Abroad, too, there are plenty of examples of governments moving to limit cryptocurrencies or ban them altogether. “We must do everything possible to make sure the currency monopoly remains in the hands of states,” declared German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz at a G-7 finance ministers meeting in December. The European Commission shows every sign of regulating the fledgling sector with its customary zeal. In particular, the European Central Bank has stablecoins (crypto tokens pegged to fiat currencies) in its sights. China is even more stringent. In 2017, the Chinese Communist Party restricted the ability of its citizens to buy Bitcoin, though Bitcoin mining continues to thrive close to sources of cheap hydroelectricity like the Three Gorges Dam.
But is it actually true that the state should have a monopoly on money? That is a distinctly German notion, stated most explicitly in Georg Friedrich Knapp’s State Theory of Money (1905). History begs to differ. Although states have sometimes sought to monopolize money creation, and although a state monopoly on the enforcement of debt contracts is preferable, a monopoly on money is far from natural or even necessary. For most of history, states have been satisfied with determining what is legal tender—that is, what can be used to discharge contractual obligations, including tax payments. This power to specify legal tender drove the great monetization of economy and society in Ming China and in Europe after the Black Death.
Money, it is conventional to argue, is a medium of exchange, which has the advantage of eliminating inefficiencies of barter; a unit of account, which facilitates valuation and calculation; and a store of value, which allows economic transactions to be conducted over long time periods as well as geographical distances. To perform all these functions optimally, the ideal form of money has to be available, affordable, durable, fungible, portable and reliable. Because they fulfill most of these criteria, metals such as gold, silver and bronze were for millennia regarded as the ideal monetary raw material. Rulers liked to stamp coins with images (often crowned heads) that advertised their authority. But in ancient Mesopotamia, beginning around five thousand years ago, people used clay tokens to record transactions involving agricultural produce like barley or wool, or metals such as silver. Such tablets performed much the same function as a banknote. Often, through the centuries, traders have devised such tokens or bills without government involvement, especially at times when coins have been in short supply or debased and devalued.
In the modern fiat monetary system, the central bank, itself supposedly independent of the state, can influence the money supply, but it does not monopolize money creation. In addition to state-created cash—the so-called high-powered money or monetary base—most money is digital credits from commercial banks to individuals and firms. As I argued in The Ascent of Money (2008), money is trust inscribed, and it does not seem to matter much whether it is inscribed on silver, on clay, on paper—or on a liquid crystal display. All kinds of things have served as money, from the cowrie shells of the Maldives to the stone discs used on the Pacific island of Yap.
Although Bitcoin currently looks to outsiders like a speculative asset, in practice it performs at least two of the three classic functions of money quite well, or soon will, as adoption continues. It can be (like gold) both a store of value and a unit of account. And, as my Hoover Institution colleague Manny Rincon-Cruz has suggested, it may be that the three classic functions of money are in fact something of a trilemma. Most forms of money can perform at least two of the three; it’s impossible or very hard to do all three. Bitcoin is not an ideal medium of exchange precisely because its ultimate supply is fixed and not adaptive, but that’s not a fatal limitation. In many ways, it is Bitcoin’s unique advantage.
In other words, Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as a great many other digital coins and tokens, are stateless money. And the more they can perform at least two out of three monetary functions tolerably well, the less that banning them is going to work—unless every government agrees to do so simultaneously, which seems like a stretch. The U.S. isn’t going to ban Bitcoin, just tax it whenever you convert bitcoins into dollars.
The right question to ask is therefore whether or not the state can offer comparably appealing forms of digital money. And this is where the Chinese government has been thinking a lot more creatively than its American or European counterparts. As is well known, China has led the world in electronic payments, thanks to the vision of Alibaba and Tencent in building their Alipay and WeChat Pay platforms. In 2020, some 58% of Chinese used mobile payments, up from 33% in 2016, and mobile payments accounted for nearly two-thirds of all personal consumption PBOC payments. Banknotes and credit cards have largely yielded to QR codes on smartphones. The financial subsidiary of Alibaba, Ant Group, was poised last year to become one of the world’s biggest financial companies.
Yet the Communist Party became nervous about the scale of electronic payment platforms and sought to clip their wings by cancelling Ant’s planned IPO in November and tightening regulation. At the same time, the People’s Bank of China has accelerated the implementation of its plan for a central bank digital currency (CBDC). In a fascinating article in February, former PBOC governor Zhou Xiaochuan explained the fundamentally defensive character of this initiative. “Blockchain technology features decentralization, but decentralization is not a necessity for modernizing the payments system. It even has some drawbacks,” he wrote. “The possible application of blockchain … is still being researched, but is not ready at this time.”