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Paper short abstract

Bitcoin confronts state hegemony via private protocols, yet the State reasserts its dominance through compliance tools & construction of boundary infrastructures. The paper traces regulatory unfolding where algorithmic ledgers reproduces State's dominance, prefiguring data-driven governance.

Paper long abstract

Digital identity systems are often portrayed as instruments of efficiency, inclusion, and transparency. Yet their underlying infrastructures materialize specific sociotechnical imageries of governance that blur the boundaries between public authority and private design.

Digital monetary infrastructures like Bitcoin expose governance as socio-technical struggle, where private protocols attempt to confront state regulatory hegemony by producing hybrid power relations. This paper analyzes the social unfolding of Bitcoin's regulatory field, from initial "wicked" ambiguity among diverse stakeholders (regulators, miners, exchanges) into its institutional absorption as discernible, legitimate financial asset. The paper shows how Bitcoin’s embeddedness in boundary monetary infrastructure reinforces existing financial power structure, under state dominance.

Through Netnography, multi-sited ethnography and infrastructural inversion, I trace how the State reasserts sovereignty via compliance tools, incoherent policy experiments, and construction of boundary infrastructures, subordinating algorithmic ledgers to public authority and powerful corporate interests. As such, data-driven governance reinforces rather than erodes state control. Bitcoin's ledgers then become sites where techno-libertarian innovation paradoxically reproduces existing monetary hierarchies, encoding state dominance into digital monetary ecologies. Contributing to EASST 2026's "More-than-now" theme, this paper uncovers how regulatory assemblages, especially monetary boundary infrastructures, prefigure futures where states domesticate private infrastructures, inviting STS methods to study these power shifts across global contexts.