[PDF]Coins, Currencies, Social Currencies And Cryptocurrencies

COINS, CURRENCIES,
SOCIAL CURRENCIES
AND CRYPTOCURRENCIES


LEOPOLDO BEBCHUK


Coins, Currencies, Soctal Currencies and
Crpptocurrencies


A Study on monetary instruments, their diversity, and their
relationship with credit-money


Faculty of Philosophy and Letters
University of Buenos Aires


Thesis for the licentiate's degree in anthropological sciences


Leopoldo Bebchuk
MMXXII


Bebchuk, Leopoldo

Coin, Currencies, Social Currencies and Cryptocurrencies: A study about monetary instruments,
their diversity, and their relationship with credit-money. 1“ English edition

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.36054.32328


Original Title: Monedas, Monedas Corrientes, Monedas Sociales y Criptomonedas: Un estudio
acerca de los instrumentos monetarios, su diversidad y su relacion con el dinero-crédito.

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.32789.40166

ISBN: 9-78-9878-89320-4


Buenos Aires, 2022
leopoldobebchuk @ filo.uba.ar


This book was written as a final thesis for the Anthropological Sciences degree at the Faculty of
Philosophy and Letters, University of Buenos Aires, and approved on May 6, 2022, as stated in
the minutes COPDI-2022-03193139-UBA-DAADE_23FFYL


No reproduction in whole or in part of this work by any means whatsoever shall be punishable
by any penalty.


If you would like to collaborate with its author, you can do so at the following Bitcoin address:


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To all those cypherpunks who fight against injustice and corruption every day of their lives.


Acknowledgments


First of all, I would like to thank the classmates I had along my career, who helped me to
progress, to study; and to the teachers who have taught and evaluated me. To my classmates
Guadalupe Colque, Sofia Quevedo and my “Anthropo-team”: Tomas Paya, Rocio Santarcieri,
Sofia Laria and Natasha Zamorano. Especially to my girlfriend, Lavinia Laviosa, for reviewing it
and helping me correct the last details before presenting it in its final form.

Secondly, my tutors: Jorge Miceli and Maria Belén Lopez Castro, who helped me shape this
project, especially the latter, who helped me beyond her role as tutor by giving me materials that
I was unaware of and have enriched this work.

Thirdly, my thesis advisors: Juan Engelman and Sebastian Valverde for their interest and
support for this work.

Fourthly, Library Genesis and Sci-Hub for the unrestricted access they provide to academic
material. Without such initiatives, none of this would be possible. Their work is fundamental to
the progress of all sciences.

And finally, Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever he is, for inventing Bitcoin. Not just for giving me
something to write about, but for giving me lots to think about.


Prefaeg


I can say that I knew Bitcoin almost from its humble origins, although I overlooked its
relevance for a long time. I met Bitcoin when I was in high school, it was 2010, I was fifteen
years old and I had built a desktop computer with a Pentium 4 processor, much better than the
one I had before. A friend of mine, Bonch, called him because it was his last name (and it
sounded funny), a very peculiar character (I was too. I am, but at that time even more so.). He
was always into weird things, one day he told me that there was a secret internet that could only
be accessed with a special browser called TOR and that was full of dark, illegal, bizarre,
macabre, and even dangerous things. At that time, it was called the Deep web but today I know it
is more accurate to call it Dark net.

