Dr Todd Mei, Head of the Department of Philosophy, has recently published for the Australian Humanities Review as part of a conversation on ‘Cryptocurrency and the Intelligence of the Humanities’ with an article titled ‘Cryptocurrency: Kneeling Before Speculation’.
“The novelty of cryptocurrency resides in how its block-chain technology provides an immutable public record of financial transactions that does not require regulation by a central authority,” Todd writes, “Lurking behind this advance is the idea that algorithms, or machine code, eliminate conventional processes that are not only less expedient but mired in institutional and personal biases. While these claims to progress are disputable, the purpose of this article is to question to what extent cryptocurrency is novel when compared to its conventional predecessor, i.e. money or currency.”