Ideas and Ideals

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.