Introduction to Bitcoin and its Ethics Issues

CONTENTS

What is Bitcoin

Who created it?

Who prints it?

How does Bitcoin work?

The characteristics of Bitcoin

Ethical analysis of Bitcoin

WHAT IS

BITCOIN

Bitcoin is a form of digital currency, created and held electronically. No one

controls it. Bitcoins aren’t printed, like dollars or euros – they’re produced by people, and increasingly businesses, running computers all around the world, using software that solves mathematical problems.

It’s the first example of a growing category of money known as cryptocurrency.

Who

created it?

A software developer called Satoshi Nakamoto proposed bitcoin, which was

an electronic payment system based on mathematical proof. The idea was to

produce a currency independent of any central authority, transferable

electronically, more or less instantly, with very low transaction fees.

Who

prints it?

No one. This currency isn’t physically printed by a central bank. Some argue central banks are unaccountable to the population and can simply produce more money to cover the national debt, thus devaluing their currency.

Instead, bitcoin is created digitally, by a community of people anyone can join. Bitcoins are ‘mined’, using computing power in a distributed network.This network also processes transactions made with the virtual currency, effectively making bitcoin its own payment network.

The characteristic

of Bitcoin

Person to PersonSend bitcoin from your computer, tablet, smart phone or otherdevice, to anyone, anywhere in the world, day or night.

EASY

SECUREStrong cryptography

Bitcoin verifies transactions with the same state-of-the-art encryption used in banking, military and government applications.

OPENFully decentralized

Bitcoin is open-source. Nobody owns it; the most popular clientis maintained by a community of open-source developers .

FAIRMinimal Fees

Using the Bitcoin network is free, except for a voluntary fee youcan use to speed up transaction processing.

The

ethics of

Bitcoin

Bitcoin transactions are not secret. In order to be verified by the network of miners, they need to be published to the network. It is possible for the general public to trace the transfer of Bitcoins from one “Bitwallet” to another. However, the owner of a particular Bitwallet can be anonymous, providing a degree of anonymity to users. This near anonymity has made Bitcoin attractive to users of underground web sites such as Silk Road to purchase illegal drugs.

The ethics

of Bitcoin

Although Bitcoin is commonly referred to as a “cryptocurrency,” a scholar refers to it as “a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.” The genesis of the invention was a concern that other electronic payments required a trusted intermediary, such as a bank or electronic mint, in order to verify the transaction. Otherwise, electronic payments could be counterfeited or “double spent.” Indeed, the word “trust” appears 14 times in his seminal nine page paper, and the word “honest” 16 times. The word “currency” only appears once, in the context of a physical currency. Instead of relying on a single trusted intermediary, such as a bank or credit card network to transmit and verify the transaction, the Bitcoin system relies upon a large number of miners to verify transactions. In the Bitcoin system, a transaction is publicly announced to the network. The miners effectively vote on the legitimacy of each transaction as part of the mining process by time stamping each transaction and verifying that no one has double spent that money before.

The

ethics

of Bitcoin

Bitcoin has attracted quite a bit of media attention, and Bitcoin related ventures have started to receive venture capital funding. One of the tantalizing possibilities of the system is that it or a similar open-architecture payment network may provide a cheaper method for businesses to receive payments than the Visa and MasterCard systems. Overstock.com has started accepting Bitcoins and states that its processing costs for receiving payments in Bitcoin are lower than for traditional credit cards.

The

ethics

of Bitcoin

In a New York Times blog post, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman declared “Bitcoin is evil”, citing arguments that Bitcoin is part of a political agenda to damage central banks and the abilities of governments to collect taxes. Although he does not precisely define his usage of the word evil, it appears that he is using it in the common dictionary meaning of “profoundly immoral or malevolent.” The implication is that the proponents of Bitcoin want to use it as a replacement currency to the fiat money currently issued by central banks. This would eliminate the role of central banks in the world economy, which some proponents think would be a good, not evil, outcome. Furthermore, the near anonymity of Bitcoin transactions can be used to facilitate illegal activities such as narcotics trafficking, terrorism, and tax evasion.

The ethics

of Bitcoin

Clearly, the use of any payment mechanism, whether it be cash, check, wire transfers, or bitcoin, for malevolent purposes is evil. One could similarly argue that paper currency is evil, given its current status as a payment mechanism for illicit activities. This raises again the old ethical question of how to balance a product’s potential for abuse with its benefits. As long as a product has significant potential benefits, then the ethical judgment should be made on the use of the product, not the product itself. For example, painkillers like oxycodone have a serious potential for abuse, but also important medical uses as well. Thus, bitcoin itself is not evil, although bitcoin, like any other payment system, can be used for evil purposes.