Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes how the exchnage of cryptocurrencies implicates practices of surveillaqnce online, elaborating on two ethnographic case studies wherein a "third party" had to intervene in order to protect the interests of users.

Paper long abstract:

In October 2008 a person or group of people using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published in a cryptography mailing list an academic paper titled 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' (Nakamoto 2008). The "blockchain", as this system is now called, regules the production and exchange of electronic money directly between partners in ways that successfully make the auditing role of "trusted third parties" (ibid: 1) obsolete. The blockchain thus effectively decentralizes these auditing responsibilities between all the "peers" that use it at any given tiume. A single, flat, digital territory on which all members of the network of peers 'see' each other all the time consequently overrides the power of any single sovereign entity to issue money while relocating this power 'back' into the simultaneous hands of a multiplicity of users. In this paper I will contemplate how the decentralization of cash implicates practices of surveillaqnce online, focusing on two ethnographic case studies wherein a "third party" had to intervene in order to protect the interests of users.