Paper short abstract:

This paper explores social devices and organized activities embedded in the market making of "virtual currency". I present research findings drawn from an ethnographic, multi-sited, study of the Israeli Bitcoin community and a netnographic study of the global Bitcoin community.

Paper long abstract:

The Bitcoin market is embedded in anonymous, decentralized, de-territorialized, online system, and may be perceived as a "pure money" arena, because it depersonalizes transactions from social identity. Trade in Bitcoin is risky, as it involves high degree of uncertainty regarding valuation, fluctuation, liquidity, and a lack of formal institutional regulation. A crucial market device is performed by constructing an imagined alternative monetary community, backed by online and offline relations. Another device is the assemblage of syncretic critical discourse, focusing mainly on the key role central and private banks play in generating endemic financial crises via "debt economy" and politically controlled economy. More important, local discourse is composed of hybrid, incoherent fragments of libertarian, socialist, and anarchistic notions, stimulated by ties to a heterogeneous assortment of protest movements' leaders and political actors. The practical materiality of Bitcoin is dependent on trust in virtuality, and acceptance of "Folk Theories" of economics, based on syncretic faith in the efficient operation of algorithmic economic regulation, and conspiracy theories of banking. An important social device is the construction "temporal fusion" between present investments and moralized and material future values. Market devices result in the framing of bifocal "fictional expectations" of utopian and material futures, which enable investors to perceive their investments as valuable, despite high levels of uncertainty, dramatic price and volume fluctuations, recurrent fraud cases, technical interruptions, institutional hostility, and public skepticism, Another important device is a recurrent confusion between Bitcoin- as- a- currency vs. Bitcoin- as- a- technology.