Stephen Wilks
This Article looks to specific periods in the socio-legal history of money to make a series of predictive statements about cryptocurrency’s contemporary impact. New forms of currency have been more consequential than simply solving narrowly defined problems. They have shaped relationships between technology and government’s expansionary aims to produce important structural arrangements – sometimes at the cost of disrupting incumbent ones. In the prehistoric era, commodity based forms of money gave way to metal coins and systems of exchange that facilitated trade expansion and would eventually express political power in their physical design. The large-scale circulation of paper notes in seventeenth-century England also responded to a mix of technological and governmental needs that created their own disruptive effects. This paradigm would repeat itself in America’s early history and ultimately lay the seedbed for today’s global political economy. In each of these historical periods, social participation remained a key element in the evolution of state power through its currency. This history gives rise to two observations about digital currency and its prospects. The first suggests cryptocurrency’s disruption will echo prior experiences with new currency adoption while attempting to address some perceived problem. The second observation argues that cryptocurrencies signal a new phase in the constantly evolving project of defining law’s role in the relationship between currency, governance and regulation; and where the modern state remains interested in controlling money’s production and movement.