With Assistance from Mr. Joel Morrison, a thoughtful response to this BoC paper pondering the notion of a Bitcoin backed currency.

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It wasn’t too long ago that I stumbled across this research paper from 2016 written by Warren E. Weber, a research consultant at the time for the Bank of Canada. Mr Weber wrote about an imagined notion that there might be a Bitcoin standard similar to a gold standard backing for a government currency. Enthralled by what a researcher for this institution might say, I found myself drawn in and felt compelled to offer my own commentary on his insights. Initially starting out as a simple two or three paragraph blurb, I found myself writing more and more until ending up with what I humbly offer below.
I hope you enjoy.

Mr Weber’s supposition; A Bitcoin standard is economically constrictive:

Starting with the non-technical conclusion that precedes the paper itself, I was particularly drawn to a couple of points that Mr Weber writes in defence of his opinion that a Bitcoin standard would likely not last if implemented.
He writes,

The paper concludes by speculating that even if the Bitcoin standard were to come into existence, it would not last long, for two reasons:

(1) The payments world is changing so rapidly that there will be a technological innovation that provides a potential medium of exchange with the same or greater benefits of Bitcoin or with lower costs. Such an innovation could come either from the private sector or from the government.

(2) There would be pressure to return to a fiat money system so that a more activist monetary policy could be pursued.

This is compelling because Mr Weber implicates activist monetary policy as a threat to the Bitcoin standard. However, I believe that in fact this is something that strengthens the notion of a Bitcoin standard.

Despite this, Mr Weber provides salient threads, and I think it’s all worth reading. Let’s start with the following from Mr. Weber in section one of his paper.

Although the skepticism about whether the Bitcoin standard could come into being is warranted to some extent, it must be remembered that if currencies other than Bitcoin exist under the Bitcoin standard, the fluctuations of their prices in terms of Bitcoin will be limited or eliminated:

[…] the current experience with the price of Bitcoin in terms of dollars is not relevant for how goods prices in terms of Bitcoin (the price level in terms of Bitcoin) would behave under the Bitcoin standard.

Mr Weber rightly points out that the relationship that currencies have with Bitcoin now is not necessarily demonstrative of how currencies would behave under a future Bitcoin standard. In such a case, Bitcoin’s volatility would almost certainly be minimal compared to now and would likely cause currencies to simply become deflationary, increasing their purchasing power year over year. Not only is Bitcoin volatile today because it is still a nascent market, but it is also because of a lack of widespread adoption on a global scale. If a country were to suddenly adopt a Bitcoin standard today, the reaction by the market would be much more volatile than in the more realistic scenario of a natural and relatively slow adoption; and so currencies would not be impacted to such a great degree.

n the technical portion of the document, Mr Weber describes the possibility where three main types of currencies exist in the world. 1) Bitcoin, 2) Fiduciary currencies backed by Bitcoin (likely fractionally), and 3) privately issued fiduciary currencies also backed by Bitcoin. I disagree with him here because, as we’ve seen, it’s remarkably easy now to use blockchain technology to issue your own currencies/tokens. You don’t even need to make a new blockchain. You can issue your own token on another platform like the ERC20 standard on the Ethereum network, or more simply with the WAVES platform, where tokens can be created in about five minutes with minimal technical expertise. So if private currencies are allowed to exist alongside a Bitcoin standard — and we seem unable to stop them — then we would actually see several different kinds of cryptocurrency backing in the world. But for the purposes of this analysis, I’ll largely stick with the supposition that if private fiduciary instruments exist, they too would be Bitcoin backed.

In section two rests this gem. Something Bitcoin alum’ like myself have blabbered on about for several years now. An observation that indeed, holding Bitcoin yourself can mean that you no longer need any of the downstream services that are supposed to be provided by a central banking system. Your money is secure and valued rationally and deterministically without the aid of a centrally managed system. In this case he focuses on agents that provide financial services and have callable liabilities such as a depositor wanting to make a withdrawal, but this can easily be extended to the notion of someone holding Bitcoin themselves.

Mr Weber writes,

Under the Bitcoin standard, Bitcoin held in an agent’s wallet serves all the functions that banks’ callable liabilities serve.

