## Metaveri Başlık: **The Social Life of Bitcoin** Yazar: *Nigel Dodd* Kategori: #articles ## Altı Çizilenler - But Bitcoin is fascinating precisely because it demonstrates many of the contradictions and confusions that characterize money, and its relationship to law and the state, in general. Bitcoin is both a symptom of increasing monetary pluralism in the advanced capitalist societies, and an embodiment of monetary diversity in its own right. Like money itself, Bitcoin is multifaceted, politically contested and sociologically rich in its functions and meanings. There is not one Bitcoin, but several (a point which, as I argue below, is all the more noteworthy given the theory behind it). (Page 36) - Bitcoin will succeed as money to the extent that it fails as an ideology. The currency relies on that which the ideology underpinning it seeks to deny, namely, the dependence of money upon social relations, and upon trust. Insofar as Bitcoin has been successful qua money, it is because of the community that has grown up around it. Ironically, however, this community is sustained by the commonly held belief that Bitcoin has replaced social relations – the trust on which all forms of money depend – with machine code. This belief is a fiction. Bitcoin has thrived despite, not because of, its reliance upon machines. If ever there was a form of money that validates Simmel’s description of money as a claim upon society, it is Bitcoin, the very currency that was set up in denial of that conception. (Page 37) - Bitcoin attracts a range of supporters not least because both aspects of monetary disintermediation – separating money from both banks and the state resonates with two major axes of political debate about the relationship between finance and the state. (Page 39) - Bitcoin’s connections with arguments about personal privacy and freedom are also important in this context. (Page 40) - Bitcoin is arguably a social movement as much as it is a currency albeit a movement that remains diffuse and ill defined. But whichever political direction one approaches it from, protest seems to be a crucial unifying factor in what nurtures and sustains Bitcoin. (Page 40) - In this sense, the broader appeal of Bitcoin is not simply that it takes money away from the control of banks and states, but that it removes politics from the production and management of money altogether. (Page 41) - Thus while the ideology behind Bitcoin is libertarian, the theory of money that informs it can be traced back to Menger (1892). An image of money as a thing that must be kept scarce – in order for its value to be protected – unites these phenomena. If money is a social process, as Simmel suggests, it seems that nothing could be farther from that idea than Bitcoin. (Page 42) - Much the same could be said of the idea of Bitcoin as a monetary space that has built-in scarcity: it is a techno-utopia that must be embedded within a set of social practices that are sustained by strong beliefs. (Page 43) - Herein lies one important aspect of Bitcoin’s significance that has both political and financial implications, because curiously, the theory behind the currency attracts interest as both a (quasi-anarchist) monetary means of escaping state surveillance, and as a financial asset (or store of value) that has the potential not only to rival but to surpass gold. (Page 44) - However, while Bitcoin resonates with the anarchist or libertarian idea of rigging up a machine to create a DIY currency, the argument for its horizontalism is undermined by the way the system operates in practice, because it incentivizes the most powerful producers of the currency to become even more powerful. This is not about wealth concentration, but monetary production. (Page 45) - In this regard, Bitcoin tells us something important about the relationship between technology and the social context of its use. Technology cannot enact social organization on its own. As a form of money, Bitcoin has been sustained by sociological characteristics – e.g. structure, leadership, hierarchy, friendship and community – much more than it has evaded them. This is no bad thing, and it is surely no surprise to any sociologist or anthropologist of money. My point is simply that the reality of Bitcoin – its social reality – is at odds with the theory behind it. A system that originally appealed because of its distributed qualities is in some ways rather centralized. (Page 46) - Calling Bitcoin horizontalist renders it sociologically anaemic, buying into the ideology that it is essentially a machine. On the contrary, there is a strong sense of community around Bitcoin, as reflected in discussion groups, internet forums and the organizations that are associated with it. In monetary terms, one could argue that the community around Bitcoin is still an important source of the disembedded trust that characterizes the currency itself. (Page 47) - Seeking to ensure a more mainstream future for the currency, many advocates of Bitcoin have challenged its associations with criminality, mainly by emphasizing the fact that this is a distributed ledger on which all transactions are stored publicly and permanently. Bitcoin, presented in these terms, is no longer primarily a tool of anonymity but rather a means of achieving transparency and trackability of data across a network that does not rely on a centralized agency. (Page 48) - In his terms, money is a claim, if not on ‘society’ then on varying modes of shared existence and experience. As sociologists of science and technology have been arguing for a long time, technological artifacts cannot simply enact organizational forms on their own. Human, social, and political factors inevitably emerge as those who interact with and use these artifacts both shape and are shaped by their practical use. In Bitcoin’s case, there is a close analogy between the underlying view of money as a ‘thing’ in itself and the notion that technology is capable of shaping a social system – in this instance, money – all by itself, free from human intervention. (Page 52)