[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/69229.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The social life of Bitcoin

Author

Listed:
  • Dodd, Nigel
Abstract
This paper challenges the notion that Bitcoin is ‘trust-free’ money by highlighting the social practices, organizational structures and utopian ambitions that sustain it. At the paper’s heart is the paradox that if Bitcoin succeeds in its own terms as an ideology, it will fail in practical terms as a form of money. The main reason for this is that the new currency is premised on the idea of money as a ‘thing’ that must be abstracted from social life in order for to be protected from manipulation by bank intermediaries and political authorities. The image is of a fully mechanized currency that operates over and above social life. In practice, however, the currency has generated a thriving community around its political ideals, relies on a high degree of social organization in order to be produced, has a discernible social structure, and is characterized by asymmetries of wealth and power that not dissimilar from the mainstream financial system. Unwittingly, then, Bitcoin serves as a powerful demonstration of the relational character of money.

Suggested Citation

  • Dodd, Nigel, 2018. "The social life of Bitcoin," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 69229, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:69229
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/69229/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Caferra, Rocco & Tedeschi, Gabriele & Morone, Andrea, 2021. "Bitcoin: Bubble that bursts or Gold that glitters?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 205(C).
    2. Ed Saiedi & Anders Broström & Felipe Ruiz, 2021. "Global drivers of cryptocurrency infrastructure adoption," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 57(1), pages 353-406, June.
    3. Angus Bancroft & Tim Squirrell & Andreas Zaunseder & Irene Rafanell, 2020. "Producing Trust Among Illicit Actors: A Techno-Social Approach to an Online Illicit Market," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 25(3), pages 456-472, September.
    4. Fortin, Mélissa & Pimentel, Erica, 2024. "Bitcoin: An accounting regime," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 99(C).
    5. Juneman Abraham & Dian Utami Sutiksno & Nuning Kurniasih & Ari Warokka, 2019. "Acceptance and Penetration of Bitcoin: The Role of Psychological Distance and National Culture," SAGE Open, , vol. 9(3), pages 21582440198, July.
    6. Srivastava, Richa & Singh, Deepak Kumar & Rana, Nripendra P., 2024. "Analysis of barriers to investment and mining in cryptocurrency for traditional and tech-savvy investors: A fuzzy approach," Technology in Society, Elsevier, vol. 77(C).
    7. Xiao, Yunpeng & Deng, Bufan & Chen, Siqi & Zhou, Kyrie Zhixuan & LC, RAY & Zhang, Luyao & Tong, Xin, 2023. ""Centralized or Decentralized?": Concerns and Value Judgments of Stakeholders in the Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) Market," OSF Preprints evz4p, Center for Open Science.
    8. Filipe Calvão, 2019. "Crypto‐miners: Digital labor and the power of blockchain technology," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 6(1), pages 123-134, January.
    9. Koray Caliskan, 2022. "The Elephant in the Dark: A New Framework for Cryptocurrency Taxation and Exchange Platform Regulation in the US," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 15(3), pages 1-18, March.
    10. Silvia Semenzin & David Rozas & Samer Hassan, 2022. "Blockchain-based application at a governmental level: disruption or illusion? The case of Estonia [A systematic analysis of applications of blockchain in healthcare]," Policy and Society, Darryl S. Jarvis and M. Ramesh, vol. 41(3), pages 386-401.
    11. Haynes, Paul & Hietanen, Joel, 2023. "Marketing without trust? – Blockchain technologies in the sharing economy as assemblage and pharmakon," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 163(C).
    12. Apergis, Nicholas & Koutmos, Dimitrios & Payne, James E., 2021. "Convergence in cryptocurrency prices? the role of market microstructure," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 40(C).
    13. Michael Cary, 2024. "Herding and investor sentiment after the cryptocurrency crash: evidence from Twitter and natural language processing," Financial Innovation, Springer;Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, vol. 10(1), pages 1-23, December.
    14. Yunpeng Xiao & Bufan Deng & Siqi Chen & Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou & Ray LC & Luyao Zhang & Xin Tong, 2023. ""Centralized or Decentralized?": Concerns and Value Judgments of Stakeholders in the Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) Market," Papers 2311.10990, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2023.
    15. Eduardo Ferraciolli & Tanya Araújo, 2023. "Agent-based Modeling and the Sociology of Money: a Framework for the Study of Coordination and Plurality," Working Papers REM 2023/0285, ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, REM, Universidade de Lisboa.
    16. Abderahman Rejeb & John G. Keogh & Horst Treiblmaier, 2019. "Leveraging the Internet of Things and Blockchain Technology in Supply Chain Management," Future Internet, MDPI, vol. 11(7), pages 1-22, July.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Bitcoin; economy; money; technology;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J1 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:69229. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.