Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I track the emergence and circulation of the “have fun staying poor” (HFSP) meme during my 15 months of ethnographic research among a diverse network of Bitcoin investors, advocates, miners and developers to illuminate the imaginaries that animate people’s engagements with the asset.

Paper long abstract:

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, unveiled their idea for a revolutionary payment system, which aimed to establish a peer-to peer exchange network that would remove the reliance on centralised authorities to authenticate transactions or endow currency tokens with value (Nakamoto 2008: 1-5). Since its inception, Bitcoin’s most avid proponents foresaw its potential to challenge the power of state actors and financial institutions to define and control monetary arrangements. In this paper, I track the emergence and circulation of the “have fun staying poor” (HFSP) meme during my 15 months of ethnographic research among a diverse network of Bitcoin investors, advocates, miners and developers, as well as FinTech players in London. By examining the rise of the HFSP narrative, I argue that the meme provides a dispersed and ‘decentralised’ network of actors with a powerful shared narrative with which to spread the value proposition of Bitcoin. Revealing the kinds of imaginaries that animate people’s engagements with the asset, HFSP constructs a dystopian future in which one’s continued reliance on traditional state backed currencies leads to poverty. By feeding into mounting fears surrounding post-COVID economic realities, the meme positions Bitcoin ownership as a life raft for those seeking to protect the value of their savings from the perceived threats of monetary printing and global economic uncertainty. In so doing, the meme constructs two seemingly opposing financial futures centred around Bitcoin ownership. The choice, it posits, is simple; buy Bitcoin or have fun staying poor.

Paper short abstract:

This paper puts forward the concept of the 'techno-financial imaginary'. We argue that the growth of blockchain technology, and the ways in which the blockchain is imagined to improve life for the better, need be understood as an 'imaginary' which is both technological and financial in nature.

Paper long abstract:

Based on over 170 interviews with finance and technical professionals in blockchain firms, start-ups and cryptocurrency exchanges, this paper explores the ways in which proponents of blockchain technology understand the possibilities and futures they think blockchain will enable. To understand this fully, we put forward the concept of the 'techno-financial imaginary'. In the social sciences, we are familiar with the concepts of a 'social imaginary' (Taylor 2004), which examines the ways in which people perceive and construct their social world. Meanwhile, in Science and Technology Studies, we are familiar with the concepts of the technoscientific imaginary (Marcus 1995), which explores the imaginaries of scientists and technical experts, and the 'sociotechnical imaginary', which is broader and does not necessarily focus on scientists and technical experts as the empirical basis of analysis (Jasanoff and Kim 2015). While these two strands of technological imaginary differ from one another in terms of their empirical point of view, both define the imaginary itself in terms of its preoccupation with the future and what might be possible. The blockchain as a technological imaginary is inherently concerned with what might be possible in the future, but this is specifically related to finance, in particular with regards to decentralisation and disintermediation. The concern with circumventing banks and central authorities reveals a broader dissatisfaction with structures of financial power. This is why, we argue, a new conceptualisation of the imaginary is necessary to fully understand the growth and development of blockchain as underpinned by a 'techno-financial' imaginary.

Paper short abstract:

The text argues that the Bitcoin architecture allows for the extraction of value from the processes of social reproduction. To analyze this process, it uses insights from the Marxist structuralist anthropology of kinship.

Paper long abstract:

The text argues that, despite the promises of equal access, the decentralized cryptocurrency structure is utilized to automatize and accelerate the exploitation of reproductive labour, effectively dividing its users into two classes – miners and investors. It analyses the production and reproduction of Bitcoin through the lens of exploitation of the domestic community as formulated by Claude Meillassoux. Bitcoin's distributed ledger, Blockchain, serves as a unilineal descent structure, which creates a linage of digital objects (blocks) to control the reproduction of Bitcoin (i.e. it prevents the double-spending of coins). The labour-intensive reproduction of the Blockchain is called mining. Miners repeatedly compete with each other in completing a block of transactions and adding it to the Blockchain. Only the winning miners get the reward in the form of newly emitted coins, while the non-wining miners carry out a significant amount of free labour to secure the Bitcoin protocol. The miners depend on the investors' valorization of Bitcoin to cover the ever-increasing costs of mining. Similarly to Meilassoux' analysis, where the value produced by the domestic community is appropriated by capital as low-waged labour-power, the value created by miners' labour is appropriated by the Bitcoin investors as its increased security, and thus eventually as a higher exchange-value.

Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic and netnographic research this paper explores narratives of blockchain projects, and how they are consolidated, or changed, throughout time. It deals with the tension between dreamt common futures and mundane financial, regulatory and everyday life realities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores narratives developed as ways to legitimize particular forms of subjective appropriation of blockchain technologies, and how they are consolidated, or changed, throughout time. It deals with the tension between dreamt common futures and more mundane financial, regulatory and everyday life realities.

Based on ethnographic and netnographic research among blockchain projects – initiatives striving for economic and governance alternatives, and financial incumbents’ fintech innovation labs - and on the follow up of such projects for 4 years, I wish to explore the interactions between their imaginaries and the mundane activities and desires that seem to underlie their development and narratives.

I will focus of three cases and kinds of narrative, and their relation with regulatory configurations, speculation in crypto markets, and bureaucratic needs:

a) pragmatics of deceit: a group of people trying to recover an early bought cryptocurrency, and their investment in it, from a pump and dump scheme;

b) libertarian dreams: the design and almost disappearance of a reputation-based virtual society, and

c) the fintech ‘game changing’: financial institutions’ quests for technical improvement and trust through the adoption of a cautious startup-like ethos.

The objective is to open a discussion about socio-technical imaginaries and how they are related to the mundane financial, relational, biographical lives of people in projects. By diving into these questions and into the ethnographic examples above, I intend to explore – and open up for discussion - the relations between imagined common futures, and the ‘here and nows’ of blockchain projects in context.