check out as valid, then one’s transaction becomes an input that results in an output which is nothing more than the fact that the transaction one just did can be verified and operate as the potential input for another transaction. If an ordinary cash transaction might be imagined to look like this:
Bitcoin works like this:
For those unfamiliar with the technology of Bitcoin, it may be clarifying here to grasp that Bitcoin transactions all come in amounts. So let’s say someone sends you .3 bitcoin. There is now a transaction to an address for which you have a private key enabling you to sign off securely on a transaction and that transaction can serve as the input for .3 bitcoin to another transaction. But let’s say you want to send .2 bitcoin to someone else. Bitcoin allows you to signal a transaction with the input .3 but since bitcoin is nothing but a chain of transactions the Bitcoin protocol also helpfully allows you to split your transaction: sending .2 to one address and .1 to another one that you also control with a private key.
That is how one makes change, as it were, in Bitcoin since what one has is control of an input for a transaction for a certain amount previously transacted to an address in your control. (Software can make this invisible, but importantly it is still what is happening.) Conversely, if a number of transactions are made to addresses for which you have the private keys and thus control, you could take those transactions and send them as a transaction to one address, combining value:
The preferred method is to generate a new address for every transaction. But since one can technically re-use an address, people understandably sometimes cling to addresses as if an address were an account. But there are no accounts upon which to draw or deposit bitcoin. Transactions follow transactions. And the program always runs forward, such that transactions are, like cash, never reversible once they have been firmly included in the chain of transactions. In Bitcoin protocol all the transactions being signaled across the network are gathered together about every ten minutes into a group, or a block, and all these transactions are verified as valid in the chain of previous blocks of transactions, creating a blockchain. The very first transaction in a block is special, however. It comes from nowhere. The computers working to validate the transactions all provide for that first transaction an address that each controls, and, for the computer that winds up validating that block of transactions, that transaction-from-nowhere becomes a payment. (‘Mining,’ it is misleadingly called, and it will continue till a limit of twenty-one million bitcoin.) That is how bitcoins originate. Receiving an originating bitcoin transaction or combining or splitting value are not the most important aspects of Bitcoin. But they are, I think, the most effective for bringing into focus that Bitcoin works not with any physical object, not even a digital virtual one made of 1s and 0s. It works through chaining transactions.
From the perspective of standardizing money, Bitcoin is thus not a computer protocol designed to handle money. The transactions of the protocol are the money. Through the Bitcoin protocol, behaviors and relations are standardized in rules for transactions whose enactments conjure the imagining of money. ‘Holding’ bitcoin is a computer interaction. It is a pause in the unfolding chain of transactions awaiting a send that is also a spend.
Bitcoin has been poorly understood in this respect. As Bitcoin educator Andreas Antonopoulos (2016, Vol. 1, p. 81–2) wonderfully rants:
In bitcoin, every single term and design metaphor is wrong and broken. Let’s go through the list. … First of all, a “wallet.” What is a wallet? A wallet is something that stores money. Not in bitcoin it isn’t. The money isn’t in the wallet; the money is on the network. … Let’s get down to basics: “Bit – coin.” Coin. What a terrible word. What a terrible brand. Coin. Take the most abstract form of money we have ever created, that is based on a completely decentralized network that has no coins, and then name it “bitcoin.” Just to confuse everyone. A coin … is two generations of technology back and a far less abstract, much more tangible, physical representation of money. … When miners mine, they don’t create coins; … Addresses don’t have balance in bitcoin. There's no such thing as a balance of an address. An address controls outputs … All of the terms are broken. The problem is, from a design perspective, instead of the metaphor informing our expectations, it is misinforming our expectations.
For us, the point is not that the various bridge-metaphors between old and new ought to be ignored as ghosts. They enter into the life of the technology. Zimmer (2017), for instance, beautifully analyzes the historical significance of the metaphor of ‘mining’ and what it reflects about bitcoin’s economic politics. Still, ‘misinforming our expectations,’ they are. Perhaps the most entrenched holdover metaphor currently misdescribing the blockchain is distributed ‘ledger.’ My ellipses above cloak that even Antonopoulos clings to the term. But, as he well knows, this ledger shows no balances, does not operate through transacting account money, tracks no particular entity’s debits and credits, and one could go on. Meanwhile, there is already a metaphor: ‘blockchain.’
