Architectural Adequacy and Evolutionary Adequacy as Characteristics of a Candidate Informational Money

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concepts of architectural and evolutionary adequacy to evaluate informational money, classifies informational commodities, and assesses Bitcoin's potential to evolve into a true form of money.

Contribution

It proposes a new hierarchy of moneyness based on adequacy concepts and classifies informational commodities, providing a framework to evaluate Bitcoin's evolutionary potential.

Findings

Bitcoin is unlikely to evolve into a true money at this stage.

The classification helps distinguish different types of informational commodities.

Design alternatives for Bitcoin are compared to unconventional fractional definitions.

Abstract

For money-like informational commodities the notions of architectural adequacy and evolutionary adequacy are proposed as the first two stages of a moneyness maturity hierarchy. Then three classes of informational commodities are distinguished: exclusively informational commodities, strictly informational commodities, and ownable informational commodities. For each class money-like instances of that commodity class, as well as monies of that class may exist. With the help of these classifications and making use of previous assessments of Bitcoin, it is argued that at this stage Bitcoin is unlikely ever to evolve into a money. Assessing the evolutionary adequacy of Bitcoin is perceived in terms of a search through its design hull for superior design alternatives. An extensive comparison is made between the search for superior design alternatives to Bitcoin and the search for design alternatives to a specific and unconventional view on the definition of fractions.