I, of course, listened to him and went into the Deep Web to see what it was all about, because I
had already spent the previous three years totally obsessed with antivirus, antispyware, firewalls,
etc. and I felt invulnerable in terms of computer security. Other friends of mine did not dare to
enter because there were many myths circulating about that on the Internet: that if you entered
those sites, you would get viruses, hackers, curses, anything. Anyway, I went in and saw what
kind of things were there (and no, nothing happened to me). At first glance, it was a terribly slow
internet (my connection was already slow, but this was like going back to dial-up), no search
engines, old HTML sites, everything looked like an old version of the internet, like it had been
before, in the '90s. And yes, all kinds of fancy sites: pages to buy drugs, weapons, stolen stuff,
child pornography, hitmen services, occultism, old software downloads; books about anarchy,
black magic, and cryptography; underground news sites, corruption and political intrigues mixed
with conspiracy theories, blogs of depressed people, hacker forums, sale of forged documents,
tutorials to clone credit cards, etcetera, etcetera. And the word "Bitcoin" came up repeatedly
when payments were involved. My friend had told me something about Bitcoin, but I did not
know much about it. We only understood that it was something people used to make payments
on the Deep Web. I read on my own what it was, but the information was scarce, all the articles
said almost the same thing: that the Deep web was a den of hackers, terrorists and criminals, a
cyberpunk world apart in which people paid with it. Nobody explained where it came from, how
it worked and what it was for, other than to pay without giving personal data (something that was
logical if you were buying a lot of illegal stuff on shady Dark net sites), so I didn't even know
where to get it, it just seemed to me that I was going to have to buy it with something and I didn't
have any money, so I didn't care too much. I also did not understand why there were so many
books about cryptography going around, if it was such a technical, complicated, boring and
impractical subject, whether it had something to do with the esoteric or what (the word
cryptocurrency didn't even exist, it was just Bitcoin).

It was not until four years later that the Bitcoin issue reappeared with some relevance in my life.
I do not remember exactly when, but I think it must be around 2014 at a family dinner. My
grandfather (who passed away just as I was about to publish this work) asked about it and my
brother and I tried to answer him. We already knew the technical aspects by that time: that it is a
big registry hosted in a P2P network, that the transactions are solved by miners making the CPUs
work, that the security was guaranteed by that CPU work, the P2P network, and the system of
public and private keys, and that this also guaranteed anonymity. But he asked us more
questions: "Why is it valuable?" And we did not understand that. My brother, for example,
thought that the creator had made a huge bank deposit to back Bitcoin. On another similar


occasion the subject came up again, but that time we already knew that there was no such
backing but rather that Bitcoin was worth ‘by itself’ and then our grandfather became more
incisive: 'who takes responsibility in case of fraud’, ‘how can it work if no government backs it’
and getting more moralistic '1f I move money with it from one country to another, the economy
minister (or the secretary of commerce, I don't remember exactly) would have a terrible
problem’. We answered that no, because you would be moving neither pesos nor dollars, but the
question of what social influence it could have been still in my head.

Guided by this concern, I started looking for studies that said something about the social impact
that Bitcoin could have. There was not much, but I found a blog with several essays that dealt
specifically with that. They were several short essays arranged in three main topics, as if they
were volumes and chapters: (1) History and philosophy; (2) Economics; (3) Politics. I read it and
understood the relationship of everything I had seen and read before: Bitcoin was money created
by cryptographic technology and politically oriented. Behind that technical development there
was a political movement that planned to evade all governmental and institutional control by
encrypting communications. Bitcoin was not money to buy illegal things on the dark net but
Bitcoin, the dark net, TOR, and a lot of other technologies were part of the efforts of this kind of
people to create a society without the possibility of centralized control.

Understanding that potential, I got really involved with Bitcoin, learnt how to use the software,
bought some, and started reading the news and telling everyone I knew about it. At the same
time, I was already halfway through my anthropology degree, which had little to do with
software, information and communication technology development and cryptography, but a lot
to do with stateless and self-regulated societies. In that year, 2015, I took the economic
anthropology assignment and from there I began to shape this work. I learnt how economies
operate where there is no government and towards the end of the program there were texts about
the barter markets that emerged in the 2001 crisis in Argentina (the magnitude of which I had not
understood either when I lived through it, because I was barely six years old) when the national
currency was destroyed, so to speak. The blog I had read mentioned that Bitcoin was going to be
useful in weak economies, in crisis, mentioned Argentina several times, and also assumed that
everything I had seen in TOR years before, those underground businesses, were just a first phase
of Bitcoin's development and that the second one was going to involve a gray area of the
economy: products that, while not illegal, circulate in an unregulated way. This is precisely what
I understood barter markets to be: when the state-organized economy fails, local economies
spontaneously emerge, and Bitcoin can be especially useful to them. So, I started to save books,
articles, any information that had to do with all this, in a piecemeal way. Now that I have
finished my degree, it is time to put all that to work.

Originally this thesis was intended to have three parts: a state of the art that would bring me up
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