Questions related to Bitcoin and other Informational Money

Abstract

A collection of questions about Bitcoin and its hypothetical relatives Bitguilder and Bitpenny is formulated. These questions concern technical issues about protocols, security issues, issues about the formalizations of informational monies in various contexts, and issues about forms of use and misuse. Some questions are formulated in the more general setting of informational monies and near-monies.We also formulate questions about legal, psychological, and ethical aspects of informational money. Finally we formulate a number of questions concerning the economical merits of and outlooks for Bitcoin.

Architectural Adequacy and Evolutionary Adequacy as Characteristics of a Candidate Informational Money

“…Currently I consider it plausible that on the long run (say 50 years) all money will develop into or be replaced by OWNIM. 4 Assuming the moneyness of Bitcoin one may wish to classify it as an EXIM, a STRIM, or an OWNIM. As stated in [3] Bitcoin may be viewed as an EXIM if one so wishes.…”

“…In [3] and [4] it has been argued that the phrase informational money may be helpful for understanding moneyness issues about systems like Bitcoin as first described in [14]. However, the notorious question whether or not Bitcoin constitutes a money is certainly not solved by simply asserting that it constitutes an informational money rather than a conventional money.…”

Bitcoin: a Money-like Informational Commodity

“…In [10] we have put forward the suggestion that Bitpenny represents an abstract logical specification of the service that one imagines that Bitcoin ideally will provide. For instance Bitpenny achieves by magic that double spending will not occur, while Bitcoin requires sophisticated machinery to implement that property.…”

“…In addition not everybody may consider Bitcoin to be a success as a coin, if being a coin counts for anything less than being a currency. 10…”

“…The original paper on Bitcoin is[35]. We refer to the paragraph "Taking Bitcoin Seriously" of[10] for a statement on the risks of considering Bitcoin from a scholarly perspective. For a technical survey of Bitcoin see e.g.[18].…”