Resistance Money: A Philosophical Argument for Bitcoin. 2024. Andrew M. Bailey, Bradley RettlerAnd Craig Warmke. Routledge.
- “Bitcoin is for criminals. It is a tool for terrorists, drug dealers and hackers and a toy for degenerate speculators.”
- “Compared to physical cash, Bitcoin enables some misbehavior to occur more easily over longer distances.”
- “Perhaps in the long run Bitcoin could destroy the international order by making sanctions less effective.”
- “While Bitcoin itself has no serious problems, it is surrounded by a culture of scams.”
- “Bitcoin causes significant CO2 emissions. This is bad.”
- “…Bitcoin advantages the totalitarian government of North Korea. This is bad.”
- “…Bitcoin does not automatically provide users with significant financial privacy.”
- “Throughout its history, Bitcoin has shown tremendous volatility.”
- “Maybe it will even go to zero.”
The preceding excerpts will likely seem puzzling to readers of this review, given the book’s subtitle, “A Philosophical Case of Bitcoin” (emphasis added).
In reality, authors Andrew M. Bailey (Associate Professor of Humanities, Yale-NUS College, Singapore), Bradley Rettler (Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Wyoming) and Craig Warmke (Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University) express the case for Bitcoin directly and argue that, on balance, it is best to live in a world with Bitcoin than one without. The book’s impartial approach is a welcome contrast to the intense commentary commonly heard from each Bitcoin’s ardent supporters and its often ill-informed opponents.
One of the positive points that the authors consider outweighs the negative points of Bitcoin is the power of its users to withstand financial censorship. They indicate that folks with dissenting political beliefs who depend on conventional financing face the danger of getting their bank accounts closed, their transactions blocked and even their funds confiscated. Bailey, Rettler, and Warmke note that such tactics aren’t only utilized by dictatorial governments.
From 2013 to 2017, under “Operation Checkpoint,” the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation pressured banks, individuals, and corporations engaged in entirely legal businesses, including ATM operators, coin dealers, dating services, pawn shops, and Payday lenders to go away their platform. In 2022, 22 human rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, called on PayPal to stop closing accounts under a brand new user agreement that gave the corporate sole discretion to withdraw as much as $2,500 to seize customers it believed were publicly spreading misinformation. Bitcoin is just not censorship-proof, the authors say, but it surely is censorship-resistant.
also pleads on behalf of the billions of individuals on the planet who should not have a checking account. Bitcoin requires no minimum balance, charges no account opening fees, and doesn’t exclude individuals with problematic credit. It is accessible to immigrants who lack documents verifying their identity and financial history and to the poor who lack the means to acquire them. Bitcoin users haven’t got to fret about being surprised by a hidden fee, being discriminated against based on their ethnicity, or living too removed from a bank branch to access banking services. To gain access to the Bitcoin network, all they need is a cell phone or laptop. Currently, 85 percent of Americans own smartphones, up from 39 percent ten years ago.
Because of their training as philosophers, the authors are masters of argumentation and in addition thoughtfully address standard objections to Bitcoin, corresponding to the high price volatility and significant energy consumption of Bitcoin mining. Fortunately, the scenario depicted within the 2017 headline “Bitcoin mining will consume all of the world’s energy by 2020” has not occurred.
Bailey, Rettler, and Warmke even address some criticisms of Bitcoin that many well-informed financial experts have probably never heard before. These include complaints that Bitcoin is divisible into excessively small subunits (one Bitcoin is the same as 100,000 satoshis, each of which was value about $0.00025 when the book was written), objections that Bitcoin could be very unequally distributed (e.g 7.9 billion people on earth don’t own one. and the claim (disputed by the authors) that while Bitcoin is intentionally designed to operate and not using a manufacturer, intermediary, or manager, Bitcoin miners are in reality intermediaries.
The last point touches on an issue that many readers are prone to encounter while reading: following certain arguments requires a deep dive into the technical details of Bitcoin’s design and operation. For example, laypeople might find the detailed description of Bitcoin’s failed predecessors ridiculous and somewhat irrelevant.
Like a lot of the other books reviewed, this one is just not entirely without errors. The text refers at one point to the “Great Recession of 2007-2009.” In fact, the National Bureau of Economic Research dates the beginning of this economic downturn to January 2008.
