Blockchain Publications and Research
Note: This section was written in 2018 and there has been a significant increase in social research and commentary in the space. Some great pieces I recommend include other internet and specifically the concept of headless brands, the radicalxchange movement, gitcoin’s experimentation with the CLR mechanism, Schnieder et al’s work on Modular Politics, and many recent pieces discussing what exactly a “fair launch” in a yield farming platform looks like in practice.
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Much of the research that I was able to find focuses on Bitcoin specifically, and examines issues from perspectives of some combination of computer science, economics, business ethics, and law (e.g. Angel and McCabe 2015; Joh 2013; Simser 2015; Stokes 2013; Yli-Huumo et al. 2016; Campbell-Verduyn 2018; Jan van Hardeveld, Webber and O’Hara 2017). Given that sociology and surveillance studies are both under-represented in the literature on blockchain and cryptocurrencies, it is imperative that these technologies are examined from these perspectives.
Many of the resources referenced within this thesis date from between 2016 and 2018, with a strong lean toward 2018. Given that my research design began in 2016, I had to do much of the research design without the backing of much social theory that explicitly dealt with blockchain or even Bitcoin, and had to build my own theoretical frameworks, adapting existing sociotechnical theories that had been created with previous technologies in mind. This has also meant that I have had to continue to monitor new research, and compare it to the paths that I was already taking to discuss concepts and social aspects of blockchain. For the most part, these were encouraging — particularly articles that discussed Bitcoin as a technological tool for groups to “enact alternative futures… by forming alternative, democratic rationalizations of technology” (Redshaw, 2017:46–7). Redshaw also discusses blockchain technology as having emerged as libertarian prefigurative politics, but that the actions of various social groups that later latched on to the technology have also shifted outcomes of the systems by encoding their various differing visions for the future (2017). Several studies have also discussed the implications and restructuring opportunities within the contemporary sharing economy, and of crowdfunding models, by using blockchain technology in some way (e.g. Schneider 2018; Langley and Leyshon 2017; Babkin, Golovina, Polyanin and Vertakova 2018; Nelms, Maurer, Swartz and Mainwaring 2018). Additionally, several exploratory papers looking at horizontal power distribution, state function absorption, alternative economic structures and models of income distribution have been published, though most of the discussion is still in a very preliminary and theoretical state (e.g. Akaev, Rudskoi, and Devezas, 2018; Ying, Jia and Du 2018; Clarke and Tooker 2018; Garrod, 2016). One of the other important areas in which some initial work has been done is on media representation and public understanding of blockchain, with a focus on mainstream media sources (e.g. Vergne and Swain 2017; Dodd 2018).
Along with these articles that mostly take a positive (or non-critical) view of blockchain, there are also several articles that take a negative, or at least highly critical view of aspects of the technology. For example, Halaburda (2018) criticizes the technology of blockchain for being poorly conceptualized and defined, which causes confusion as to what the technology is, as well as an assertion that blockchain is nothing new, but instead simply a combination of other technologies — smart contracts, encryption, and a distributed ledger. Dowd and Hutchinson (2015) discuss Bitcoin specifically, and in the end describe it as an “instructive creative failure” that they hope will lead to superior forms of digital currency or cryptocurrencies through the lessons learned (380). Dodd refers to this tendency, particularly in the mainstream media around price crashes as “Bitcoin-related schadenfreude” whereby media would discuss a crash with a gloating headline and breakdowns of Bitcoin’s flaws when they had barely paid any previous attention to the cryptocurrency (2018: 36).
This could be related to the complexity of blockchain systems in general to the non-technical user, as described by Greenfield: “Almost all verbal conversations involving the blockchain begin and end the same way, too: in perplexity. This is the first information technology I’ve encountered in my adult life that’s just fundamentally difficult for otherwise intelligent and highly capable people to comprehend” (Greenfield, 2017:115). Even with the published articles to move from, many of the conclusions include phrases such as “how this technology enables organizations in practice remains unknown” or “Mainstreaming of the ‘blockchain’ technology with observance of all the laid principles will fundamentally change the way how the economy functions today and how financial transactions are carried out” (Ying et al. 2018; Babkin, Golovina, Polyanin and Vertakova 2018). This simply points to the infancy and emerging character of the technology, and reinforces the fact that this research must be done, particularly on a field that is in some ways aiming to transcend politics and economics in new ways, and especially because as each decentralized project joins the blockchain or cryptocurrency space, it alters the possibilities for the future of the space. Again, this is of importance because of blockchain technology’s emergence from outside of traditional capitalist software development, combined with the interest and recent rapid development of capitalist firms engaging with the technology and the space.