Similarly, various visualizations of bitcoin add to the miscomprehension. The image of a gold-colored coin embossed with lines simulating computer chip circuits surrounding a presently prevails. The coin (Figure 2) alludes to the gold-like attributes to which bitcoin explicitly aspires. By contrast, contemporary artist Matthias Dörfelt’s series ‘Block Bills’ (Figure 3) artistically symbolizes bitcoin as paper cash; each bill was generated by running code using the hash of a block as input. There is much that could be said about these representations, but the salient fact here is simply that visualizations of bitcoin can be so different because no physical object exists to contradict them. Bitcoin, along with the other cryptocurrencies that have followed in its wake, of course require a weighty material infrastructure of wires, satellites, computer hardware, electricity, and so on, but bitcoin is not a physical object – not even, as one might justifiably have assumed, a digital electronic one, a coin of bits.
Figure 2. Getty images stock photo. Istock Unreleased/Pixelfit via Getty Images.
Figure 3. Block Bill 01. Archival digital print on paper. ©Matthias Dörfelt, 2017.
Is this standardization? If it is, it is a mode of standardization that upends the process of making physical objects shed their particularity for the purpose of making them interchangeable. Instead the Bitcoin protocol formalizes particularity. In the case of a bank note, standardization could still be usefully defined, as Joseph O’Connell (1993) specifies, as ‘the creation of universality through the circulation of particulars’ where a crux is that the circulating physical particulars subordinate, to the extent necessary, their natural given historical uniqueness by becoming duplicates of a standardized set and thus are enabled to perform their functions interchangeably. By contrast, the Bitcoin protocol creates universality through creating a universe – a system – in which circulation in the shape of transactions for specified amounts can unfold and in which the system’s total knowledge of the unique historicity of all these transactions engenders the imagined relations of circulating amounts of a unique particular physical object, a bitcoin, that is also completely standardized as a measure of value, exactly the same across time as the rest of its ilk. The Bitcoin protocol thus does not matter here because, like all computer communications, it lays down standards enabling that communication (outside of which inputs and outputs would be unparsable). Neither does Bitcoin matter here because it has been anointed the standard cryptocurrency. On the contrary, far from winnowing alternative norms, Bitcoin has spawned many competitors. Rather, the Bitcoin protocol matters because it intervenes in the fact that standardization had proceeded through the erasure of historical particularity so as to enable interchangeability across time – implying an eternal present – and, instead, to say it again, invents a universe in which that temporal aspect of standardization paradoxically proceeds through its omniscient capacity to track historical particularity.
This reminder of the system’s omniscient awareness of all bitcoin transactions brings us to what I want to suggest is Bitcoin’s second, related innovation in the history of standardization: its autonomization of standardization. There are two key aspects that combine to produce this autonomization: first, Bitcoin’s enactment as an internet protocol, which means the transactions unfold peer-to-peer across a distributed network, and second its securing of those transactions as trustworthy through cryptography.
The first aspect, that Bitcoin is an internet protocol, means the transactions themselves occur peer-to-peer and thus bypass, say, the Bank of England or other third-party institutions, governmental or financial. A primal aim of Bitcoin from the beginning was enabling such direct exchange on the internet, which mimics not only the hand-to-hand circulation of paper cash within a nation but also that of metallic coins (a form of ‘digital metallism’ [Maurer et al. 2013, Zimmer 2017, Ammous 2018]). As every web user knows, there are no serious obstacles to performing financial transactions online using the existing banking system. Today the internet sweats electronic digital money from millions upon millions of web-based marketplace exchanges, whether Visa credit transactions or transfers between accounts kept in computerized bank ledgers. This mode of transacting is not, however, peer-to-peer. As Nakamoto (2008, p. 1) succinctly put it in the opening line of the white paper announcing ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’: ‘Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments.’
