An ethnography of Bitcoin: Towards a future research agenda
Main Article Content
Keywords
bitcoin, ethnography, international remittences, community study, cryptocurrency, banking
Abstract
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are a recent socio-technical innovation that seeks to disrupt the existing monetary system. Through mundane uses of this new digital cash, they provide a social critique of the centralized infrastructures of the banking industry. This paper outlines an ethnographic research agenda for this new digital frontier of social practice and exchange and the human affordances of engaging with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Firstly we argue that the use of Bitcoin can be seen as acts of social resistance and a form of social mobility that harnesses the emergent, serendipitous and dynamic properties of digital community. We then outline the disruptive nature of borderless, affordable and instantaneous international transfers within social practice. Finally, we identify the possible permutations of trust that may be found in the technical affordances of Bitcoin and how these relate to user (pseudo)anonymity, cybertheft, cyberfraud, and consumer protection. Bringing together these three key areas we highlight the importance of understanding the ordinary (rather than extra-ordinary) uses of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. We contend that focusing upon users interactions with Bitcoin as a system and culture will shed light upon mundane acts of socio-technical disruption, acts that critique and provide alternative financial exchange practices to the economic and regulatory financial infrastructures of the centralised banking industry.
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Ba, Sulin. 2001. "Establishing online trust through a community responsibility system." Decision Support Systems 31:323-336.
Bagozzi, Richard P. and Utpal M. Dholakia. 2006. "Open Source Software User Communities: A Study of Participation in Linux User Groups." Management Science 52:1099-1115.
Bauman, Zygmunt, Didier Bigo, Paulo Esteves, Elspeth Guild, Vivienne Jabri, David Lyon, and R. B. J. Walker. 2014. "After Snowden: Rethinking the Impact of Surveillance." International Political Sociology 8:121-144.
Bhakta, P. 2015. "How virtual currency bitcoin is gaining ground in India, ." in The Times of India (TOI).
Biryukov, Alex, Ivan Pustogarov, Fabrice Thill, and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann. 2013. "Content and popularity analysis of Tor hidden services." arXiv:1308.6768.
Blanchard, A. L., J. L. Welbourne, and M. D. Boughton. 2011. "A model of online trust: The mediating role of norms and sense of virtual community." Information Communication and Society 14:76-106.
Böhme, Rainer, Nicolas Christin, Benjamin Edelman, and Tyler Moore. 2015. "Bitcoin: Economics, Technology, and Governance." The Journal of Economic Perspectives 29:213-238.
Bohr, J. and M. Bashir. 2014. "Who Uses Bitcoin? An exploration of the Bitcoin community." Pp. 94-101 in Privacy, Security and Trust (PST), 2014 Twelfth Annual International Conference on.
Brezo, Félix and Pablo G. Bringas. 2012. "Issues and Risks Associated with Cryptocurrencies Such as Bitcoin." Pp. 20-26 in ThinkMind // SOTICS 2012, The Second International Conference on Social Eco-Informatics. Venice, Italy.
Bronk, Christopher, Cody Monk, and John Villasenor. 2012. "The Dark Side of Cyber Finance." Survival 54:129-142.
Brown, J. and J. Morgan. 2006. "Reputation in online auctions: The market for trust." California Management Review 49:61.
Cheshire, C. 2011. "Online trust, trustworthiness, or assurance?" Daedalus 140:49-58.
De Filippi, Primavera. 2014. "Bitcoin: a regulatory nightmare to a libertarian dream." Internet Policy Review 3.
Donnelly, J. 2015. "Could Abra be Bitcoin’s “Killer App”?" Bitcoin Magazine, 5 March 2015.
Elias, Matthew. 2011. "Bitcoin: Tempering the Digital Ring of Gyges or Implausible Pecuniary Privacy." International Telecommunications Law.
Feld, Scott L. 1981. "The Focused Organization of Social Ties." American Journal of Sociology 86:1015-1035.
Ganley, D. and C. Lampe. 2009. "The ties that bind: Social network principles in online communities." Decision Support Systems 47:266-274.
Grabner-Kräuter, S. and E. A. Kaluscha. 2003. "Empirical research in on-line trust: A review and critical assessment." International Journal of Human Computer Studies 58:783-812.
Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. "The Strength of Weak Ties." The American Journal of Sociology 78:1360-1380.
Horst, Heather A. and Daniel Miller, Eds 2012. Digital Anthropology. Oxford and New York: Berg.
Horst, Heather A., Sandra Kailahi and Supriya Singh. (Forthcoming) The Value of Sacrifice: Mobilising Money among Tongans in Auckland.
Horst, Heather A and Erin Taylor. (2014). The role of mobile phones in the mediation of border crossings: A study of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The Australian Journal of Anthropology (TAJA) 25(2):155-170
Horst, Heather A. (2013) The Infrastructures of Mobile Media: Towards a Future Research Agenda. Mobile Media and Communication 1: 147-152
Jackson, T. 2015. "Could Bitcoin ease the pain of Africa's migrant workforce?", vol. 2015: BBC.
Jøsang, Audun, Roslan Ismail, and Colin Boyd. 2007. "A survey of trust and reputation systems for online service provision." Decision Support Systems 43:618-644.
Kleinberg, Jon. 2000. "Navigation in a small world." Nature 406:845(1).
