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Alternative Currencies

Chump Change: Decrypting Bitcoin & Blockchain

Can you dig it?

Artists and academics are jumping on the blockchain bandwagon and talking up the potential for cryptocurrency and distributed ledgers to mitigate austerity capitalism. Attractive as techno-monetary fixes may seem they come at a dangerous ideological cost, argues Andrew Osborne reviewing David Golumbia’s The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism

 

This short account by the Pöhl Monetary Research Group (P.M.R.G) of the sterling’s post-war history begins with three ideas concerning money as such

 

At the Limit: Self-Organisation in Greece

In Greece a resurgence of self-organising under crisis conditions is drawing on an established repertoire of existing alternatives. Anna O’Lory – member of the group and journal Blaumachen – describes these initiatives’ central features and exposes their integral limits
 

On Wikileaks, Bitcoin, Copyleft - Three Critiques of Hacktivism

and collects

  * Wikileaks - The State Persecutes its Idealists
  * Bitcoin - Finally, Fair Money?
  * Free Property – On Social Criticism in the Form of a Software Licence

The pamphlet is available in PDF, EPUB and MOBI format at:

  http://antinational.org/en/furball-00-hacktivism

To compliment the recent Bitcoin critique it seems a host of these alternative currency/economy ideas could be worth examining and critiquing, lots of these ideas have been around for a long time, but as capitalism and anti-capitalists search around looking for alternatives, these ideas can gain traction and even state support.

Bitcoin – finally, fair money?

Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency deploying peer-to-peer networking to enable secure and anonymous transactions without a central bank. Unlike many economic commentators, The Wine and Cheese Appreciation Society and Scott Lenney take the currency seriously but ask, how exactly does it differ from 'real' money?

 

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