Bitcoin as Money
Mythos, Logos, and Value
Vilnius University
2026-02-27
Money as a Puzzle
[N]ot even love has made so many fools of men as the pondering over the nature of money.
– Gladstone (1845*) according to Marx (1904, 73)
“[I]t is with peculiar diffidence and even apprehension that one ventures to open one’s mouth on the subject of money”
– Hicks (1989, 8)
There is no denying that views on money are as difficult to describe as are shifting clouds.
– Schumpeter (2006, 276)
[Paper money] may be a dubious and even dangerous sort of money, but even the worst sort must be included in the theory. Money it must be, in order to be bad money.
– Knapp (1924, 1)
Bitcoin as a Puzzle
Rotta and Paraná (2022) call it a digital commodity “that requires no direct (living) labour and thus creates no new value” (p. 1046).
Swartz (2018) dubs it a form of digital gold which is mined rather than minted.
Hayes (2019) questions its monetary pretensions altogether and is rather “a [digital] collectible or a commodity than money” (p. 51) and is only money “within the socio-technical bounds of its own blockchain” (Hayes 2021, 130).
“Political Economists”virtually all have agreed that no cryptocurrency fulfills all [classical] functions [of money]” (Olk and Miebs 2025, 1417)
The Commodity-Credit Schism
There is a longstanding debate on the origins of money as top-down or bottom-up phenomenon between two camps which Goodhart (1998) dubbed the metalists (M) and the chartalists (C).
Money, then, is credit and nothing but credit. A’s money is B’s debt to him, and when B pays his debt, A’s money disappears. This is the whole theory of money.
– Alfred Mitchell-Innes in (Wray 2004, 42)
The theory of money necessarily presupposes a theory of the saleableness of goods. If we grasp this, we shall be able to understand how the almost unlimited saleableness of money is only a special case,-presenting only a difference of degree-of a generic phenomenon of economic life-namely, the difference in the saleableness of commodities in general.
– Karl Menger (1892, 243)
A Dead Dog?
Team M “has assembled the more illustrious collection of economists” whereas Team C has attracted “a more motley, fringe group of economists” alongside “a sizeable majority, of those in other disciplines, e.g., anthropologists, numismatists and historians concerned with the origin of money”
– Goodhart (1998, 408)
“What accounts for the insularity of conventional [IPE] studies of money? Why is the mainstream literature so timid about taking on larger systemic issues? Why the fascination with puzzles rather than problems? […] Put simply, too much emphasis is placed on formal scientific method at the expense of substantive content”
– Cohen (2017, 674)
Money’s Neglected Dimension
Scholars have long recognized that economic value has been a neglected dimension by both methodological individualists and structuralists alike (Zelmanovitz 2021; Orléan 2023).
Pitts (2021) identifies substance (labor), field (utility), and institutional (norms) theories of value, each centering on its own metaphor.
[Value] is a term that suggests the possibility of resolving ongoing theoretical dilemmas; particularly of overcoming the difference between what one might call top-down and bottom-up perspectives […] Reconciling the two has been a perennial problem for social theory.
– Graeber (2001, 20)
Money, Myth and Metaphor
For Barthes (1991), myth purifies and bestows natural and eternal justifications. Mythical speech understood as innocent not because its intentions are hidden, but because those intentions have been naturalized rather than motivated ideologies.
Mythic language is metaphorical. The literature on money ponders its nature as either a special object or a special contract (Ali 2014).
For the orthodoxy money is a natural product of human propensity for exchange (Desan 2013). For the heterodoxy money is creature of the State (Beggs 2017). Both build upon mutually exclusive visions of the world (Steininger 2025).
The Original (Barter) Myth
When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam, He set the bounds of the people. […] One country abounded in one thing and lacked another. Men therefore began to trade by barter:one man gave another a sheep for some corn, another gave his labour for bread or wool, and so with other things. […] But as this exchange and transport of commodities [sic] gave rise to many inconveniences, men were subtle enough to devise the use of money to be the instrument for exchanging the natural riches which of themselves minister to human need. […] And it is clear without further proof that coin is very useful to the civil community, and convenient, or rather necessary, to the business of the state, as Aristotle proves in the fifth book of the Ethics.
– Nicholas Oresme (1355 or 1356) in Johnson (1956, 4–5)
The Elements of Bitcoin’s Mythos
Faustino, Faria, and Marques (2022) discuss the mythos of Satoshi Nakamoto:
- A holy text (white paper) nailed by a mythical hero on the door of a corrupt church (central banks and bailouts).
- A genesis block on recorded on January 3, 2009 and a sacrifice (5% of BTC frozen)
- A festive calendar, May 22nd as Bitcoin Pizza Day and the halvings.
- A mythical hero (Satoshi Nakamoto) and his disciples (e.g. Antonopolous, Ver)
- A schism in the early church (code change 2017, Bitcoin Cash),
- A message from the beyond to keep the faith (2018): “Nour”
- Utopia (a trustless society) and rapture (the fall of fiat money)
So, Bitcoin’s Moneyness?
Following the Simmel (2004) - Dodd (2014) - Zelizer (1989) (sociological) tradition, money is understood as an impersonal claim within a social system.
The boundries of this system are drawn relationally, and interactions within it are on average rational, but this requires a collective acceptance of symbols of value.
The value dimension of the classical defintion is better understood as symbol rather than a bucket that stores a proverbial substance.
The Elephant in the Room
Can our understanding of money be divorced from our understanding of what it should be? Can there be a true science of money?
To borrow a metaphor from Haidt (2012), we over-focus on the rider and neglect the elephant.
AI forces us to reflect on value’s foundations in scarcity and productivity:
- Example AI podcast on Faustino et al (2022):
Thank you for your attention!
I am a computational social scientist examining how ideas and narratives shape political and financial systems. Alongside research, I have taught several courses on data science for social scientists and regularly share and review open-source tools.
For information more visit my personal website.
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