Should money be abolished altogether or could it be transformed to become a ‘means of improving society’ and achieving ‘monetary utopia’? Theory remains divided. However, amongst the many dualisms and conflicts, there is a common theme that emerges: the problem of the state in money.

Keynes acknowledged that the consistent devaluation of money throughout history was not an accident and that two great forces were behind it: the ‘impecuniosity of Governments and the superior political influence of the debtor class’.

The great inflations of our age are … government made. They are the off-shoots of doctrines that ascribe to governments the magic power of creating wealth out of nothing.

Governments across the world continue to build up debt through deficit spending, as expenditure exceeds income through taxation. The existing capitalist monetary system of endogenous and exogenous money allows this to happen, often via a central bank in concert with private financial institutions.

A Bank of England bulletin notes that ‘money is a social institution that provides a solution to the problem of a lack of trust… money in the modern economy is an IOU that everyone in the economy trusts’. But this trust has been broken and many no longer trust state money.

Bitcoin has emerged as social resistance and as a new type of higher supra-individual formation, where it is a community institution alongside the state – money as a public institution. And Bitcoin has expanded economic circles beyond the physical, geographic borders of state currency and proven that money does not depend on the state for guarantee. It is for an economic community to believe in a money, and the wider a money is used the better it needs to be. Bitcoin may be very different to state money technically and politically, but it is very similar philosophically.