Trade-offs In The History Of Money, From Shells To Bitcoin

TRADE-OFFS IN THE HISTORY OF MONEY, FROM SHELLS TO BITCOIN (BUT ESPECIALLY IN BITCOIN)

This presentation will be an attempt at representing organically and at a high level the history of monetary technologies (with particular focus on the most recent one, Bitcoin) from the perspective of the different trade-offs involved in any step of their evolution. The speaker will try to give an organic account of classical as well as less discussed trade-offs, like the ones existing between transaction costs and divisibility (gold vs silver), between verification costs and independence from third parties (coinage practice), between privacy and local security (binding vs hiding in cryptocurrencies), between privacy and scalability (obfuscation techniques in cryptocurrencies), between scalability and independence from third parties (Bitcoin “scaling debate”), and so on.