Reconstructing Money, Toward a Philosophy of Cryptocurrencies

Abstract

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.