Note: This thesis requires a basic understanding of blockchains, smart contracts, Bitcoin, and Ethereum. A quick recap if you’re not familiar: Bitcoin created the ability to send money around the globe cheaply and easily without having to trust a third party. Ethereum extended this idea with smart contracts, which essentially allows you to control the money programmatically. So, you can create computer programs that take and escrow money from various participants and then reallocate the funds amongst those people based on certain conditions. For instance, those conditions could effectively replicate a swap, options, futures, bond, or other financial agreement. Moreover, the critical part is you can do all of this without having to trust anyone, and the contracts enforce themselves automatically because programs do all the work. Coordination is substantially easier because these markets are all open, public, and accessible via the internet. If this paragraph sounds ludicrous, you should probably start with some background reading: I’d suggest the Bitcoin White Paper and the Ethereum White Paper.

Blockchain tech and cryptocurrency are the underpinnings of a new financial infrastructure, just as the internet was the underpinning of a new information infrastructure. Neither was, nor will be, built overnight.

When one looks at the history of advances in free speech and increased access to information, you notice, almost universally, that society advances by every imaginable metric: literacy rates, educational advancement, dissemination of ideas and new technologies, GDP per capita, and poverty rates — just to name a few.

The first information revolution was the printing press, followed by the telegram, telephone, radio, television, and of course, the internet. The internet is interesting in that it encompasses all the other revolutions into one: you can listen to sound over the internet, you can read a text, and you can watch videos. You can even do it all in the same place! The internet, unlike historical information revolutions, not only revolutionized access to content, it democratized the creation of that content.

Finance hasn’t gone through this series of revolutions; indeed nothing close to the level of free speech wrought onto society by the internet. At best, one can argue that most trades today take place electronically; financial infrastructure uses the internet to communicate; and execution speed has improved considerably since the 1970’s — all true statements. Finance, however, has not been transformed at its most critical point: the creation of new instruments, contracts, and agreements. If today you wish to create a new financial contract — a derivative, loan, or money market instrument, for example — good luck! In short, I would argue that finance has not even begun it’s equivalent to the printing press phase of the information revolution!

This sounds radical, just as it would have seemed quite radical to suggest that people beyond monks and scribes would want to author their own books, or that people would want to have their own websites or spin-up new websites about entirely random subjects.

People exclaimed, “But shouldn’t the publishers control what gets published, they’re a check on sensibility!”

Others rejoined, “What if people were able to publish whatever they want and choose for themselves what to read?”

I’d argue that the same fundamentals apply to the financial system, and by opening access to democratize the creation of new financial markets, society will benefit on the scale brought by the information revolutions in the past, but this time, it’ll transform value, money, and finance.

There’s another weird thing, specifically about cryptocurrency: given the sorry state of finance, we’re not just trying to create the printing press, or the telegram, or even television. No, here we’re aiming to jump straight to the level of disintermediation and free speech of the internet today but applied to finance.

It’s only natural to consider money an extension of speech, and, even if you disagree, Citizens United effectively deems it so. But one doesn’t need a Supreme Court case to recognize that bits of information on a computer are speech, and, therefore, if you can represent money as bits, it too is speech.