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…
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…
Our use of money is infused with profound cultural and political meaning, and the interplay of rival currencies can offer insights into cultural tensions. This was as true of post-Soviet Russia as it is of Bitcoin today. The anarchic virtual currency is part of a wider cultural movement that embraces technology, and replaces institutions with…
In the early hours of 11 May, a volunteer somewhere wrote the millionth substantive page on the Russian-language edition of Wikipedia. Crossing the 1,000,000-page mark is mainly a symbolic one, an aesthetically and cognitively pleasing number for us ten-fingered mammals, but it seems as good a time as any to take stock of the importance…
PSA for Bitcoin users: please take a few minutes to fill out the 2014 community survey This question was included in my survey of 1,000 Bitcoin users (most of whom responded before the recent price surge), and remains one of the areas poorly examined in media coverage. I don’t buy into the drugs and pizza myth, of…
The first version of a new Internet technology is rarely the one that wins mass adoption. Early versions of the browser, search engine, email provider, and social network were exciting, but ultimately overtaken by later rivals. Behind all the hype and speculation about Bitcoin over the last month, now gradually dying down, there is a…