§5.86 — Arvind Narayanan and Jeremy Clark helpfully decompose cryptocurrency – as initiated by the Bitcoin synthesis – into three functional modules, which can be traced back along distinct technical lines. Crossing the threshold into cryptocurrency requires bringing together a resilient decentralized registry, secure value-tokens, and a gauge of computational contribution, in a fully-converged operational singularity.[1] Within this combination, each thread exposes its complicity with an abstracted realization of money, in one of its three ineliminable semiotic aspects. The index of value-storage, the sign of accountancy, and the token of actual payment (i.e. exchange), are the exhaustive, irreducible, indispensable, and mutually-dependent features of any functional monetary order.

[1] See: Arvind Narayanan and Jeremy Clark, ‘Bitcoin’s Academic Pedigree’ (2017). Bitcoin is a triadic dynamo. “In bitcoin, a secure ledger is necessary to prevent double spending and thus ensure that the currency has value. A valuable currency is necessary to reward miners. In turn, strength of mining power is necessary to secure the ledger. Without it, an adversary could amass more than 50 percent of the global mining power and thereby be able to generate blocks faster than the rest of the network, double-spend transactions, and effectively rewrite history, overrunning the system. Thus, bitcoin is bootstrapped, with a circular dependence among these three components.”