Ethics and positionality

Over the course of the research, I increasingly took the position of critical insider in the field, being invited to contribute to educational material and public debates about blockchain by people in the industry (see specifics below). Researching a field that I myself was becoming a participant in raises some ethical concerns and questions about positionality, transparency and the effects on the field I am researching as well as my findings. I briefly discuss these here before discussing the limitations of my research methods.

Issues of ethics and positionality, in particular when it comes to participatory methods, concern differences in power dynamics, questions of transparency and not causing harm (cf.

Community-based Participatory Research: Ethical Challenges, 2011). In the case of my empirical work, the communities I was studying were mostly highly educated researchers and developers from technical backgrounds, themselves engaged in research. This meant that my position as a researcher was neither unusual nor a threat, but in fact welcomed by the communities and industry, in particular because of my social sciences angle on a technical field grappling with questions of power and radical reorganisation of economic, political and

of issues of security, privacy and transparency, such that information and opinions are often radically open. Code, papers, opinions and interactions tend to be fully published, often leaked by the community itself; if, on the other hand, these contained sensitive data, this was made very clear to me and the documents were cryptographically secured. I was generally a bystander of such dynamics of hiding or revealing, witnessing as a chat log was published following the Ethereum DAO exploit for example (see Chapter 6). That is to say that I worked almost exclusively with data and information that were already made public, discussing personas and positions that were in the limelight already as public figures.

It is worth explicitly stating that Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrencies are, as mentioned in the introduction, associated with and implicated in illicit and geo-politically contentious activities, markets, hacker cultures and politics, the ‘Darknet’ and so on. Had I addressed more practical case studies, for example hacker involvement or the uses of blockchain by political movements, there would have been significant questions, ethical and technical aspects to address – confidentiality and the security of identities in particular. However, my study has focused on people and places that are not currently under threat legally or personally, and draws almost exclusively on material that is already widely published and openly available online. When I engaged in more private conversation, it would usually be to seek verification or clarify details of online rumours. These conversations were neither recorded nor registered and do not form a substantial part of my data. For the few recordings and interviews that I did conduct, the usual ethics of seeking explicit consent apply.

In terms of access to the community itself, developer conferences and meet-ups were generally very open and inclusive spaces, making it easy to engage with. This earlier work, and the assistance of my colleagues in computer sciences, also gave me a means to check my technical understandings. Following an invitation by a blockchain developer training company, B9Lab, to write a ‘Hippocratic oath’ for blockchain developers, I became increasingly drawn in as a ‘critical insider’ in the field.23 Where I had begun my research from the position of critique, sceptical of many of the projects I was looking at, in the empirical work I found that critique was generally welcomed and that many people were themselves openly grappling with questions and concerns about what they were building with blockchain. This realisation significantly impacted my research, interpretation and analysis. My approach increasingly became to, in the words of Haraway, ‘stay with the trouble’ (2016) and, in the words of Barad to ‘meet the’ (blockchain) ‘halfway’ (2007). I found that the developers, computer scientists and engineers were themselves grappling with the ways the technology might not be living up to claims made of it, and were correcting, building and addressing this. I wanted to take these efforts seriously, and instead of keeping at a safe distance, to contribute

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my own critical work to this process of shaping the possibilities and directions of the field. Such an approach might be understood to compromise the ‘objectivity’ of the research: if I myself was beginning to have an active stake in how projects and debates in the industry developed, would this not in turn affect and potentially compromise the integrity of my findings? Furthermore, would it not also represent a conflict of interest? In reference to Barad’s approach to ‘objectivity’, there is no ‘outside’. An observer, and any description of the observed phenomenon will in turn affect its very determination. Indeed this is usually an ambition in research, to contribute to knowledge about a given field such that it can be understood and developed further. It becomes less important to construct a position of neutral outsider, and instead essential to articulate and explain the nature of the interest and stake in the field, the motivations behind the research, the ways in which the material and phenomena were engaged with and the reasons for the arguments made. My intention with this thesis is not only to go out and ‘find’ what matters politically in blockchain, but to take part in articulating this, and make the claim of what kinds of things matter as a contribution to a broader conversation. It is also important to state that this did not involve any direct material or financial stake: I did not at any point work directly for, or receive any remuneration from, any Bitcoin affiliated companies, nor from Ethereum. While B9Lab at the time of my work with them were offering Ethereum courses to developers, the work I conducted aimed to contribute to a critical reflection on the systems that developers build.24 It is also worth stating that throughout the research period, I only held small amounts of bitcoin (the most I had at any one point was 1btc) and ether (2 ether) for research purposes, in order to test wallets, Smart Contracts and transaction systems and that I have not, as of writing, exchanged for other currencies.