This is important to recognize, not even just on the individual level, but also on the level of those same financial service companies. When you get right down to it, central banks are lenders of last resort. They were tasked with stabilizing the dynamics of the economy through centralized monetary policy, the only kind of policy that technology would allow at the time. But if you are of a mind like mine, you might consider that central banks — through endless configurations of salaried middlemen — are not too terribly efficient at this. You might also see this migration of functions and responsibilities away from a monolithic central banking institution and toward a more diverse free market structure including a protocol layer and internet of value not as a devolution of monetary policy, but as advantageous for the individual. Perhaps you might even see it as the next step in monetary evolution for financial service companies as well. Afterall, a large chunk of their responsibilities and grunt work is now automated and made practically error-free.

In section three, a very interesting discussion on a key difference between a Bitcoin standard and a gold standard is provided. Mr Weber points out that while a gold standard has affected a nation’s capacity for setting interest rates in a constrictive fashion, nations were still given a lot of wiggle room because the cost of arbitraging gold was high. This meant that between the true market price of money and the government’s desired bank rate, there was room to manipulate interest rates. Weber points out that the cost of arbitraging Bitcoin is effectively zero, and so there is no room for government to set a bank rate that deviates from the true market price of money.

This is seemingly argued as a negative by Mr Weber because it removes a government’s capacity to “cool” or “heat” the economy. In my view, however, this is an incredibly positive aspect because a Bitcoin standard de-politicizes this control over the economy. The market should cool or heat itself in emergent response to its real dynamics. Government intervention does not work and has arguably been a key factor in exacerbating economic crises in the past. Also in section three, Mr Weber talks about the “lender of last resort” and how a central bank is hampered in this role under a Bitcoin standard.

He writes,

The ability of a monetary authority to act as lender of last resort under either the gold or Bitcoin standard is limited.

He writes,

The ability of a monetary authority to act as lender of last resort under either the gold or Bitcoin standard is limited.

Again, I believe this to be an immense positive to a constrictive monetary standard because, once again, a lack of this constriction means that central banks can politicize monetary policy. Should financial crises come on the back of a constrictive monetary standard, I can only conclude that it is certainly derived from rational market activity, and that central bank intervention will only hamper the market’s capacity to correct itself. In every case of hyperinflation, I believe this is precisely what we’ve been able to observe where a government causes an economic crisis, suffers damage to the value of its money, attempts to control the economy by way of monetary policy intervention, and then loses control of its money. In cases like the Weimar republic’s hyperinflation, were a constrictive monetary standard in place, they would not have been able to hyperinflate their way out of their debt, thereby collapsing their money. Arguments aside about whether or not those debts were fair. That’s a separate discussion.

Further addressing this constriction, Mr Weber goes on to talk about how a run on the banks under a gold or Bitcoin standard can turn into a run on a central bank, and so a central bank can only engage to a limited degree in fractional reserve. In the case of a run on a central bank, Mr Weber suggests that a central bank could either borrow Bitcoin from another central bank with a promise to repay once a financial crisis has been averted, or the central bank could suspend payments. Weber refers to an example from 1971 with which I’m not familiar, but I am familiar with an example from 1797. In this example, the Bank of England suspended payments, meaning that banknotes were no longer convertible into gold and silver until such time as the bank could return to stability and offer convertibility in the future.

Weber notes that the problem with this is that a central bank may never return to stability, and so a suspension of payments could trigger a complete collapse of a fiduciary paper money that’s effectively made into a fiat paper money because it’s lost all of its backing. When I see economists write about this, almost comically I rarely read these warnings as reasons that a central bank should not engage in politicized fractional reserve banking. Instead, economists typically attempt to suggest varied means of further policy manipulation, not taking the hint that fractional reserve is simply a form of increased risk exposure for a lender, the lender being a central bank in these cases. I don’t believe you can policy your way out of that. The risk is simply an economic reality as real as gravity and oxygen. I know of no law which allows us to go without oxygen simply because it is written. I assume this is because legislators understand some limitations of reality that prevents this from being an effective law and so, obviously not worth attempting to pass. Economic realities strike me as much the same, though I find many of us with an interest in economics to desperately seek ways of writing our way out of these simmilar realities.

