Speaking of reserve currencies, Bitcoin introduces addressable scarcity not in direct relation to the sum of mined minerals or national currencies, but by the mathematics of solving increasingly difficult problems toward an eventual arbitrary limit of 21 million “ coins. ” There is much to explore with Bitcoin, blockchains and related initiatives, such as Ethereum, but it is also the monetary platform of choice of secessionist projects for which the metaphysical expulsion of externalities is the paramount program, as important if not more than the disintermediation of central banks. The version of Bitcoin that we have (other currencies may fork or follow) is exemplary of the futurearchaic quality of many Stack innovations. It is, as Paul Krugman puts it, “ both a 17th century and 21st century currency at once, ” a currency mechanism that would freeze the sum total of possible liquid value tokens in the world, now and forever. <sup>64</sup> In this regard, for certain persuasions, it is better than magic rocks (like gold) because incrementally more gold can always be mined, allowing rootless cosmopolitans to upset “ the natural order ” of hierarchical hereditary accumulation. If nothing else, Bitcoin has made money into a general design problem, as it should be, and not just the design of financial products or the look of paper bills, but of vessel abstractions of time, debt, work, and prestige. Better alternatives are needed soon, before today ’ s digital platform currencies are prematurely entrenched in the wrong direction (artificially attenuated to closure and scarcity of the wrong stuff). Bitcoins also appear not only in mathematical space but through the energy-intensive mining of coins using special hardware with names like AntMiner, Minerscube, TerraHash HashCoins, and so on. The math is a function of the processing power of the servers, which is also a function of the amount of energy that a server pulls, which for some custom clusters is tremendous. The value of a single Bitcoin is also then a direct expression of carbon-intensive energy brought to bear on powering and cooling chips. Perhaps the transparency of that chain of transference, from energy to money, may lead toward even more direct reference to the heat and carbon at the real bottom of this particular financial stack.
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The Stack to Come