No Bit, No Coin in BitCoin

Be of good cheer. If you can tell the difference between something and nothing, between a mountain and a hole in the ground; between something that is there, as opposed to something that is not there – then you can understand money, and probably better than the professional economists who try to fluster you with complexity.

Folks will try to convince you that BitCoin is different than the US Dollar, but they share this characteristic: that they do not exist in the universe that was created. This could explain why they have no definition or substance, and cannot be measured or counted.

Let me explain “bit” for a bit. Back in the 1980’s when I was first working with computers, back when Windows operating system and PC’s were barely known – I worked with a program which would display pairs of “bytes” to the monitor. Each byte (think kilobytes x 1000, megabytes x 1,000,000, Gigabytes [6 zeros], terabytes [9 zeros]) was made up of 8 bits. Each bit was a on/off switch which represented “off” as zero and ‘on’ as one. Together they could indicate a base-2 number which could register the numbers from zero (all bits “off”) to 255 (all bits on). If you are not familiar with how non-base10 numbers are represented, I must leave that to your research. The revelation here, is that everything a computer “thinks” and “stores” consists of numbers and those numbers at the ‘bit’ level are all made up of logical ‘switches’ which are either off or on.

The point of this, is that all things electric can be controlled by switches, and if someone has the power to turn those switches off and on, that someone has the power to control. Thus all the ownership, control, contracting, trading, borrowing, paying, and reckoning is just built on these bits, but the bits are not the Thing in itself but just represent information.

I’ll leave it to you to consider who is going to control these switches and how it is that you know that “who”, and if they can be trusted, and what you can do about it if they do not prove trustworthy. Yet all electronic currencies share this same architecture. There is nothing more “bit” about BitCoin than there is about any other cryptocurrency, blockchain, distributed ledger, or any other numbers, words, sounds, or pictures communicable by computer.

And what about “coin”? What is “coiny” about BitCoin? Of course there are no coins involved. This is not to say, that someone cannot manufacture a coin and offer an agreement about using such a physical coin to represent a contractual arrangement for redemption and “delivery” of pretended or honest substance. A coin will be different in that it can be defined, like anything else that we can honestly trade. If a coin is made up of material (wood, metal, animal products) it can be defined as a certain substance that can be verified or falsified. We can utilize a unit-of-measure to measure such a substance and then we can count those measures. This is not to say that it is impossible to trade what has no material substance or “mass”, but to be real, such a thing must be definable, falsifiable, or verifiable in order to be honestly traded.

So since “bit” is not specific to any particular money-unit, and there is no substance, coin, or definitions of what a BitCoin is, it might be more descriptive to give a label to this anonymous person’s “creation” and his open-source program – as SwitchesNothing. We don’t like using that title because it is embarrassing. The question is: shouldn’t it be? Those that study the operation of BTC (and I hope this doesn’t mean Before The Con) can tell you how practical and beneficial substantial adoption of this “currency” will be, and how it will increase the justice and prosperity of the world. Before I deposit my reason for doubt, allow me to deal with that handy noun: “currency”.

The first time a word like this is used in the Bible of the Jews and Christians, is when Abraham purchased the burial plot for his wife. It says he weighed out 400 shekels of silver, current – according to the merchant. What was the Substance traded? Silver of some understood and agreed upon refinement. How was it Measured? In shekel weights. And what kind of shekel was that? What was its definition? It was the one that was in use by the merchants of the area at that time. These were the kinds of shekels the merchants were using, currently, or as we say “now” or “at this writing”. In this context, “current” referred to the unit of measure. The “current” of “currency” was used here in an adjectival phrase that that embellished the meaning of ‘shekel’, a unit of weight-measurement. It did not refer to the thing traded as if the substance silver was the “currency”.

So when you hear the word: “Currency”, you should immediately ask what the speaker/author is applying the “now-ness” toward. Is he talking about the substance being most commonly traded in the now time? Is he talking about the unit of measure in most common use in the now time to quantify how much substance is being traded?

Unfortunately, the only “current”-ness about the money-units which all the nations have come to adopt after World War II, is that we are all pretending in the now-time that our money units (whether we call them ‘dollar’ or something else with the nation’s name in front of them, like US dollar, Canadian Dollar, or Swiss franc,Italian lira, Mexican peso, Russian ruble, Chinese yuan, etc) exist, and are capable of being borrowed, owed, paid, printed, owned, lost, deposited, or withdrawn. And yet, none of these verbs can have any meaning when men attempt to connect them to what is not there.

Which sets up the irrefutable problem for the Good Man and True: This type of money cannot be traded honestly. We cannot be honest about the substance or definition of what we are trading. We cannot be honest about the units-of-measure we are using, because nothing is being measured. And we cannot be honest about the quantity of the measures we are using to measure what we are trading, because there are no measures to count. And without honesty that could be verified or falsified, we cannot know whether the buyer is stealing from the seller, or vice-versa. We will never know who to trust in our trades.

Remember, if a trade is not honest, there is only one other kind of thing it can be.

And this is just as true for BitCoin, as it is for the world’s most “used” money-unit at the present time (there’s that currency idea), or any other nation’s preferred noun for the ‘nothings’ they are pretending to trade, or even the global bank’s Special Drawing Rights.

The Bible of the Jews and the Christians does not command men to use any particular substance or measure for the money-side of trades. It very clearly commands all to be honest – to keep promises and neither lie nor steal. The consequences of refusing to do so are well-known and experienced by all of us. The Bible is specific about the punishment for theft which Bystanders (who see and know) are required to inflict upon the thief. They are supposed to use human force, up to and including killing the physical life – to coerce the thief to pay double-restitution. He is to restore back to the victim equivalent value of what was stolen. Plus he is required to pay over to the victim of his own property or labor that same amount, and thus be divested, himself, of what he intended his victim to lose.

Leviticus 5

1‘Now if a person sins after he hears a public order to testify when he is a witness, whether he has seen or otherwise known, if he does not tell it, then he will bear his punishment.

Exodus 22

“...if the thief is caught, then the thief shall pay double. 8 If the thief is not caught, then the owner of the house shall appear before the judges, to determine whether he laid his hands on his neighbor’s property. 9 For every breach of trust, whether it is for ox, for donkey, for sheep, for clothing, or for any lost thing about which one says, ‘This is it,’ the case of both parties shall come before the judges; he whom the judges condemn shall pay double to his neighbor.”

Deuteronomy 17

“8 “If a case is too difficult for you to decide, between one kind of homicide or another, between one kind of lawsuit or another, and between one kind of assault or another, that are cases of dispute in your courts, then you shall arise and go up to the place which the Lord your God chooses. 9 So you shall come to the Levitical priests or the judge who is in office in those days, and you shall inquire of them and they will declare to you the verdict. 10 Then you shall act in accordance with the terms of the verdict which they declare to you from that place which the Lord chooses; and you shall be careful to act in accordance with everything that they instruct you to do. 11 In accordance with the terms of the law about which they instruct you, and in accordance with the verdict which they tell you, you shall act; you shall not turn aside from the word which they declare to you, to the right or the left. 12 But the person who acts insolently by not listening to the priest who stands there to serve the Lord your God, nor to the judge, that person shall die; so you shall eliminate the evil from Israel. 13 Then all the people will hear and be afraid, and will not act insolently again.”

honestmeasures@pm.me