Balinese Cockfights & Bitcoins: How one can help us understand the other
Balinese cockfights and cryptocurrencies, can you think of two more unrelated topics? You’d be surprised then to discover that at closer inspection, looking beyond blockchains and metal spurs, the social dynamics taking place around cockfight rings can help us understand those around cryptocurrencies.
As an anthropologist, I take the view that for outsiders to understand different world views, such as those of indigenous populations, or entirely new phenomena, such as crypto communities, taking a one-glance-view is simply never enough. To better understand these worlds, we must instead suspend our biases and (dis)beliefs to truly observe what’s happening within. With this in mind, this analogy doesn’t aim to trivialise crypto communities as narrow tribalistic phenomena. Rather, aims to expose the values and beliefs at the hearts of its communities.
It’s from there, from this outsider’s perspective, that Balinese cockfights are reduced to a senseless form of gambling based purely on violence. Similarly, Bitcoin might at first be associated with gambling, black markets, and malicious hackers. But dive into these two worlds, and things start looking quite differently.
