§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.”