Transnational Political Regulation of Bitcoin

Virtual currencies have recently emerged at the intersection of Internet and finance, bringing unprecedented innovations in payment systems, money and finance. In particular, Bitcoin is examined as the first example of virtual currency, dating back to 2009. Ever since virtual currencies emerged, they received increased attention from public, private and societal regulators, especially in the field of finance. Since regulation of Bitcoin is still in its infancy, this project will rather aim to unpack the underlying rationalities of power. Employing the concept of governmentality, this thesis performs Critical Discourse Analysis on policy papers, statements and press releases from public, private and societal regulators of finance. Rationalities of power and regulation are unpacked along three categories: ideas over the object that has to be regulated; ideas over the objectives that regulation has to achieve; ideas over the technical tools to be employed to achieve said aims. The results envision a future in which regulation will be public, transnational and permissive. The attitude of regulators is aimed at co-opetition, understood as a mix of competition and co-optation of virtual currencies in the current paradigm of regulation of money and finance. The future scenario will be mostly decided by strategic employment of material and institutional power by public and private actors in order either to limit or to support the adoption and diffusion of virtual currencies. However, it seems unlikely that virtual currencies will simply vanish in the future

Close to the metal: Towards a material political economy of the epistemology of computation

This paper investigates the role of the materiality of computation in two domains: blockchain technologies and artificial intelligence (AI). Although historically designed as parallel computing accelerators for image rendering and videogames, graphics processing units (GPUs) have been instrumental in the explosion of both cryptoasset mining and machine learning models. The political economy associated with video games and Bitcoin and Ethereum mining provided a staggering growth in performance and energy efficiency and this, in turn, fostered a change in the epistemological understanding of AI: from rules-based or symbolic AI towards the matrix multiplications underpinning connectionism, machine learning and neural nets. Combining a material political economy of markets with a material epistemology of science, the article shows that there is no clear-cut division between software and hardware, between instructions and tools, and between frameworks of thought and the material and economic conditions of possibility of thought itself. As the microchip shortage and the growing geopolitical relevance of the hardware and semiconductor supply chain come to the fore, the paper invites social scientists to engage more closely with the materialities and hardware architectures of ‘virtual’ algorithms and software

The material geographies of Bitfury in Georgia: Integrating cryptoasset firms into global financial networks

Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, have garnered significant attention in scholarship and beyond. Geographical work on cryptocurrencies has focussed on how their energy demand interacts with local communities and economies. Less is said about the organization of cryptoasset firms and their associated demands. This paper illuminates the complex geographies of one such firm, Bitfury Group, to investigate the global and national forms and structures such companies take and the factors encouraging them to concentrate operations in certain areas. To investigate the latter, we adopt the case study of Bitfury’s operations in Georgia, a South-Caucasian country where its presence is significant. We adapt Haberly et al.’s analytical framework to explore Bitfury’s geographical dimensions. We highlight how cheap electricity, regulatory and taxation regimes, personal encounters and personalities, and the materialities of hardware and energy-saving technology define these geographies and illuminate how Bitfury actively curates advantageous regulatory spaces. We encourage future work exploring Blockchain and Bitcoin technologies to understand the companies involved as simultaneously material and virtual, and as centrepieces in global networks interweaving production and finance

Sul divenire immateriale del denaro: digitalizzazione, (im)materialità, infrastrutture

The process of digitalization of money is often understood solely in terms of money’s dematerialization, inscribed in the longer process of money’s transformation into pure function. This paper problematizes this assumption by showing that digital money is more material than ever. The ostensible contradiction lies in a misplaced emphasis on the substance of monetary objects as the sole locations of money’s materiality. This paper argues that infrastructures, and not monetary objects alone, are the place where money’s irreducible materiality can be retrieved. Monetary infrastructures are then shown to be deeply relational and composed of material active forms and imaginaries

Steps towards an Ecology of Money Infrastructures: Materiality and Cultures of Ripple

Money’s materiality produces an ontological conundrum for social theory: should the analysis of money foreground the objects used as money, or the abstract relations that underpin it? Provoked by the emergence of cryptocurrencies, this paper develops a conceptualization of money as a technological and social infrastructure which directly addresses this theoretical impasse. Cryptocurrencies’ sole form of material existence coincides with their underpinning infrastructure of records, accounting and payments. In the past decade, cryptocurrencies have skyrocketed in number, and they have been applied to a host of use cases. This paper focuses on cross-border payments through the example of the fintech company Ripple, the cryptocurrency XRP, and the design of the XRP Ledger. Combining literatures from the social theory of money, science and technology studies and new materialisms, this article develops steps towards an ecological conceptualization of money infrastructures. Infrastructures, understood ecologically, include devices, active forms, and imaginaries in seamless webs of mutual relations of co-evolution. These ecologies are always potentially prone to slippage, dissolution, disassembling, reassembling and reappropriation, dependence, and competition

Money’s Infrastructures: Blockchain Technologies and the Ecologies of the Memory Bank

This thesis takes the emergence of blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies for monetary payments as a provocation to investigate infrastructures as the irreducible materiality of money. Increasingly obscured and taken for granted in everyday digitalised interactions, infrastructures are held to be the material condition of possibility for money. Departing from approaches to the social theory of money that privilege either monetary objects or the abstractions of money of account, the thesis demonstrates how infrastructures provide an analytical site where social studies of money and finance and science and technology studies can be fruitfully combined. In particular, the thesis establishes an ecological ontology of money’s infrastructures of memory to capture active forms and dispositions of money infrastructures, and the co-evolution of money infrastructures with their associated milieux. Focused specifically on cross-border payments, the thesis utilises the blockchain and interoperability firm Ripple as a “revelatory case” for investigating the entanglements of matter, meaning, space, desire, and power that pervade all of money’s infrastructures. Analysis is extended in three main directions. First, with reference to recent developments in cross-border payments, money’s infrastructures are shown to produce and inhabit spatialities and chrono-topologies that take four main typological forms – pyramids, rhizomes, platforms, stacks. Second, with reference to the libidinal political economy of the cryptoasset bubble that has built up around applications of blockchain technologies in payments, the materiality of infrastructural ecologies of money is shown to be shaped significantly by enchantment and desires. Third, with reference to remittances as cross-border payments where informal circuits of value transfer are presently being formalised as market opportunities to free hitherto idle assets, money’s infrastructures are shown to be replete with political-economic tensions between interoperability and platformisation and frictionless flows and rent extraction