Ideas and Ideals

The subject of the research is a relatively new financial market instrument - cryptocurrency. The authors use methods of comparative analysis and logical investigations, which allow to evaluate a variety of cryptocurrency characteristics and a mechanism of its regulation. The article considers debatable issues about the essence of cryptocurrency. In the sphere of practical application cryptocurrencies are treated like digital currencies, electronic means of payments, new forms of electronic money, “new money” and even a mirage. The paper analyzes the current state of cryptocurrencies in different aspects (structures, user communities, gender component, age characteristics of users, use of device-type and browser). The authors give an assessment of the mechanism for regulating cryptocurrencies in separate countries, which recognize this instrument and actively regulate it, as well as countries, which reject or just tolerate cryptocurrency, but do not have the regulatory framework for its use. Obviously, cryptocurrency is a relatively new instrument of the financial market, but its value does not depend on the amount of labor invested, as it is traditionally characteristic for conventional goods and services. The analysis of the cryptocurrency structure shows that bitcoin still remains the most widespread type, although ethereum is building up its volumes. The bitcoin users are mainly men of the age category from 24 to 44. An important and significant aspect of cryptocurrencies functioning is their regulation. Cryptocurrency has an official status (goods, financial asset, payment means or other instrument) in forty countries. Venezuela became the first country to sell its cryptocurrency “petro”, a distinctive feature of which is its real provision. As far as Russian regulation is concerned, there is no legislative certainty yet, although some efforts have been made in this direction for the past two years. However, while the cryptocurrency is not recognized by the state, there are doubts that it will enjoy full confidence. In the long term, it seems certain that cryptocurrency will be regulated at the international level, and the emphasis will be on preventing the use of digital assets for money laundering and illegal financial transactions.

The article analyzes the phenomenon of cryptocurrency. The authors reconstruct three versions of its creation: 1) it is a scam in the spirit of the Mavrodi pyramids, 2) it is new money that allows to earn adequately, 3) a conspiracy version. The authors sort out the myths about cryptocurrency. Namely, that money must necessarily be provided by gold or the economy of the country, and also be material (visible and perceived). Today, money is not provided with anything, and the "materiality" of money lies in their importance and efficiency. In this case, the authors characterize the efficiency with the help of four classical functions of money: money as a measure of value, a means of circulation, accumulation, and a means of payment. In addition to these functions, two more are singled out: money as a social institution and money as a tool for regulating economic relations. Cryptocurrency in its functions and structure is correlated with the sphere and functions of conventional money. The conventional money and cryptocurrency are two different systems of principles and conditions. In the first system, the state and elites are interested in manipulating conventional money and therefore created financial and other institutions that guard these manipulations. In the second one - financial institutions and consumer societies are still developing, but, in terms of their principles, they look like opponents of the first system. The authors suggest a hypothesis that the idea of creating cryptocurrency is to block manipulations with conventional money (their source is the state, economic and financial elites). With further improvement, as well as the disappearance of feverish demand, the cryptocurrency is likely to be able to more or less effectively perform the first four classical functions of money, and it wasn’t supposed to provide the other two functions (if we are talking about the existing system of management, economy and supporting social institutions). The paper considers different variants of the development of cryptocurrency and the possible interrelationships of crypto-communities with the state. The authors come to the conclusion that the victory of the state over the crypto-communities is not predetermined, both because of the crisis of modern civilization and its institutions, and the lack of control over these communities by the state.

Fundamental goal-setting of the functioning of economic systems is manifested in the intention for the sustainable development in the environment which is represented by “chaos” and is filled with uncertainty and the fundamental goal-setting is limited to “fundamental stochasticity” and “fundamental instability”. This feature stimulates the development of theoretical and practical aspects of new control mechanisms which include robust control that is a control configured to dampen uncertainty in an application to open systems. The article considers the development of the concept of robust control of economic systems in the continuum of fundamental paradigms “subject-object”, “subject-subject” and “subject-polysubjective environment” which determine the evolutionary view of control. The research is aimed at revealing the changing environment of the functioning of economic entities and developing models of reflexive and robust control of their interaction.             The model of market (polysubjective) environment used in the analysis takes into account the chaos and uncertainty and reflects the fundamental characteristics of the behavior of market participants: the existence of different pictures of subjective perception of the surrounding reality, the need for decision-making in the conditions of uncertainty, the emergence of reflexive processes that accompany the interaction of market actors. The methodology of introdu robust control into the polysubjective environment is based on the approach to structuring a reflexively active method, where the business situation, regarded as the carrier of uncertainty, and the elementary organizational structure, is the "subject-subject" interaction as its elementary organizational structure. The action in the context of "subject-subject" is determined by the generated model of reflexive control, which differs from the model of J. Soros, by the introduction of an interpreting function. It is shown that the result of interaction between economic entities is a random variable and to assess the admissibility of making a decision in the "point of agreement" it is necessary to seek compliance of the meeting result with the constraints imposed by the robust limit. The image of the process of generating control actions is represented by means of functions of reflexive governance acting within the limits of a robust limit.

The paper presents a critical review of dissertations defended in Russia during the period 1998–2017 devoted to the application of fuzzy sets theory for the evaluation of investment and innovative projects. The author analyzed about 150 dissertations. The analysis has shown that the methods of the fuzzy sets theory are actively used by scientists. The explosion of interest to the application of the fuzzy sets method to investment analysis is observed in 2003–2006 after defending a doctoral dissertation by A.O. Nedosekin. The author highlights the appearance of a number of works in the area of technical and physicomathematical sciences related to the use of fuzzy sets method for the analysis of investment and innovation activities. In these research studies the authors usually examine the issue from the point of technical execution – substantiate the algorithms and methods of assessment and decision-making under the conditions of uncertainty, automatize this process. Russian authors study the investment potential of industrial, construction, high-tech, IT-enterprises, as well as the industrial complex as a whole, transport and scientific and innovation infrastructure that indicates the gradual deepening of specialization in this field of research. Despite the fact that Russian researchers show rather a high interest in the fuzzy sets method, only a small part of the works uses it in combination with the real options method (9 %) to assess the effectiveness of investment and innovative projects. The author comes to the conclusion that to analyze the effectiveness of venture financing of innovative projects, the combination of real options method and fuzzy sets method does not occur in the works of Russian authors.