Paper Short Abstract:

This paper will investigate the epistemic modalities of automating trust in the Bitcoin blockchain. I will investigate dynamics of legibility/opacity and transparency/privacy that are operationalized through 'proof of work' systems as a form of writing technology that allows for software chatter to get crystallized into a model of recognition and reward. I will thus ethnographically explicate the idea of blockchain as a 'truth machine', which generates much hype and appeal around a decentralized accounting infrastructure emerging as a digital res publica.

Paper Abstract:

As a 'distributed trust protocol', the bitcoin blockchain seeks to integrate aspects of privacy, transparency and immutability by insisting on a time-stamped and encrypted register of all verified token property transfers. Through an ensuing dialectics between open-source verification and infrastructurally intensive machine-recognition, Blockchain emerges as a decentralized ledger technology where the appending of digital signatures itself becomes a model of money supply. In this paper, I will ethnographically re-assemble 'proof of work' in the blockchain as a form of communicative monetary proxemics, investigating the metaphors and object ontology underlying the data structures operationalizing the Bitcoin Blockchain. Utilizing Daniel Miller's material cultural perspective and Clifford Geertz's idea of cultural encryption and shadow-play, I will analyze modes of enregisterment in Satoshi Nakamoto's (2008) infamous Bitcoin white paper that operationalized a model of distributed accounting to become a source of peer-to-peer electronic cash. Further, I will argue how Bitcoin's model of mechanically fixed deflationary currency issuance is conceived through a computationally competitive digital potlatch with the site of the 'digital middens' of blockchain records itself becoming both a source of mechanical solidarity and an archaeological record of 'trust in the code'. Lastly, I will investigate how an epistemic modality of digital evidence performed through proof-of-work software communication itself allows for a currency ideal to emerge through transactional recognition in a self-appending accounting infrastructure. The paper seeks to de-anonymize the blockchain as a financial document which allows for a new Durkheimian mode of computational authority to emerge around the idea of immanent financial auditability.