Reconstructing Money, Toward a Philosophy of Cryptocurrencies

Abstract:

Cryptocurrencies have emerged as a new paradigm that disrupts our general understanding of  money, value, and exchange. My thesis revisits the fundamental questions about the nature of  money in order to explore how the idea of cryptocurrency would disrupt the general  conception of money, exchange, and value. Mainstream economics argues that  cryptocurrencies resonate with the Hayekian regime of currency competitions, which he  advocated in his book "The Denationalization of Money". While my thesis believes that if this  narrative is correct, cryptocurrencies are not, in fact, new phenomena at all and are thus  stripped from creating new horizons of possibility. Referring to the works of Geoffrey Ingham,  Randal Wray, Katsishu Iwi and Makoto Nishibe, my thesis questions the validity of the  philosophical underpinning of the orthodox narrative about the nature of money and argues  that the inability of mainstream economics to contribute to the conversation on the current  transformation of money would come from its misconception of the nature of money and the  role it plays in the capitalist economies. Moreover, deploying the works of Marcel Mauss and  David Graeber on money, my thesis tries to develop a debt theory of cryptocurrencies that goes  beyond cryptocurrency's capitalistic emergence and echoes gift-based relations.