Does bitcoin fit the definition of good money?

Three philosophers walk into a crypto-currency. Resistance Money: A Philosophical Case for Bitcoin, I’d argue, is a slightly inaccurate title. Messrs Bailey, Rettler and Warmke have composed a book that is a meticulous and unphilosophically lucid examination of the origins and properties of bitcoin. No Hegel, no Husserl, no fuss. ‘We don’t prophesy,’ they state. ‘We don’t preach.’ They plead a Socratic humility. ‘We’d forgive you for thinking that three philosophers aren’t up to the task.’ They describe themselves as ‘epistemic trespassers’ in matters of economics and cryptography.

The editorial sessions for Resistance Money must have been hell. Unlike many academic books where one particular aspect of a subject is assigned to a specialist, this one is a joint text by all three. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that they have written one of the best introductions to bitcoin. Perhaps precisely because they aren’t experts, they’re better at explaining things. Andreas Antonopoulos’s Mastering Bitcoin breaks down the tech stuff in greater detail, but you need some serious sitzfleisch and maths muscle to get through the elliptical curve cryptography and Merkle trees.

Bitcoin is a teenager. Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper came out in 2008. Bitcoin production, ‘mining’, started in 2009. The story of its outlandish growth is so implausible you couldn’t put it in a novel. It was envisaged as digital cash, a cash outside the control of wicked, inflation-creating governments, the ‘sly, roundabout solution’ that Friedrich Hayek had hoped for.

Is bitcoin functioning as digital cash? Not really. You can use it to buy a slice of pizza or a coffee, but deploying it like that is a real headache. And if you possess some bitcoin, you’d be better off spending your evaporating fiat currency to buy your refreshments.