Bitcoin: In Crypto We Trust

Tim Wu, who coined "net neutrality", has written an op-ed on the New York Times called "The Bitcoin Boom: In Code We Trust". He is wrong about "code".

The wrong "trust"

Wu builds a big manifesto about how real-world institutions can't be trusted. Certainly, this reflects the rhetoric from a vocal wing of Bitcoin fanatics, but it's not the Bitcoin manifesto.

Instead, the word "trust" in the Bitcoin paper is much narrower, referring to how online merchants can't trust credit-cards (for example). When I bought school supplies for my niece when she studied in Canada, the online site wouldn't accept my U.S. credit card. They didn't trust my credit card. However, they trusted my Bitcoin, so I used that payment method instead, and succeeded in the purchase.

Real-world currencies like dollars are tethered to the real-world, which means no single transaction can be trusted, because "they" (the credit-card company, the courts, etc.) may decide to reverse the transaction. The manifesto behind Bitcoin is that a transaction cannot be reversed -- and thus, can always be trusted.

Deliberately confusing the micro-trust in a transaction and macro-trust in banks and governments is a sort of bait-and-switch.

The wrong inspiration

Wu claims:

"It was, after all, a carnival of human errors and misfeasance that inspired the invention of Bitcoin in 2009, namely, the financial crisis."

Not true. Bitcoin did not appear fully formed out of the void, but was instead based upon a series of innovations that predate the financial crisis by a decade. Moreover, the financial crisis had little to do with "currency". The value of the dollar and other major currencies were essentially unscathed by the crisis. Certainly, enthusiasts looking backward like to cherry pick the financial crisis as yet one more reason why the offline world sucks, but it had little to do with Bitcoin.

In crypto we trust

It's not in code that Bitcoin trusts, but in crypto. Satoshi makes that clear in one of his posts on the subject:

A generation ago, multi-user time-sharing computer systems had a similar problem. Before strong encryption, users had to rely on password protection to secure their files, placing trust in the system administrator to keep their information private. Privacy could always be overridden by the admin based on his judgment call weighing the principle of privacy against other concerns, or at the behest of his superiors. Then strong encryption became available to the masses, and trust was no longer required. Data could be secured in a way that was physically impossible for others to access, no matter for what reason, no matter how good the excuse, no matter what.

You don't possess Bitcoins. Instead, all the coins are on the public blockchain under your "address". What you possess is the secret, private key that matches the address. Transferring Bitcoin means using your private key to unlock your coins and transfer them to another. If you print out your private key on paper, and delete it from the computer, it can never be hacked.

Trust is in this crypto operation. Trust is in your private crypto key.

We don't trust the code

The manifesto "in code we trust" has been proven wrong again and again. We don't trust computer code (software) in the cryptocurrency world.

The most profound example is something known as the "DAO" on top of Ethereum, Bitcoin's major competitor. Ethereum allows "smart contracts" containing code. The quasi-religious manifesto of the DAO smart-contract is that the "code is the contract", that all the terms and conditions are specified within the smart-contract code, completely untethered from real-world terms-and-conditions.

Then a hacker found a bug in the DAO smart-contract and stole most of the money.

In principle, this is perfectly legal, because "the code is the contract", and the hacker just used the code. In practice, the system didn't live up to this. The Ethereum core developers, acting as central bankers, rewrote the Ethereum code to fix this one contract, returning the money back to its original owners. They did this because those core developers were themselves heavily invested in the DAO and got their money back.

Similar things happen with the original Bitcoin code. A disagreement has arisen about how to expand Bitcoin to handle more transactions. One group wants smaller and "off-chain" transactions. Another group wants a "large blocksize". This caused a "fork" in Bitcoin with two versions, "Bitcoin" and "Bitcoin Cash". The fork championed by the core developers (central bankers) is worth around $20,000 right now, while the other fork is worth around $2,000.

So it's still "in central bankers we trust", it's just that now these central bankers are mostly online instead of offline institutions. They have proven to be even more corrupt than real-world central bankers. It's certainly not the code that is trusted.

The bubble

Wu repeats the well-known reference to Amazon during the dot-com bubble. If you bought Amazon's stock for $107 right before the dot-com crash, it still would be one of wisest investments you could've made. Amazon shares are now worth around $1,200 each.

The implication is that Bitcoin, too, may have such long term value. Even if you buy it today and it crashes tomorrow, it may still be worth ten-times its current value in another decade or two.

This is a poor analogy, for three reasons.

The first reason is that we knew the Internet had fundamentally transformed commerce. We knew there were going to be winners in the long run, it was just a matter of picking who would win (Amazon) and who would lose (Pets.com). We have yet to prove Bitcoin will be similarly transformative.

The second reason is that businesses are real, they generate real income. While the stock price may include some irrational exuberance, it's ultimately still based on the rational expectations of how much the business will earn. With Bitcoin, it's almost entirely irrational exuberance -- there are no long term returns.

The third flaw in the analogy is that there are an essentially infinite number of cryptocurrencies. We saw this today as Coinbase started trading Bitcoin Cash, a fork of Bitcoin. The two are nearly identical, so there's little reason one should be so much valuable than another. It's only a fickle fad that makes one more valuable than another, not business fundamentals. The successful future cryptocurrency is unlikely to exist today, but will be invented in the future.

The lessons of the dot-com bubble is not that Bitcoin will have long term value, but that cryptocurrency companies like Coinbase and BitPay will have long term value. Or, the lesson is that "old" companies like JPMorgan that are early adopters of the technology will grow faster than their competitors.

Conclusion

The point of Wu's paper is to distinguish trust in traditional real-world institutions and trust in computer software code. This is an inaccurate reading of the situation.

Bitcoin is not about replacing real-world institutions but about untethering online transactions.

The trust in Bitcoin is in crypto -- the power crypto gives individuals instead of third-parties.

The trust is not in the code. Bitcoin is a "cryptocurrency" not a "codecurrency".