This is an opinion editorial by Maximilian Brichta, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California currently working on his dissertation, “Vernacular Economics: On The Participatory Culture And Politics of Bitcoin”
Speculative Bubbles, Technobabble And The Ignorant “Enthusiast”: Part One
There is a strand of academic literature that treats Bitcoin’s advocates and investors as ignorant enthusiasts, dupes and ideologues. Notably, each of these scholars fails to engage with texts that come directly out of Bitcoin culture. Instead, their analyses are largely based on second-hand accounts, mainstream news articles and investing forums that conflate bitcoin with other cryptocurrencies. The result is a flattened image of Bitcoiners and overly simplified, sometimes misleading characterizations of Bitcoin’s social world. In this three-part series, I’ll focus on three such texts and offer a framework that I believe would help academics bring much needed nuance to critical analyses of Bitcoin and its culture.
In his article “In Digital We Trust: Bitcoin Discourse, Digital Currencies And Decentralized Network Fetishism,” Jon Baldwin argues that Bitcoin is not a trustless system as Satoshi Nakamoto claimed. Instead, the trust shifts from governments and banks to algorithms and the security of encryption software. He views Bitcoin as just another technology with an overblown promise to decentralize the web and subvert traditional hierarchies in business and…
