Empirical phase 2: technical understanding

The second phase of the empirical work partially overlapped with the first, with the most focused data gathering work occurring between November 2015 and June 2016. This phase involved immersing myself further in the field in order to a) familiarise myself with the applications by trying different wallets, using the cryptocurrencies and explore Smart Contracts; b) gain a deeper grasp of the technical architectures; and c) develop better understanding of the communities involved and the evolution of the industry. In order to ensure a good grasp of the technology, from a user perspective as well as its architecture and its rationale, I started my research of each case study with a thorough reading of their whitepapers – high level descriptions of the intention, purpose and core technical proposition of the currency. The methods I used in this phase involved researching the different clients, wallets, applications and currencies, reading technical papers and tracing in particular historical papers on cryptography in order to understand how it is employed in blockchain (see Appendix for details). I would then write up my own descriptions of the architectures in order to test my level of understanding at this point, which also became an exercise in translation. This process brought up an issue of slippage of meaning between technical terminology and socio-political practices, both by myself and in the manner in which the applications were presented; for example, with the notion of ‘decentralised consensus’, referring to a computational problem that simultaneously presented a tempting socio-political proposition. The awareness of such slippages informed my observations and questions in interviews and at events. I conducted a number of semi-structured interviews (see Appendix). As it turned out, most of these repeated information and attitudes that were already evident and available in online videos, posts and discussions. This was likely due to the timing of the interviews in early-to-mid 2016 when the industry was experiencing a boom, making it difficult to move beyond the surface of excitement and selling of ideas. On the one hand the interviews thereby served to confirm coherence between information and attitudes expressed in online material, but also meant that I took the decision to draw on such online material as a primary source rather than seek out further interviews (see Appendix). Had the interviews taken place a year later, during and after some of the major forks and disputes in the community, and had my own understanding of the field and the stakes reached a sufficient level, the interviews might have been more focused and insightful. Regardless, a large part of discussions and activity in blockchain takes place online, and the community has a culture of openness and leaking, so there was plenty of available data to work through. I drew heavily on these resources, in particular on the work by filmmaker Tomer Kantor and the IamSatoshi production team who had been extensively documenting and interviewing key figures and developments in blockchain from the early years.27

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During this period Bitcoin was going through a prolonged conflict over a fundamental change to the protocol, which also signified a potential change to the governance structure of the currency. Instead of having to rummage around the Bitcoin GitHub repository on my own trying and draw out issues of governance and power, these events brought such questions immediately to the foreground.28 I traced the conflict across discussion boards, email lists and news outlets, writing and rewriting descriptions of the conflict (see Appendix). Discussions oscillated between technical, ethical and political concerns, bringing out questions around technological determinism and the impetus and assumptions that drive and shape development pathways. It also became clear that there were fractions and interests in Bitcoin that I was not able to fully grasp. In the case of Bitcoin and Ethereum, the plethora of information, sites, blogs, rumours and claims online proved tricky, so I initially relied on informal conversation with contacts in the industry (explained in ethics and positionality above) to verify rumours. In the case of Faircoin, online documentation was fairly opaque. The project was based more on assemblies, the chat application Telegram and trusted networks. In order to get a fuller understanding of the cooperative movement context and actual usage of the currency on a day-to-day basis, I undertook three field trips to Catalonia and one to Athens over the course of 2016 (see Appendix).

To get a better understanding of Faircoin, I stepped away from the explicitly FinTech and start-up-oriented events and started tracing the political alternatives being developed. I took part in seminars with social currency networks and the city of Barcelona, which also had attendance by local Bitcoin entrepreneurs as well as a cryptocurrency ATM hardware company. I omit the details of these seminars here in part because my thesis no longer addresses Faircoin, social currencies and the Catalan case explicitly, and therefore will not be able to contextualise these seminars in an adequate manner. It is worth mentioning, however, because conversations with the ATM hardware company in particular were very revealing with regards to the amount of practical and logistical work that was being put in to establishing infrastructure for international currency circulation even under conditions of extreme legal uncertainty. I traced the Faircoin infrastructure and project through two more field trips, including a location where Faircoin founder Enric Duran was in exile. Apart from interviews with Duran and other core Faircoin developers I also visited the Faircoin project spaces Aurea Social in Barcelona, the local and very active Girona Faircoin node towards the end of 2016 and the offices of a Bitcoin ATM company operating in the Mediterranean. These visits gave a good insight into the enthusiasm and energy that infused the projects at the time where technical and legal architectures were being rapidly built and deployed regardless of their legal standing and uses. This seemed to cut across all cases, and also showed how the difference between what might be considered a ‘scam’ or simply mismanagement due to

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overambitious and enthusiastic ideas, development and experimentation was largely a matter of perspective – all projects operating in a legal grey zone. My grasp of the technical aspects of each project and the ways in which I sought to relate them to issues of governance and power still seemed untested and indeed my own role as a researcher within this field remained vague. So, in the third phase of the empirical research, I focused on publicly verifying my understandings of the cases and the ways in which I was translating these by taking part in events, presenting my research and observing how these might be received in the field.