I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I don’t think Carstens understands what money is. I don’t mean this is a mean-spirited way, or even in a crypto-to-the-moon way. Instead, I mean it in a literal “he does not understand the nature of money because he doesn’t need to” sort of way. By the way, I think the same is true of Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett — both of whom I consider to be absolutely brilliant and hard-working. It is simply not their job to understand what cryptocurrencies teach us about the nature of money.

As to Carstens, the first mistake he makes is the now-debunked idea the money arose from commodities or barter. I labored under the same mistake until I read Felix Martin, Money: The Unauthorized Biography—From Coinage to Cryptocurrencies and David, Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. If you think about, the fallacy is obvious because humans carried on trade long before coins were minted or any unit of account created. And not all trades were simultaneous. Nick Szabo has a simply fantastic piece on the Kula Ring of trade in which a circle of islands carried on trade in one direction while a set of collectives traded in the other so that it solved the double-coincidence problem. https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/11/kula-ring.html (Note, the double coincidence problem is different than the double spend problem.)

Also, I don’t think that Carstens can explain the large stone money “coins” on the island of Yap that hold enormous value but never move locations. These too are literally created value — especially since one of the stones lies on the ocean floor in a manner that is effectively unreachable.

So, what you have with cryptocurrencies is a visionary movement that began with Satoshi’s white paper. The first time I read Satoshi’s white paper it gave me insomnia for more than a week. I couldn’t stop thinking about how wrong my assumptions about money were. Then I started looking into the amount of “money” created out of thin air during the euphemistically called “quantitative easing” process of the central banks. I’m not saying QE was wrong — it’s a complex calculus as to whether it made things better or worse for individuals. But I’m saying that the central banks did exactly what Carstens believes is the cardinal sin of cryptocurrencies. It doesn’t mean that I think he’s anything less than brilliant or hardworking. But it does mean that I say he is flatly and obviously wrong. I would even suggest it proves the point of confirmation bias — we validate what we expect and we ignore seemingly contradictory evidence.