Both Dodd (2018) and Redshaw (2017) contrast this inability of most mainstream media outlets to adequately delve into the intricacies and importance of blockchain technologies with discussion of the social and political aspects of Bitcoin, including the importance of its ideological appeal, especially the fact that it offers “change”, and the social networks involved in the proliferation of blockchain. While this thesis project aims to be exploratory, I would like to build on these limited observations, to explore and expand upon several key areas related to sociology, surveillance studies, and digital policy.
The research questions that emerged through the project include: how does a technology that keeps track of things on a distributed through peer to peer networking stand to change the way that we think about topics like privacy, anonymity, governance, security and trust? What about the blockchain allows it to be so broadly applicable, and what are the factors that may facilitate or impede acceptance of uses in the public and other interested groups? What characteristics of blockchain do those involved with it find valuable or integral to the technology, and does this perceived value align with that of other groups that could be affected by implementation? These are all questions that deserve serious academic inquiry, as they have the potential to affect implementation, shape policy, and inform the public about a technology that is highly likely have more widespread applications in the very near future.
References from this section:
Akaev, Askar, Andrew Rudskoi, and Tessaleno Devezas. 2018. “Digital economy and the models of income distribution in the society.” SHS Web of Conferences 44(5): 1–7.
Angel, James J. and Douglas McCabe. 2015. “The Ethics of Payments: Paper, Plastic, or Bitcoin?”. Journal of Business Ethics. 132(3):603–11.
Babkin, Alexander, Tatiana Golovina, Andrey Polyanin, and Yuliya Vertakova. 2018. “Digital model of sharing economy: blockchain technology management.” SHS Web of Conferences 44(11): 1–10.
Campbell-Verduyn, Malcolm. 2018. “Bitcoin, crypto-coin, and global anti-money laundering governance.” Crime Law Soc Change 69(2):283–305 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-017-9756-5
Clarke, Chris, and Lauren Tooker. 2018. “Social Finance Meets Financial Innovation: Contemporary Experiments in Payments, Money and Debt.” Theory, Culture & Society 35(3): 3–11.
Dodd, Nigel. 2018. “The Social Life of Bitcoin.” Theory, Culture & Society 35(3): 35–56.
Dowd, Kevin and Martin Hutchinson. 2015. “Bitcoin Will Bite The Dust.” Cato Journal 35(2): 357–82.
Garrod, J.Z. 2016. “The Real World of the Decentralized Autonomous Society.” TripleC 14(1): 62–77.
Greenfield, Adam. 2017. Radical Technologies. Brooklyn, NY: Verso.
Halaburda, Hanna. 2018. Blockchain Revolution Without the Blockchain. Staff Analytical Note. Currency Department, Bank of Canada.
Jan van Hardeveld, Gert, Craig Webber, and Kieron O’Hara. 2017. “Deviating From the Cybercriminal Script: Exploring Tools of Anonymity (Mis)Used by Carders on Cryptomarkets.” American Behavioural Scientist 61(11): 1244–66.
Joh, Elizabeth. 2013. “Privacy Protests: Surveillance Evasion and Fourth Amendment Suspicion.” Arizona Law Review 55(4):997–1029.
Langley, Paul and Andrew Leyshon. 2017. “Capitalizing on the crowd: The monetary and financial ecologies of crowdfunding.” Environment and Planning A 49(5): 1019–39.
Nelms, Taylor C., Bill Maurer, Lana Swartz, and Scott Mainwaring. 2018. “Social Payments, Innovation, Trust, and the Sharing Economy.” Theory, Culture & Society 35(3): 13–33.
Redshaw, Tom. 2017. “Bitcoin beyond ambivalene: Popular rationalization and Feenberg’s technical politics.” Thesis Eleven 138(1):46–64
Schneider, Nathan. 2018. “An Internet of ownership: Democratic design for the online economy”. The Sociological Review Monographs 66(2):320–40.
Simser, Jeffrey 2015. “Bitcoin and Modern Alchemy — In Code We Trust.” Journal of Financial Crime 22(2):156–69. DOI 10.1108/JFC-11–2013–0067
Stokes, Robert. 2013. “Anti-Money Laundering Regulation and Emerging Payment Technologies.” Banking and Financial Services Policy Report. 32(5):1–10.
Vergne, J.P. and Gautam Swain. 2017. “Categorical Anarchy in the UK? The British Media’s Classification of Bitcoin and the Limits of Categorization.” From Categories to Categorization: Studies in Sociology, Organizations and Strategy at the Crossroads 51: 185–222.
Ying, Wenchi, Suling Jia, and Wenyu Du. 2018. “Digital enablement of blockchain: Evidence from HNA group.” International Journal of Information Management 39: 1–4.
Yli-Huumo J, Ko D, Choi S, Park S, Smolander K. 2016. “Where Is Current Research on Blockchain Technology? — A Systematic Review”. PLoS ONE 11(10): e0163477. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0163477