In section four, Weber begins to speculate on how a Bitcoin standard might work by first examining the performance of a gold standard historically. He observes that between 1880 and 1895, a selection of 11 countries experienced no inflation and in fact saw deflation of an average 0.19%. Between 1895 and 1913 however, these 11 countries saw an average of 1.45% inflation. Showing the unfortunate mistake of many economists, Weber speculates that this inflation is due to an increase in global gold supply because it tracks well with new gold supplies mined into circulation such as massive gold discoveries in South Africa and a new cyanide based smelting process.

Weber then does indeed go on to observe that world gold stocks did increase from 1880 to 1895, and argues correctly that quantity theory shows an inflation rate similar to the observed inflation rate between 1895 and 1913 given that increased gold production should also be measured by average economic output/growth. However, I find myself again having to insist that this calculation is crude and supposes far too much about macroeconomic factors which could be considered microeconomic when we’re comparing blocks of countries with one another. Weber is correctly observing a correlation between an increase in supply of a commodity good (gold in this case) and its decreased price on global markets that results. But at this point I am afraid that he is teeing up an argument against a standard because of how it constricts a nation’s capacity for using monetary policy to regulate local markets.

Weber goes on to offer three points of conjecture on how world prices might be affected by a Bitcoin standard given his observations of inflation and deflation under a gold standard.

In his first point of conjecture, Weber asserts that because of Bitcoin’s declining issuance model, and that because Bitcoin will see less than 0.5% inflation by the year 2026, at this time economies tied to a Bitcoin standard would see deflation of roughly 2 or 3 percent. Using the modern vernacular of inflation as we have been doing, this would mean that real prices in a Bitcoin standard economy would fall by 2 or 3 percent per year. To add my own thoughts to his conjecture, I would say that this deflation would increase over time and track economic growth rather than monetary issuance, though I believe that to be the case at all times.

Conjecture two offers the notion that there would not be periods of deflation followed by inflation because Mr Weber has correlated price inflation from 1895 to 1913 with an increase in world gold supply. Weber argues that because Bitcoin supply only decreases, inflation would simply give way entirely to deflation. Mr Weber also rightly points out that real market interest rates could be negative under a Bitcoin standard, depending on whether or not an economy was experiencing high real growth in output.

Mr Weber’s third point of conjecture is that prices across nations, especially those that are closely tied, would experience remarkable similarities in prices. Of course, this is absolutely the case, and I would further argue that even countries in which a Bitcoin standard is not adopted, prices would be strongly affected by an otherwise popular global Bitcoin standard. Whether a central bank uses Bitcoin or uses an issuance method of 100% “full faith and credit” fiat, a cryptocurrency empowered by popularized utility of governments around the world would, in my estimation, turn Bitcoin into a global settlements currency. In this paper, Mr Weber has already pointed out that the cost of arbitraging Bitcoin is essentially zero. This means that someone in a non Bitcoin standard nation would simply have to wonder if their desired local merchants would accept Bitcoin over their local government’s fiat currency. If Bitcoin is already a global settlements instrument, then the answer would almost certainly be yes. As an example to consider, in my own travels to different countries, negotiating the use of the US Dollar over a local currency has always been exceedingly easy because of the US Dollar’s status as a global settlements instrument.

Mr Weber touches on exchange rates in this section also, and once again perfectly points out that, under a gold standard, exchange rates between nations rather perfectly tracked the costs of arbitrage. For example, Mr Weber points out that exchange rates between the USD and the CAD had very little variance because they are geographically close together, and those who were using CAD likely also had accounts in New York to store gold. I find myself agreeing entirely with this observation as supply and demand are very logically affected by the cost of transport and storage which equate to the cost of arbitrage.

Mr Weber concludes this portion of section four with the following.

Conjecture: Under the Bitcoin standard, the exchange rates among the fiduciary currencies of various countries would be fixed at par, because the cost of Bitcoin arbitrage is essentially zero.

Mr Weber speaks to real output growth (real output growth and real GDP are regular output/GDP numbers adjusted for inflation) as well, and seems to suggest that under a Bitcoin standard, real growth would be similar to real growth today. I would argue that this conjecture is faulty because today, the price of money (interest rates) is highly politicized and influenced by immense amounts of government malinvestment which are significant inefficiencies. What Mr Weber is failing to recognize in this paper is that constrictive gold standards in the past have hampered government’s capacity to spend irresponsibly and even to go to war. It may be a cynical view that is not shared among many economists, but it is my opinion that government is not properly incentivised to spend responsibly, and so real growth is hampered by government malinvestment as a matter of routine in the world today.

