Social Media Abyss

Author:Geert Lovink
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

Bitcoin after Bitcoin

The future of Bitcoin is bright, but it will come after Bitcoin. Farewell, Winkelvoss Bros. The advance of small-scale digital (crypto-)currencies that operate within a specific social setting (be it local or trans-local), labelled either alternative or complementary, is unstoppable. The trickiest part, in terms of adoption and economic effectiveness, is always going to be their relation with the ‘real existing’ money (€, £, $, whatever …). On this point, complementary currencies are much more flexible than alternative ones. Still, these are technological advances that the current banking system is ill prepared for, especially at the ‘retail’ level (never mind the not-improbable collapse of the financial/monetary system as we know it). For retail, probably non-banking, and possibly non-centrally regulated, electronic payment systems will win the day, especially in the realm of transactions by or between individuals. Banks already want to get rid of individual customers; they are a nuisance, with their puppet house payments and their expensive customer service requirements. Minimizing the branches did not scare them off; neither did high fees. The fact remains that their profit margins remain too low despite all efforts to get rid of the Johnsons. When and how this will all ‘flip’ remains a matter of speculation and depends on a lot of factors, including political ones.

What is less speculative, however, is that the currencies that will emerge will not be denominated ‘Bitcoin’, at least not in its current representation. Bitcoin has massively accelerated thinking about this evolution, spawned a multitude of parallel experiments and partial solutions, and has – both on the social as well as on the technical plane, by trial and error – cleared a lot of ground for others in this process. This is the currency's greatest, and most undeniable, merit.

While all kinds of new, mostly net-born formats will continue to arise, large-scale use of mobile money in parts of Africa also provides an interesting Lehrstück, one that is not easily transferable to other parts of the world where the existing banking system still has a tight grip on the economy. What mobile money does have in common with Bitcoin is the larger techno-historical movement from banks to telcos. As Bitcoin is 100 per cent internet-based from day one, it does not see itself explicitly as built on top of the telecom infrastructure. Internet and smart phones are the unconscious a priori here.

If Bitcoin did not assemble from the beginning such contradictory ambitions, or was ‘merely’ planned to be a (built-in) payment protocol – for instance, inside HTML – it would be a genuinely bold undertaking. It would be an interesting experiment to strip off its libertarian mining ritual and blockchain religion to see what's left. Right now, crypto currencies are the avant-garde movements of our age. In line with the Zeitgeist, this avant-garde is neither progressive nor artistic (no aesthetics please, we're strictly geeks). But if everything fails, it can always retroactively enter history as an artwork, a true (anti-)social sculpture (so less Duchamp, or Beuys, than neo-Futurism).

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