Reinventing Bitcoin

Most digital platforms are inherently versatile partly because their software code can be modified, but primarily because they are designed as open-ended modular stacks whose affordances increase with the variety of functionalities provided by the upper layers, without needing to rewire or reprogram the lower layers. This is plainly true of platforms that were specifically designed to be versatile - e.g., the Internet, the Web and the iPad - but it can be no less true of platforms that were initially designed to be rigid and specialized. This paper argues that frequent dismissals of the Bitcoin project by economic and business analysts reveal a failure to grasp this important property of modular stacks. As we shall see, recent developments in the Bitcoin ecosystem are transforming Bitcoin into a much more versatile and consequential platform than was originally intended, by enabling a wide variety of modular application layers to be superposed on the Bitcoin infrastructure. If successful, this reinvention of Bitcoin could turn the controversial currency and its blockchain into pillars of the emerging cryptoeconomy.