Mr Weber does at least go on to state though that he believes concerns linking deflation and slowed economic growth are unwarranted. He rightly seems to be observing that nominal values of currencies do not dictate a currency’s flexibility in being utilized for credit markets. This is a fallacy that I’ve seen far too many economists seemingly accept at face value, and mr Weber seems to correctly reject it.

In writing on the spectre of financial crisis under a Bitcoin standard, Mr Weber writes,

According to the Reinhart and Rogoff (2009) data, there were banking crises in 1880, 1882, 1885, 1889, 1890, 1891, 1897, 1898, 1901 and 1907 in one or more countries that were on the gold standard.

He continues a short time later,

[…] there were six countries (Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Indonesia, Switzerland and Turkey) that were on the gold standard during the entire 34 years but did not have a financial crisis, and another 11 that were on the gold standard for part of the period but did not have a financial crisis.

Mr Weber seems to suggest that a crisis is an economic certainty under most any financial system and concludes that there will be financial crises under a Bitcoin standard. While I agree that this is likely, I once again point my finger at governments and politicized monetary policy for that while Mr Weber points to a maturity mismatch between backing instruments like gold, and redemption demands from fiduciary paper money holders. However, I would argue that this maturity mismatch on a national scale is virtually impossible without government monopoly of currency supplies. With increased market accountability, it is my view that currency issuers that engage in fractional reserve issuance of their currency expose themselves to greater and greater market risk. Thus, the less competition there is in a monetary marketplace, the less that risk is realized and accounted for until it is too late, and a national currency crisis blooms.

I respectfully suggest that in this paper, Mr Weber is sadly not pointing to government manipulation in fiscal policy as a primary cause for what motivates central banks to engage in manipulations of currency that then spur crises. Say, for example, a government overspends by significant sums. This has a real impact on the economy, not only because those significant dollar amounts could easily be spent unwisely, but also because debt maintenance serves then as an economic drag which affects how a central bank will interpret inflation targets and how they set interest rates. The effect of government malinvestment is a stunningly important factor that goes largely unnoticed in this paper as it often does in many research papers like this. Mr Weber even suggests that deposit insurance could be used to mitigate financial crises, but rightly notes that deposit insurance has never actually prevented a crisis. In my view, that is because deposit insurance attempts to use a failed fiduciary instrument to aid in the recovery of that fiduciary instrument. Much like trying to use a broken arm to splint a broken leg. It doesn’t make much sense to me.

Mr Weber’s suppositions on the unsustainable nature of a Bitcoin standard:

In section five of his paper, Mr Weber states that the Bitcoin standard would likely not last long. I find his reasoning overreaching and assumptive, but it’s not entirely unfair. My primary issue with Mr Weber’s reasoning is found in his assertion here that Bitcoin lacks any intrinsic value and I’ll explain shortly my objections relative to that specifically.

Mr Weber first states that the length of time a Bitcoin standard might last is likely dependent upon how a Bitcoin standard comes into being. In his first supposition, he ponders a situation in which a Bitcoin standard is introduced slowly over time. In this case, Bitcoin is simply used more and more in an economy, and so the central bank connected to that economy adopts a standard that the market has essentially adopted already. Mr Weber argues that this standard would not last long because an economic crisis would result in pressure on a central bank to use tools at its disposal like quantitative easing to mitigate the effects of these crises.

While this supposition isn’t unfair, I once again am made to ponder the root causes of financial crises. While financial crises are certainly possible in a free money market where government maintains no monopoly on the money supply, I assert that these crises are much more localized when they happen, and much less impactful even locally when all is said and done. Again, the key here is market accountability where the greater the risk exposure for a fractional reserve currency issuer, the greater the capacity for the market to react to that risk exposure unless the currency supply is monopolized by a nation. In that case, risk exposure can be built up to such catastrophic levels that entire economies crash, rather than only localized pockets of an economy in the case where currency supplies are openly competitive within a broader single economy.

