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POST Building the cryptoasset superstructure

Assets DBIs

Yuri Biondi's paper on "Hyman Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis and the Accounting Structure of Economy" from "Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium", edited by Avi-Yonah, Reuven S. / Biondi, Yuri / Sunder, Shyam

Online ISSN 2152-2820

Volume 8, Issue 2 (Jul 2018) The Money Problem. Perspectives on Money, Banking and Financial Regulation

De Gruyter doi 10.1515/ael-2013-0045 AEL: A Convivium 2013; 3(3): 141 – 166<.p>

In this piece, Blondi says that

Banking and government agencies can then be understood as dynamic holistic connections that layer upon ownership of wealth and entitlements to it.

This naturally set me thinking, as I imagine the sender intended, that the nature of these connections might be different in the new world of cryptography and shared ledger. MY first and most obvious reflection is that the new structures available to us because of cryptography can separate these concepts. We have pseudonymous entitlement to wealth and, in real-world markets with legal status (put to one side the "code is law" techno-perspective), we have links between the wealth repositories (wallets) and real-world legal entities. In the formulation assumed by the article, you use your government identity to asset ownership of the wealth stored in bank accounts.

A generalised view of these two separate bindings (ie, between "tokens" in the crypto-world and assets in the real world, between "wallets" in the crypto-world and people or companies in the real world) is as shown in the diagram below, taken from the forthcoming revised paperback edition of my book "Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin".

xxx

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