# Cryptocurrency
> **Machine-Evolution Nexus:** [[articles/Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution|Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution]] provides the evolutionary and computational context for this supporting concept.
**Domain:** Distributed Systems / Economics
**Doc Type:** Supporting Canonical Node
**Maturity:** Developed
## Definition
Cryptocurrency is digitally represented value transferred and accounted for through cryptographic protocols and distributed consensus.
## Nexus Context
Bitcoin, Ethereum and their forks create technical lineages whose persistence depends on software, validators, markets and communities rather than biological reproduction.
## Markets as an application of computational inference
[[wiki/The Alan Turing Institute|The Alan Turing Institute]] supplies a concrete adjacent token-market example: its [2021 NFT study](https://www.turing.ac.uk/blog/non-fungible-tokens-can-we-predict-price-theyll-sell) examined price patterns using machine learning, transaction history, and trader-network information. [[wiki/Convergence Research|Convergence Research]] places market modeling beside other uses of inference and prediction, and keeps high-frequency execution and the funding of future machine infrastructure as separately specified questions. NFTs and cryptocurrencies occupy different roles within the wider token economy.
## Incentive architecture and political reorganization
[[articles/gamification/Gamification From the Directorate to the Heritage Foundation|Gamification From the Directorate to the Heritage Foundation]] routes cryptocurrency into the larger gamification field through incentives, persistent state, reputation, and distributed participation. [[wiki/Gamified Elicitation and Selection|Gamified Elicitation and Selection]] explains how a task system can produce work and participant signals simultaneously; crypto systems can add transferable rewards or cryptographically persistent records to that grammar. [[wiki/Western Order Succession|Western Order Succession]] carries the political question of whether capability-based networks reorganize affiliation outside inherited institutions. The documented and strongly indicated relationships in the advocacy chain remain distinct from the crypto comparison: no evidence here establishes that a currency protocol or Cicada belongs to that institutional lineage.
## Relationships
[[wiki/Blockchain|Blockchain]], [[wiki/Bitcoin|Bitcoin]], [[wiki/Ethereum|Ethereum]], [[wiki/Technological Evolution|Technological Evolution]], [[wiki/Gamified Elicitation and Selection|Gamified Elicitation and Selection]], [[wiki/Cicada 3301|Cicada 3301]], [[wiki/Western Order Succession|Western Order Succession]]
## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts
> "In the future, network phenomena like block-chains, the technology behind crypto-currencies, may be the route to the most radical examples of machine intelligence."
> **— Matt Ridley**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”*
[[reminders/Machine Succession/Networks May Become the Most Radical Machine Intelligence by Matt Ridley|Networks May Become the Most Radical Machine Intelligence by Matt Ridley]]
## Sources / Provenance
- Developed from the cited research in the central article and the surrounding continuity, rights and evolutionary architecture.