Conclusions and methodological limitations

In this chapter I described and discussed my methodological design, its implementation and how I went about analysing my data. I took a case study approach for the methodological design, drawing on mixed methods in order to trace through answers to my research questions in each of the cases. This involved a combination of ‘netnographic’ research, ethnographic observations, a limited number of interviews, writing as method and tracing through concepts across technical papers, promotional material and online discussions. I also

used my own public presentations as method for verifying my understandings and testing my arguments, in particular in relation to my technical understanding. The cases enabled me to go in-depth in my understanding of the technical architectures and the culture around their development. The Bitcoin and Ethereum cases were selected on the basis of being the two largest blockchain networks. In my further analysis, I take this to mean that these cases set much of the standard not only technically but also in terms of ‘sensibility’ for the rest of the blockchain industry. This is, to some degree, an assumption. Nevertheless, the two cases remain the largest blockchain networks. They form two important moments in the history of decentralised network technologies, such that recounting their particularities and histories are important in their own right, having opened up new fields of computation. To conclude the chapter, I briefly discuss some of the limitations to my approach and methodological design, some alternative approaches and the reasons why I did not pursue such alternatives.

3.3.1 Methodological limitations

My initial assumption, that the political implications of the technology and site of decision- making would be defined in and through protocol development, meant that my focus was primarily on the protocols and developer communities, rather than deployment and effects amongst people using the applications and technologies. This initial assumption brought with it significant analytical limitations and certain biases, the most important of which is that I thereby risked reproducing in my own work a certain technological determinacy that was very much present in the blockchain industry more generally: that what matters primarily is the protocol and the ways in which it determines things. An alternative approach to ‘the political’ in relation to blockchain might therefore have been to address the deployment and uses of the technologies, which might have been a more powerful angle from which to assess claims made of it – comparing claims with substantial research into its uses and effects in different contexts. Such approaches, however, have already been the focus of many critics of blockchain, and tend to produce analyses concerned primarily with disproving the claims and efficacy of the technology (O'Dwyer, 2015; Golumbia, 2016; Gerard, 2017; Vidan and Lehdonvirta, 2018). I wanted to address blockchain from a more open perspective, to meet the claims ‘halfway’ to paraphrase Barad (from the title of her book, 2007), in order to understand its merits and contribute to an articulation of what might be possible. In other words, instead of claiming that it is either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘works’ or doesn’t ‘work’, I aim to understand in what sense it does or does not work, and how and why it is corrected for. I aimed for an approach that would be more open to the possibilities in the space, what is at stake in their materialisation and how this might be articulated and therefore shaped more clearly.

At a certain point in my analysis, however, I had to step ‘outside’ of the protocol so to speak, to be able to understand how its descriptions operated politically in themselves. This represented another analytical angle that critics have effectively employed for analysing blockchain, namely to address how blockchain operates as a narrative device, more effective as a story about money and power, than a technique, tool or technology (Golumbia, 2016; Reijers and Coeckelbergh, 2016; Kreutler, 2018). Such an angle might have benefited from a systematic discourse analysis in the field, but instead I opted to trace the use of concepts through histories of cryptographic and computational advancements, alongside forum posts and discussions, essays and commentary on Medium (an online publishing platform on which major actors in the industry tend to publish their reflections), mailing lists and technical papers. I did this because I did not want to emphasise a distinction between discourse (claims) and materiality (reality), but instead to understand how historical experiences, technical papers and networks played into each other and were entangled – an onto- epistemological approach so to speak, whereby discussions feed into experimentation, changes to designs and ideas about the world. My hesitation was that discourse analysis, by overly focusing on words and ideology, might lend itself to the assumption that something else is happening in ‘reality’ while the discourse operates as a set of false claims or dubious ideology. Precisely because ‘Bitcoin is a technology whose social and political functions far outstrip its technical ones’ (Golumbia, 2015, p. 119), these would need to be addressed as part of the motivating factors as these social and political functions fed into ongoing efforts to materialise new technical architectures and resonated with experiences, projects and ideas across different contexts.

Another alternative research design to understand some of the political implications of blockchain might have been to ‘follow the money’ so to speak, and analyse the specific individuals, companies and investment flows to achieve a map of different kinds of stakes and interests in systems being developed. This would have been a fruitful approach for analysing, in particular, the disputes around protocol changes that were playing out in the case studies (discussed in chapter 6) and gaining an understanding of who might have a stake in different kinds of outcomes. This approach might have given a good overview of the relationships, interests and stakes, but at the time did not seem an effective approach for gaining a deeper understanding of the political ideas and sensibilities that were forming and informing the assemblages. Such a social and value network analysis would be hugely valuable, but was beyond the scope of this thesis due to time limitations and the labour-intensive nature of such a mapping endeavour.

The next three chapters form my three Baradian ‘cuts’ in the blockchain field. Chapter 4

addresses the technical architectures of Bitcoin and Ethereum and their analysis in relation to the indeterminate and insensible. Chapter 5 traces the pre-histories of these architectures in

previous generations of decentralised architectures to understand the particularities of a blockchain sensibility. Situating Bitcoin and Ethereum in such a historical trajectory of decentralisation also allows for an analysis of what has changed with their invention, namely the platformisation of decentralisation and ‘tokenisation’ of protocols, the implications of which I discuss in this chapter. Chapter 6 describes two major conflicts in Bitcoin and Ethereum. I introduce the concept of the dissensible through which to discuss the ongoing possibility for things to be different and for these differences to be incompatible. The chapter discusses issues of dissesus over the governance of protocols that were supposed to have solved the problem of consensus and a resolution to this through ‘forking’ that I discuss as a ‘dissensus mechanism’.