Philately and numismatics

For hobbyists of a certain time and pedigree, it was philately and numismatics that occupied their attention and fetish, the kind which made them otherwise conscious and aware of a much larger world out there organized by the symbols and functions of a global semiotic and bureaucracy and standard of trust and working fiction, while representing on a postage stamp and on the face of a coin an idea of an idea usually about a country’s place-making in the family of nations and the tender of metals exchanging hands by their very uniformity of shape and weight in that moment the fungible transaction to a piece of candy or chocolate to a child or a cigarette to a woman or a pint of beer to a man.

There is much else represented besides ubiquity and pervasiveness. In one, there is also a guarantee in the hands of the workers of the system the confidence and the privacy of communication established for the purpose of delivery of messages the brief set of news or the lengthy riposte to a deep conversation that already takes the measure of time in the distances traveled and the pause of thoughts or indeed their rush that nevertheless will be “slowed up” in the aggregate volume of the mail. In the other, an equal if taken for granted guarantee that a penny is worth a penny to its purpose, and added up to make a farthing will make a farthing just as well, as much public knowledge that could be represented, if in the time of the rule of Genghis Khan, punishable by death if rejected of its fiat decree of worth in the dominion.

But it is rather not the wide dispersion of these various systems of communication and currency that attracts the regard of the stamp and coin collector. Rather it is their materiality, variety, rarity, and valuation beyond face value, particular conditions of preservation or decay, or human interest, that fetch the care and keeping of a curation or collection or catalogue of things. Nobody at this time collects email delivery headers, the meta-information about electronic forwarding that allow the Internet to identify and address mailboxes, in the same way that nobody collects nuts and screws that have been manufactured globally throughout the centuries which in their fastened and hidden existence hold things together for us.

But there is a new-fangled collection out there now called Bitcoin. Bitcoin is semiotically a representation of its own work and function, a ledger of ledgers, a key design of which is its distributed outsourcing of the labour of cryptographic calculation of hashes of every Bitcoin transaction since Day Zero of its existence, rendered unbreakable on the axis of the mathematical rigour of the encryption itself on one hand, and on the axis of the “consensus object” held by all the nodes volunteering machine time to the non-repudiation properties of the individually constituted ledger records while simultaneously guaranteeing the non-repudiation of the entire distributed ledger up to that point, in exchange for a unit of Bitcoin itself.

Long gone are the days of penalty under Genghis Khan for rejecting the coin of the realm. In the Marxist analysis of labour’s estrangement from the fruits of labour, Bitcoin also nudges it back by giving the blacksmith a piece of his or her own foundry.

This new collection is a work of curation, too. In its representation it is a museum or a gallery of Bitcoin transactions that, were the whole to be looked at as a painting, what is made observable in the collection is not only the very first brush stroke on the canvas and the sequence of each one thereafter but indeed also the very work of canvass of securing the ballot as it were of every count of observation and inspection of the canvas in its history and progress.

And while Leonardo da Vinci may be able to hide an ugly line or a poor colour by overpainting, Bitcoin will not be able to conceal it by design. If one Bitcoin transaction involved a buy and sell of a dirty bomb, then it stays there in its non-repudiated status as any other unique transaction that constituted a purchase of 2,056 roses on Valentine’s Day.

However, this does not mean that the encryption itself insufficiently veils the identities of transacters themselves‎; the trafficking in plutonium is on par with the ordering for pizza in a degree of anonymity similar to an exchange of cash. There is a non-repudiable record of transaction, but between which parties is a thing of mathematical probity of non-disclosure; that is, not entirely a secret if you can break the cryptography.

Bitcoin relies on the systems of trust long established in the uptake of the postal system and of money and their antecedent systems as well as later adventitious inventions (think of Canadian Tire money) as generally understood and taken for granted today. In some jurisdictions, specifically Japan, the reliability of the postal system also performs a banking function, which sticks around in the form of the postal money order. The sending and receiving of money should of course be mapped onto a history of industrialisation, embedding a core versus periphery of capitalist accumulation away from the feudal economy‎ as well as mercantile trade to the concentration of urbanisation centres when industrial wage labour upended the old connections to the land and commerce.

Bitcoin is also purported to be responding to crisis. This crisis is of a monetarist nature where runaway speculative conditions gave way to a destabilization of the system of money value of the fiat variety, especially of the idea of the stable numeraire against which are measured many other prices marked to many markets of values in exchange, stores of value, and discount rates in the valuation of future cash flows. The crisis is one of an erosion, erosive thereby unto itself, in a negative feedback loop, to which any system of trust is always potentially subject. A specie of distrust, some would go so far as to say disgust, of authority in general beyond skeptical argument, but also of equal partnerships that belong to mutual relations of citizenship, marriage, or humanity. ‎Into this gaping breach, enter Bitcoin, not quite really understood, more misunderstood than ‎a pair of teenagers rebelling in the Garden of Eden.

In recent weeks, in typical reductive instinct, the financial system has invented for itself a new derivative to the new-old underlying security, or what I would also call the semiote, of Bitcoin. So long as it has a price tag to its supply amenable to the plot of supply and demand and the law of arbitrage, it could be subjected to speculation, just like tulip bulbs had been in the Netherlands, the last person holding the bag be damned. Indeed, there is regular money to be made from irregularities of volatility indices, and the value of Bitcoin in exchange has indeed been surpassing normal or natural logarithmic volatility. Part of this is by design, accounting from dwindling supply, and part of it is by the usual mania for yield in monetarism’s own dose of medicine of too much quantitative money chasing after skirts of returns.

Bitcoin’s debut on the commodities and options exchanges and clearinghouses is as plain vanilla as orange juice futures and the backwardation or contango of post-Brexit British pounds. There is money to be made not just in mining Bitcoin but also in the stakesmaking of Bitcoin’s gold rush. ‎Time will tell if derivatives contracts will settle at strike using Bitcoin itself, and why shouldn’t it when like any ouroburos its self-cannibalisation is self-generative and -reproductive of itself. Maybe as it is in the endless world of Minecraft, the video game beloved by many kids, what you got here is the Bitcoin miners building an infinite mine to generate unto itself the generation of mines to be mined exponentiated to the nth power of its most recent nth generation.

In more precise terms, the work of Bitcoin mining is the cryptographic boulder of Sisyphus, and the mine to be worked on is the exponentiating size of this boulder ad infinitum. But perhaps with a catch: when will the value of all Bitcoins at the engineered maximum unit count be greater than the value of the terms of exchange using Bitcoin in any given moment and throughout the running total of the whole ledger to-date and at some future date?

There shall be a graphical representation of this curve. After all, if a Bitcoin yesterday was worth less than a Bitcoin today, the key arbitrage activity is simply to exchange yesterday’s Bitcoin for today’s Bitcoin and to pocket the difference. But this particular ledger itself is off balance sheet of Bitcoin’s distributed ledger, unless of course the work of Bitcoin arbitrage, an opportunism, is conducted using Bitcoin and self-marks unto the ledger.

This ultimately is what Bitcoin in its purported response to crisis entails. For if Bitcoin actually succeeds and becomes a self-rendered stable numeraire self-ledgering its renditions of itself in the brushstrokes of its volatility, and why shouldn’t it?, then it will be of an immense Sisyphean boulder vastly containerized of its own arbitrage transactions if perhaps eventually of nothing else. The mark of its stability is its asymptotic, the parabolic point of its surmise, which the current system of monetarism mirrors in the opposite direction to the null point of zero interest rates.

To a stamp and coin collector, this Bitcoin boulder shall be after all perforation of edges and the hunt for the variety of things to come.

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