I’m also brought back to some of Mr Weber’s opening thoughts in which he speculates on the possibility of privately issued fiduciary instruments existing alongside a central bank issued fiduciary instrument backed by Bitcoin. If this is allowed to happen where central bank Bitcoin backed currency exists alongside privately issued Bitcoin backed currency, in the case of a financial crisis striking the central bank, the general public could easily begin to adopt the use of private currencies and abandon the central bank currency. While the population would still be impacted by the financial crisis, the impact would be mitigated by the free market provided opportunity to choose currencies based in their provable security. Assume for instance that Wal Mart decides to introduce a Bitcoin backed currency and users flock to it because Wal Mart also releases public audits of its currency to show that it is secure and additionally entices consumers to use their currency for discounts at its stores. This is one in a million possible cases where privately issued fiduciary currencies would replace the need for a central bank to attempt monetary policy manipulation to mitigate a currency crisis. A central bank is transformed in this case from market regulator to market competitor.

Mr Weber continues,

The second case is that in which countries had been on fiat monetary standards similar to the ones in existence today, but for some reason their fiat currencies are no longer valued, have gone out of existence and have been replaced by the Bitcoin standard. Further, there is no possibility of a return to a fiat standard. One of the major reasons that this could occur is that countries have been following bad monetary policies that have led to high rates of inflation.

We could look to cases like Zimbabwe where the currency was so badly mismanaged in the mid 2000s that the country abandoned its own currency in 2008. In 2015, the central bank there began the process of demonetization to officially devalue their currency to zero. Nine currencies would be given legal tender status afterward, though the country began using the US Dollar almost entirely, along with the South African Rand. In this case, what if the country adopted a Bitcoin standard? Mr Weber asserts that in this case also, a Bitcoin standard would not last long. I respectfully disagree.

Here Mr Weber touches on a point of major contention I have with much of the economic world in how it views Bitcoin. Mr Weber suggests that Bitcoin may be adopted, but that it may not be persistently valued because it has no intrinsic value. In other words, he claims, it may be used today, but because it is intrinsically valueless, something else may easily come along to displace it on the back of future uncertainty in its acceptability.

Let me say clearly that Bitcoin is not intrinsically valueless and that the common understanding of intrinsic value is typically unfair to very specialized units of account. While we often may face explanation of intrinsic value in things like gold, given that gold is used in jewelry and such, this observation of utility is not only subjective, but it also disregards accounting of value as a value itself. It is my position that units of account (even unbacked fiat) all have “intrinsic” value in that they are useful for indexing value. Units of account are what enable us to transcend the clumsy barter system by overcoming the coincidence of needs problem, and when we see things like gold as a potential unit of account, it is not because it’s on someone’s necklace, but rather because gold is divisible, fungible, durable, and difficult to counterfeit. It is my belief that if a fiat money shares these values and is managed perfectly, that fiat monies would have displaced gold and fiduciary gold instruments long ago. However, it is also my belief that such perfect management is impossible in any political system. Even Bitcoin and other blockchain currencies are susceptible to poor management, but in my opinion, they are as close to a perfectly managed money as the world has ever seen. I argue, this is due to the cryptocurrencies’ exposure to harsh market accountability.

So, while Mr Weber suggests that a Bitcoin standard may waffle over time in the case where a fiat or failed fiduciary currency has collapsed, I take some issue with this supposition in this case given that I do not believe units of account are inherently lacking in value. Indexing value and making it easily exchangeable is of immense value to any functional economy, and Bitcoin achieves this. Bitcoin necklaces may not show up anytime soon, but I absolutely reject the notion that this is what gives any currency its value. After all, when aluminium was rare, it too was used as jewelry and for expensive eating utensils. That said, this history doesn’t make aluminium any good as a currency, or for utensils for that matter, today when it’s commonly available and dirt cheap.

Mr Weber does, however, outline some very reasonable possibilities that threaten a Bitcoin standard. One such supposition is an attack on the Bitcoin blockchain. A common technical point of discussion among bitcoin developers is blockchain integrity which is a focus on how to ensure that the Bitcoin blockchain is free from manipulation by bad market actors. Central to how Bitcoin operates is the concept of distributed consensus decision making, sometimes referred to as Nakamoto Consensus. Should this consensus be somehow compromised, the Bitcoin blockchain becomes questionable, and faith in Bitcoin itself can easily crumble. However, we should attempt to frame the likelihood of this threat in easily understood terms. One might as well speculate on how difficult it might be to target every gold mine in the world with military force, capture said gold mines, and then control the issuance of new gold into the world gold supply. This would of course be immensely difficult, it would be impossible to achieve without going unnoticed, and it would also drive the market to abandon gold as an investment safe haven in favour of other instruments not controlled in this fashion. The practically impossible difficulty of this is similar to the difficulty we would find in the notion of taking over and attacking the Bitcoin blockchain.

