Beyond Money: Cryptocurrencies, Machine-Mediated Transactions and High Frequency Bartering

Abstract

As blockchain technology is adopted into modern economies, the underlying institutional protocols will evolve. In this paper, we set out the reasoning behind how this will likely take us to an economy beyond both money and money prices. Money facilitates human-human exchange in the presence of cognitive limitations. However, in the near future personal artificially intelligent machine agents will be able to conduct exchanges with a matrix of liquid digital assets (such as cryptocurrencies). We call this process high frequency bartering. The existence of markets without money presents complex public policy challenges around privacy and taxation.

Keywords: institutional cryptoeconomics, money, bitcoin, institutions

JEL Classification: E42