I checked out the PACE Gallery in Chelsea yesterday. The signs outside were sufficiently vague that on arrival I first walked into a carpet shop next door thinking it was the gallery. The carpets were plush enough that only after a full inspection of the premises I was confident I had made a mistake. A…
I sporadically get asked for access to the primary data from two surveys I did with Bitcoin community members in 2013 and 2014, so for the sake of posterity (and future requests), here it is. 2013 Survey: full data, cleaned data 2014 Survey: full data For context – during this period I was writing a…
The major new addition to this year’s survey was a set of questions about trust, a rich avenue of inquiry for the “trustless” network. There is a clear divide between the relatively strong trust held by Bitcoin users for those within the cryptocoin ecosystem, and the poor trust held for traditional and established authorities. That…
There is no average Bitcoiner, but neither is Bitcoin a perfect reflection of wider society. That said, discussion of imbalances within the community should not be overstated, and should account for where the project stems from (finance, technology, politics) and what the project is a reaction to (crisis, uncertainty, alienation, and rapid social change). Furthermore,…
This is a slightly different perspective on money than Bitcoin users are used to, firstly because it involves looking at the past rather than the future, and secondly because it draws on anthropology more than economics. I outline the two broad competing theories about the origins of money, then give a very quick history of…
Update: Here are some preliminary results, based on the first 120 responses. The community seems to have gotten slightly younger over the last year, and in this initial sample we have twin peaks in the mid-twenties and early thirties. The proportion of people who have mined BTC has dropped from last year, though the breakdown…
This essay looks at two conflicts which emerged in my reading of We, Zamyatin’s dystopia and a precursor of 1984 and Brave New World. First, I examine the tension between contentment and freedom, a dilemma which quickly emerges upon entering Zamyatin’s nightmarish paradise of OneState. I then look at the question of the slavishly rationalist OneState…
When airports are excused from democratic and civil norms, they take on many of the characteristics of a police state. With dystopian aesthetics and ostentatious security checks, the airport provides a space for us to examine our political fears, but may also pose a threat to civil liberty beyond its walls. Early on Monday morning…
The digitization of our economy will bring with it a new generation of radical economic ideologies, of which Bitcoin is arguably the first. For those with assets, technological savvy, and a sense of adventure, the state is the enemy and a cryptographic currency is the solution. But for those more focused on the decline of…
A broad cultural movement that is networked, open source, and collaborative is challenging, and sometimes replacing, key elements of the traditional nation state. The result could be characterized as a dispersed but coherent digital nation, a polity with its own rules, identity, origin myth, politics, currency, education system, and hierarchy. The established political order struggles to absorb…