‘While the system works well enough for most transactions,’ Nakamoto continues (p. 1), ‘it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model.’ Thus does Nakamoto introduce the very existence of a technological alternative to a ‘trust based model’ of money, challenging a primary definition of money, held by many economists, sociologists, and historians, as an exchange transaction between two parties who need not fully trust each other because they have trusted in the authority of a third party providing some token representing and measuring value. Bitcoin does not exactly falsify this definition, but in a long comparative historical monetary view, one can also see that, from the perspective of the internet, routing financial transactions through banks in nationally-backed fiat currencies lacked the kind of less-trust-based, immediate valuation people had once endowed on coin through making them of the commodities gold or silver. John Locke, for instance, famously defended having a metallic standard for money because the valuing of gold and silver meaningfully outstripped the boundaries of kingdoms and states and instead implicitly posited the individual as the creator and holder of value in exchange. As polymath cypherpunk Nick Szabo would explain (Peck 2012) of his protocol for bitgold, a forerunner of bitcoin, the goal was ‘to mimic as closely as possible in cyberspace the security and trust characteristics of gold, and chief among those is that it doesn’t depend on a trusted central authority.’
From the perspective of autonomizing the standardization of money, the defining fact about the internet is that it works through protocols to create a distributed network. To review briefly, the most important protocols forming the internet and enabling peer-to-peer communication are a pair called TCP/IP. Together TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and IP (Internet Protocol) organize how to fragment and wrap data into small addressed packets and then transmit those packets of data across a network, computer handing off to computer, until the data is reassembled by the destination computer. TCP/IP allows the sending and destination computers and all the transmitting computers, however different they might be, to communicate peer-to-peer as long as they follow the protocols, nor does any node serving the network need know anything more than how to talk to the several others to which it is directly connected. The protocol guides which connection is likely to get a packet of data closer to its destination, until it arrives at a node that can directly pass the data to the destination, where the packets of data are reassembled. Thus can computers communicate, peer-to-peer (P2P). They do not do so ‘in person’ with a direct connection, but through a network, or rather a network of networks, an inter-net: a system not centralized, nor merely decentralized, but distributed (Figure 4).
Figure 4. ‘Centralized, decentralized and distributed networks’ (Baran 1964, p. 2).
Hence in his account Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (2000, p. 36), Tim Berners-Lee, who first devised what evolved into the world wide web, remembers:
What was often difficult for people to understand about the design was that there was nothing else beyond URIs [later renamed URLs], HTTP, and HTML. There was no central computer “controlling” the Web, no single network on which these protocols worked, not even an organization anywhere that “ran” the Web. The Web was not a physical “thing” that existed in a certain “place.” …
I told people the Web was like a market economy. In a market economy, anybody can trade with anybody, and they don’t have to go to a market square to do it. What they do need, however, are a few practices everyone has to agree to, such as the currency used for trade … .
The release of Bitcoin in early 2009 extended the internet to implement Berners-Lee’s erstwhile analogy between protocols and currency as a potentially functioning reality. And I do mean specifically the internet. The Bitcoin protocol is not an extension of the world wide web (which in a rough sense is interwoven atop the internet) because it is the internet that underlies peer-to-peer communication between computers.
Most importantly, because all bitcoin transactions unfold across and are handled on the internet, Bitcoin not only consists solely in transactions rather than things transacted but also each transaction exists in no particular place on Earth but rather gets signaled and spread out all around the network, while all the transactions are stored as well across the net in copies of the blockchain. Thousands of computers are running the Bitcoin protocol – e.g. some acting as servers for it, many working competitively to validate blocks of transactions, and many more signaling transactions. To paraphrase Berners-Lee, there is no central computer ‘controlling’ bitcoin, no single network on which the Bitcoin protocol works, not even an organization anywhere that ‘runs’ it. If there were, then the system would depend on a third party: whomever was controlling the network running the protocol, whomever could manipulate the blockchain. No corporations or nations, no .com or .gov sites, grant access to bitcoin. Instead the distributed network of the internet enables Bitcoin to enact transactions peer-to-peer (and significantly there is only one internet, not competing internets). As with gold coin, bitcoin’s peer-to-peer transactions transfer value directly between exchanging participants, but where the ‘standarding’ of gold by mints authorized coined money, standardization here proceeds autonomously, absent any centralized controls.