This plays well into another supposition by Mr Weber where he notes that there are many hundreds of other cryptocurrencies in existence that could replace Bitcoin as an instrument that secures a country’s fiduciary currency instrument. On this, I must agree that a Bitcoin standard could well be threatened by a different cryptocurrency should it be valued in a superior fashion compared to Bitcoin. However, while this is important to recognize, I don’t see this in any negative fashion. To be fair, Mr Weber doesn’t indicate it specifically as a negative either. In any case, this plays to something that I very much enjoy about the idea of a Bitcoin standard, which is that Bitcoin is extremely market accountable. In fact, the entirety of cryptocurrencies are highly market accountable. Should Bitcoin be displaced by something better, I would see this as highly advantageous to an economy because this can only mean that said economy is drawn to the use of a superior money.

Mr Weber also supposes that a Bitcoin standard could be foiled by a country’s adoption of an “inherently valuable” backing which he thinks would drive bitcoin out. I suppose this depends on where you stand on inherent value in a money as I’ve already explained. I think that Mr Weber relies on a fundamental mistake in understanding where money gets its value, and fails to realize that “inherently valuable” money doesn’t drive out Bitcoin in competition; rather it’s the other way around. We should come back again to arbitrage and consider the immense value of Bitcoin’s capacity for being moved around a market rather freely, and even in between markets with virtually no friction. If faced with the question of whether we’d want a money that will cost $1,000 to transport across country lines or a money that will cost $0, I don’t think whether or not the money is used in necklaces becomes a primary point of concern in choosing between the two. Again, I firmly reject that Bitcoin or other crypto currencies are at an advantage simply because they lack this fallaciously accepted notion of intrinsic value. Instead, I strongly assert that Bitcoin gets its monetary value from being a useful money due to fungibility, divisibility, durability and its resistance to counterfeit.

If good money does indeed drive out bad, then Bitcoin will absolutely drive out politically manipulable fiduciary instruments whether backed by something with intrinsic value or not.

Mr Weber concludes,

Nonetheless, in my opinion it is unlikely that the Bitcoin standard will come into existence, because governments and central banks will take actions to prevent it. They will do so for two reasons. One is to protect the seigniorage revenues that they obtain from the ability to almost costlessly create money. The second is to retain the ability to implement interest policies to affect their domestic economies. Governments would lose the ability to do either or both of these under the Bitcoin standard.

While I cannot find fault with this particular view on government’s motivation, I believe that governments around the world will be forced to “face the music” so to speak, and accept that they will have to work within the confines of a cryptocurrency dominated world. While Mr Weber is spot on in why governments might not wish to allow for a Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency standard, the fact is that if Bitcoin can do better than central banks in providing a useful money, Bitcoin will simply have impossible to contain market demand and end up routing around government controlled monetary systems. Indeed, we already see this being done as Bitcoin surges over and over again in popularity in hyperinflation stricken Venezuela, taking away the government’s power to control the monetary instruments used by the population there. We have seen numerous instances in which individuals choosing to invest in Bitcoin have seen their wealth increase as the market more and more adopts Bitcoin as a preferred monetary instrument. We see more and more users of the currency choosing to deal as much as they are able in Bitcoin exclusively to meet their purchasing needs. Year over year, Bitcoin has not experienced a single period of contraction despite a continued inflation of its money supply. In fact, its periods of growth have been unrivalled by any traditional investment vehicle and projections only continue to get more and more positive.

In my estimation, Mr Weber has written a fantastic paper here that draws attention to the many dynamics that would affect a Bitcoin Standard. I find a number of points where I disagree with Mr Weber, but all in all, his observations of a possible future are compelling and highly relevant to understanding this potential avenue of growth for the cryptocurrency space. It was an honest pleasure going over his paper. My sincerest thanks to the author.

A Bank of Canada Researcher Imagines The Bitcoin Standard. A Detailed Commentary.

Mr Weber’s supposition; A Bitcoin standard is economically constrictive:

Mr Weber’s suppositions on the unsustainable nature of a Bitcoin standard: