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Comment by branchless | Hacker News Reader

It's not a currency. It's not issued by the state.

Whether or not something is issued by a state has nothing to do with it being currency. I would challenge you to find a reputable source that says otherwise.

> Currencies in this sense are defined by governments, and each type has limited boundaries of acceptance.

First paragraph is all about the nation state. Currency is the state. Why would they give that up?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency

There's literally a section further down in the article you're citing that says:

> In economics, a local currency is a currency not backed by a national government, and intended to trade only in a small area.

Yes, which is a specific thing that by the way doesn't occur in practice and has a word prefixed to it: "local".

It's not a currency.

I guess people have different views on it, but to me it looks much more like an asset than a currency. You currently can't easily send money around without incurring massive fees.

The Australian government currently classes it as an asset for tax purposes.

I’m no cryptocurrency fanatic, but you can’t set up a mutually exclusive dichotomy between the terms asset and currency as the latter is a proper subset of the former: currency you own is an asset of yours, currency you owe is an asset of somebody else's (a debt).

Pedantry aside, however, I agree with you that these ‘tokens’ are cryptoassets, entities whose only saving grace is their deliberately manufactured scarcity.

That's all block chains are, really: methods of manufacturing scarcity on a distributed, open medium.

Block chains are a fundamental technological revolution which for the first time in human history provides a verifiable public accounting ledger which eliminates double spending, back dating transactions, and as you mentioned eliminates the ability to arbitrarily create more tokens.

Yup. I consider blockchains, at root, to be distributed DRM systems at heart: they ensure a consensus view of who has the exclusive right to use a given token at a precise moment in time. This is remarkable in that they build upon a P2P system that in the past was notorious for being piracy-friendly on the simple grounds that digital information is inherently infinitely duplicable. To think of blockchain technology in terms of currency replacement is a bit reductive (and, as far as my perspective of orthodox macroeconomics goes, pretty misguided). They will, however, have alternative applications of much greater import.

One description I saw said that while it's not really part of the definition of a currency, useful currencies are usually issued by a state because tax payments provide a built-in base of demand.

Exactly. That's the real world.

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