If the internet provides the media through which bitcoin transactions flow peer to peer, bypassing the national currencies of central banks and governments and standardizing all bitcoin’s holders (human or otherwise) as interchangeable, the cryptographic aspect of Bitcoin replaces the government and banks in their role of providing trust in cash transactions.
The proficient may skip ahead, but for those unfamiliar with the use of cryptography in Bitcoin, it can be summarized as serving three basic functions. In none of them does cryptography mean encrypting a message so others cannot read it. Bitcoin transactions are, for instance, broadcasted unencrypted. Indeed it is crucial that anyone can see any and every transaction. The same is true for the source code. It is public. Cryptography in Bitcoin is rather a means to create security through a radical imbalance of the amount of work required to move in different directions across the mathematical steps of an algorithm from input to output and back. It must be easy to check a solution is correct, but unbreakably-lock-hard to discover it. Thus through the 1970s technology of private key infrastructure (PKI), a short alphanumeric string gets used as a public address that is paired with another short string – a private key – used to generate a secure digital signature, ensuring none of the data signed has been changed and that only the holder of the private key could have signed it. That is how the system establishes a transaction has been authorized by the owner of the public account. In the case of the blockchain, cryptography means taking the data that is gathered into a block of transactions and finding for that data a numeric string of a certain length, called a hash, that is based on an algorithm. Again the way the algorithm works it will result in a totally different hash given the slightest change in data and the hash itself cannot be predicted, only found by guessing. As is widely understood, in Bitcoin computers contend to verify a block of transactions by competing to find a hash of a set difficulty for that block. Doing so stops any one computer or even a large number of them from controlling the blockchain because it requires many computers to solve – using brute computing force, requiring guessing again and again – the cryptographic puzzle. (Proof of work this competition is appropriately named.) The blocks chain these hashes together. That chain ensures agreement on what data constitutes the blocks and enables consensus though the computers must coordinate asynchronously across time and over unreliable links (a problem known familiarly as the Byzantine Two Generals’ Problem). Finally, through even more hashing, all the transaction data within a block also gets cryptographically compressed (in Merkle trees) and so previous valid transactions can also be verified easily. To perform a new transaction it is not ever necessary to examine – what would be too laborious even for computers – the entire past transaction-by-transaction. In these several ways, Bitcoin’s past, which is the historical truth of its transactions, becomes secured by cryptographic work.
‘Bitcoin revolutionizes trust’ is the catchline Antonopoulos (2016, Vol. 2, p. 12) formulates for this achievement in cryptography. Though the necessity for social trust otherwise hedges bitcoin and cryptocurrencies on multiple other fronts (Dodd 2017) – e.g. in currency exchanges, in the storing of private keys, in even one’s faith that the internet or Bitcoin’s code will not be rigged or hacked – the standardization of bitcoins through cryptography autonomizes the security, or the confidence, in the exchange transaction itself formerly provided by a third party central authority. Such a money, those subscribing to a state-theory of money insist, must be a mirage. By contrast, ‘That any economic mechanism can be run without trusted intermediary, is very exciting,’ Nick Szabo celebrated (Szabo 1997) in a 1997 piece with the apt title ‘The God Protocols,’ in a section named ‘Mathematically Trustworthy Protocol.’
Years earlier, as early as 1988, Timothy May, one of the original cypherpunks and a leading engineer at Intel, foresaw cryptography’s potential historical economic significance. He prophesized (May 1992), with a nod to Marx, that ‘A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy’:
Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions … .
The technology for this revolution—and it surely will be both a social and economic revolution—has existed in theory for the past decade. The methods are based upon public-key encryption, zero-knowledge interactive proof systems, and various software protocols for interaction, authentication, and verification … .
