I think the problem here is that you are trying to decouple money from the government. If you have a definition of money and an economic theory that allows for

I think the problem here is that you are trying to decouple money from the government. If you have a definition of money and an economic theory that allows for such a system, that is fine. Do you have such a definition or theory, and are you willing to share it? "most of the definitions you want for don't globally exist because we've given up the assumption of global consistency" You might have, but for currency to work there needs to be consistency across the entire market (not necessarily all markets, of course; currency exchanges exist mainly to allow people to move between markets). One of the most important functions of money is as a medium of exchange, which requires an agreement across the entire market about what constitutes valid money. "More importantly, stop talking about "cryptography"." Why should I? Digital cash is a cryptography problem. Secure multiparty computation is a major field of study in cryptography; Silvio Micali and Shafi Goldwasser, the pair who recently won a Turing award for their work on defining public key cryptography, also happen to have done extensive SMC work over their respective careers. Cryptographic solutions to the Byzantine Generals problem have been presented many times over the past 20 years. No matter how you try to describe Bitcoin, it absolutely is a cryptosystem and cryptography absolutely is relevant to the conversation. Furthermore it is dead wrong to think that the security of a signature system or a hash function is the whole story. Unless you can rigorously prove that the security of ECDSA and SHA256 imply the security of Bitcoin (whatever the rigorous definition of security would be for Bitcoin), there is no point in saying that ECDSA and SHA256 are secure. Nobody is calling their security into question here. Bitcoin can be insecure in the cryptographic sense even if ECDSA and SHA256 are secure, unless you think that Bitcoin is a signature system or a hash function. "you keep blowing right past it" What I keep doing is asking for definitions. You have ignored or avoided the question over and over again here. To be clear, I am asking you to give a rigorous definition of the security property you want to achieve. That can and should be given as a corollary to a definition of money, since you are not using the definitions economists are familiar with. If Bitcoin is nothing more than a solution to the Byzantine agreement problem, then I see no reason to continue talking about money -- unless you can define money in terms of Byzantine agreement.