Token Crushing Token: from Cryptocurrencies to Capabilities

The very first aim of this project is to move the understanding of cryptocurrencies away from the formal objectives of the misleading and unrealistic Bitcoin rhetoric, so as to bring it closer to the social, economic, financial and technical issue of the inefficient and unfair distribution of power in our societies and its practical consequences. Rather than being notionally defined in instrumental terms, cryptocurrencies and blockchain will be philosophically investigated as a dynamic relation between society, economics and technology. For this purpose, Martha Nussbaum’s strategic extension of Rawls’s theory of public reason, known as capability approach, will be applied in the evaluation of the concrete outcomes of the growing introduction of cryptocurrencies. The second reason why this approach seems promising and fruitful is that cryptocurrencies and capabilities not only have been developed within the ICT domain, but under certain circumstances they can both be defined as tokens, namely as tamper-proof keys necessary to access a certain value, unrelated in the first case and related in the second to a real object. A philosophical research project keen to apply the capabilities approach to the study of cryptocurrencies might offer some insight into reshaping the concept of value itself.