As May explains elsewhere (2001, p. 69), anarchy means here not ‘lawlessness, disorder, and chaos,’ but rather the facility to operate without a governing authority. My argument strongly echoes that distinction. At least insofar as it flies under the flag of standardization, a revolution potentially portended by Bitcoin and blockchain technology conjoins, among other things, the lawfulness of computer code, an orderliness borne of uniformity, and clockwork predictability.
May’s comparison of a cryptographic revolution to that prompted by the printing press only too readily confirms that the standardization of money by Bitcoin that I have been examining in this section calls for being discussed in terms of an ongoing seismic historical shift from a society organized into nations and corporations whose main media was print to one increasingly structured through a global internet with data as its primary media. And yet, at the same time some irony oozes from positioning Bitcoin and blockchain as a repudiating break rather than as an extension – May is ambiguous here – of a revolution begun in print. This is so because when bitcoin upends the mode of standardization achieved by the bank note, it does so through a Borges-like fulfillment of the fantasy of print’s capacity to record the world. More than any newspaper ever dreamed, within its world Bitcoin infills time with omniscient coverage of all the ongoing daily transactions happening, even uniting event, recordation, and observation. Recall again for a moment the genesis block’s splicing in of a printed newspaper headline – strangely useful, maybe also slightly ironic. Suddenly one may here again freshly recognize the extraordinary, paradoxical accomplishment of the standardization of the bank note. The bank note used print to obviate recordation, data storage.
This section, in sum, has shown how bitcoin innovates on the standardization of the bank note as money. Instead of erasing historical particularity to effect interchangeability across time and space, the Bitcoin protocol standardizes money through omnisciently knowing the historical particularity of all transactions through a process that proceeds autonomously and trustworthily. Previously in the standardizing process money’s value had appeared inseparable from authority. Now, the two diverged.
To recap, where coin made of bullion garnered its immediate sense of value for exchange in the units it presented through combining a commodity-value with the trustworthy authority of its manufacture, the bank note produced a sense of immediate value extending interchangeably across time partly through using print to reference the now of its being held by a ‘Bearer’ and the immediate here of a national bank, like the ‘Bank of England,’ that had authorized this set of physical bank notes. The only historicity of this standardized object that mattered was its potentially having been forged. Bitcoin broke with this process of standardization. Focusing solely on transactions, no physical object performed as cash in Bitcoin, though many of the current metaphors used to describe Bitcoin conceal this aspect and other of its related attributes. Through the system’s new capacity to know the history of all transactions in a way also autonomized (thus beyond anyone’s control) and made trustworthy (always inevitably and reliably enacted exactly the same for everyone), Bitcoin standardized value, enabling all bitcoins to be exactly the same across time for interchangeable users, but its standardizing process separated money’s function as conveyer of value from the mode of its authorization and trustworthiness. That authorizing operation now paradoxically embraced historicity. Taking together these two technologies for standardizing cash – the bank note and bitcoin – draws one into that strange temporal dimension of money, its implication of an eternal present, and thus also the imaginative process of engineering the historicity of that which strives to serve as cash.
Acknowledgments
Nicholas Grossman and Irene Tucker fundamentally shaped this essay in its principal arguments. In a scientific paper, they would be listed as co-authors. I thank also for helpful contributions Eli Grossman, the FORM group at UC–Irvine, Ellie Paton, Jana Portnow, my JCE production-editor Timothy Benosa, and my two anonymous readers at JCE.
Disclosure statement
In accordance with Taylor & Francis policy and my ethical obligation as a researcher, I am reporting that I own a few bitcoins..
Notes on contributor
Jonathan H. Grossman is an English Professor at UCLA. He is working on a book on the history and theory of standardization. The first article from this research, titled ‘Standardization (Standardisation),’ appeared in 2018 in Critical Inquiry. He is far from an expert in computer science, but from 1989 to 1991 he worked at IBM, where he first learned SGML and where the first manual he edited was Application Programming: Program-to-Program Interface (1990).