Lane, Jonathan. 2014. "Bitcoin, Silk Road, and the Need for a New Approach to Virtual Currency Regulation." Charleston Law Review Forthcoming.
Lee, Timothy B. 2011. "How Private Are Bitcoin Transactions?" in Forbes.
Maddox, Alexia. 2015. Research Methods and Global Online Communities: A Case Study. Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Maddox, Alexia, Monica J. Barratt, Matthew Allen, and Simon Lenton. 2015. "Constructive activism in the dark web: cryptomarkets and illicit drugs in the digital ‘demimonde’." Information, Communication & Society:1-16.
Marti, Sergio and Hector Garcia-Molina. 2006. "Taxonomy of trust: Categorizing P2P reputation systems." Computer Networks 50:472-484.
Maurer, Bill, Taylor C. Nelms, and Lana Swartz. 2013. "“When perhaps the real problem is money itself!”: the practical materiality of Bitcoin." Social Semiotics 23:261-277.
Mazer, R. 2014. "Digital Currencies and Financial Inclusion: 5 Questions." vol. 2014.
McCoy, Damon, Kevin Bauer, Dirk Grunwald, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Douglas Sicker. 2008. "Shining light in dark places: Understanding the Tor network privacy enhancing technologies." Pp. 63-76 in Proceedings of the 8th international symposium on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, edited by N. Borisov and I. Goldberg. Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag.
McKay, C. 2014. "Digital Currencies and Financial Inclusion: Revisited."
Pink, Sarah, Heather A. Horst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis & Jo Tacchi. (2016) Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice. London: Sage.
Ratha, D., S. De, S. Plaza, K. Schuettler, W.' Shaw, H. Wyss, and S. R. Yousefi. 2015. "Migration and Remittances: Recent Developments and Outlook Migration and Development Brief 24." The World Bank.
Reid, Fergal and Martin Harrigan. 2013. "An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System." Pp. 197- 223 in Security and Privacy in Social Networks, edited by Y. Altshuler, Y. Elovici, A. B. Cremers, N. Aharony, and A. Pentland. New York: Springer.
Resnick, Paul and Richard Zeckhauser. 2002. "Trust among strangers in internet transactions: Empirical analysis of ebay’s reputation system." The Economics of the Internet and E-commerce 11:23-25.
Ron, Dorit and Adi Shamir. 2013. "Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph." Pp. 6-24 in Financial Cryptography and Data Security, vol. 7859, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, edited by A.-R. Sadeghi: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Singh, Supriya. (2013). Globalization and money: a global South perspective: Lanham [Md.] Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.
Stokes, Robert. 2012. "Virtual money laundering: the case of Bitcoin and the Linden dollar." Information & Communications Technology Law 21:221-236.
Taylor, Erin B. and Heather A. Horst (2013) From Street to Satellite: Mixing Methods To Understand Mobile Money Users. pp. 63-75. Proceedings from the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, EPIC2013. London 16-18 September, 2013. http://epiconference.com/2013/sites/default/files/EPIC-Proceedings.pdf
Yelowitz, Aaron and Matthew Wilson. 2015. "Characteristics of Bitcoin users: an analysis of Google search data." Applied Economics Letters 22:1030-1036.
Article Sidebar
Published
Mar 31, 2016
Article Details
How to Cite
Maddox, A., Singh, S., Horst, H. A., & Adamson, G. (2016). An ethnography of Bitcoin: Towards a future research agenda. Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy, 4(1), 65–78. https://doi.org/10.18080/jtde.v4n1.49
Issue
Section
Telecommunications
Copyright Telecommunications Association Inc.
Author Biographies
Alexia Maddox, RMIT University
Research Assistant, College of Design and Social Context
Contact DetailsDigital Ethnography Research Centre
School of Media and Communication
College of Design and Social ContextRMIT University
GPO Box 2476
Melbourne Victoria 3001
Australia
Supriya Singh, RMIT University, Melbourne
Professor Supriya SinghProfessor, Sociology of Communications,
Graduate School of Business and Law,
RMIT University, Melbourne 3000
Tel: +61 3 9925 1327; Fax: +61 3 9925 5741
http://www.rmit.edu.au/staff/supriya www.supriyasingh.org
Heather A. Horst, RMIT University, Melbourne
Professor Heather A. HorstDirector, Research PartnershipsCollege of Design and Social Context
Contact DetailsDigital Ethnography Research Centre
School of Media and Communication
College of Design and Social ContextRMIT University
GPO Box 2476
Melbourne Victoria 3001
Australia
Office: Bldg 101, Level 2, Room 6
Phone: +61 3 9925 3988
Email: heather.horst@rmit.edu.au
Recent PublicationsDigital Ethnography: Principles and Practice Being in Fieldwork In Sanjek & Tratner's eFieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology in a Digital World
ResearchMobilising Media for Sustainable Development in the PacificLocating the Mobile: Intergenerational Locative Media Practices in Tokyo, Melbourne and Shanghai The Moral and Cultural Economy of the Mobile Phone in the PacificTransmedia Literacy: Exploiting transmedia skills and informal learning strategies to improve formal education
Greg Adamson, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
Dr Greg Adamson
President IEEE-SSIT (Society on Social Implications of Technology) and an Honorary Fellow, University of Melbourne and works at ANZ Bank .
