Peer-to-Peer Review: The State of Academic Bitcoin Research 2014

PHILOSORAPTOR'S RESEARCH, SOON APPEARING IN ECONOMETRICA JOURNAL

I decided to build a rather large database of academic research on Bitcoin. If you'd like to see it, click on the link. It's a Google Doc, and it allows you to comment if you think there is something I've missed. You can also download it as an Excel spreadsheet. It includes academic, and quasi-academic, research papers, journal articles and theses related to Bitcoin.

Admittedly, the definition of 'academic' or 'quasi-academic' is pretty loose. It can include peer-reviewed papers that appear in major journals, to working papers released from university departments and think tanks, to a thesis of a PhD student, to independent research from people with clear expertise.

I built this list because I myself like to write quasi-academic articles on Bitcoin, and have been trying to find good quality analysis of cryptocurrency, frustrated by the huge amounts of spurious opinion churned in the media, and self-promoting rants by opportunists and ideologues.

How I built it: Lots of searching

To build this list, I spent about four days going through different academic search engines. Many of these search facilities found the same papers, but each also tended to find some unique articles that the others didn't. The sites include:

• JSTOR (here)
• ScienceDirect (here)
• IngentaConnect (here)
• Microsoft Academic Search (here)
• SpringerLink (here)
• SSRN (here)
• Taylor & Francis (here)
• Google Scholar (here) (including year-by-year search from 2008)
• Wiley Online Library (here)
• Directory of Open Access Journals (here)
• DiVA-portal (here)
• Econpapers (here)
• ArXiv (here)
• IDEAS (here)
• Oxford Journals (here)
• Cambridge Journals (here)

Open access vs. closed: A bit of both

A lot of the papers in the list are open access, which means you can get them as PDFs or HTML files. Unfortunately though, the top journals tend to be behind corporate-controlled paywalls and require university subscriptions or money to get in. That said, if a paper is closed access, search for it online and you'll often find earlier PDF versions of it floating about, because the authors often publish draft versions or working papers in open access formats before getting them accepted into closed journals.

Language: English

I'm not one of those people who is oblivious to the fact that research exists outside the English language, and I know that it's quite possible that some of the most cutting edge Bitcoin research could be going on in a Chinese university or in a Greek think-tank. Unfortunately I don't speak those languages, so be aware that these are only English language papers.

Quantity of research: Reasonable

A LOT, BUT NOT THAT MUCH

Bitcoin literature is very new. The first paper - Satoshi Nakamoto's paper - came out only in 2008. I could find almost no academic research from 2009 and 2010, and only a trickle in 2011. It's only in 2012 that we start to find a decent amount emerging in the record. It's really in 2013 though, that the big research starts to come. 2014 has by far the most research, and it's in this year that peer-reviewed academic journal articles start to come out.

Bear in mind that peer-review processes for big journals can take years, so it's little surprise that there are so few cryptocurrency articles out in the really big-hitter journals. My prediction for 2015 though, is that there will be a big flood of research, and a significant batch of peer-reviewed journal articles. Good research takes a while to do, especially in the social sciences.

Quality of research: Hmm... 

Quality to some extent is in the eye of the beholder, but I'll be honest - there is a fair amount of crap research out there. For example, I've found 'academic' analyses of Bitcoin from people that work in big universities, that still hold onto archaic beliefs about money emerging from barter. There are also a lot of PDF documents floating about with academic-sounding titles, written by people with academic sounding affiliations, but you never really know how good they are, or if they're written by some enthusiastic second-year students who don't really know what they're talking about.

Peer-reviewed journals obviously demand a certain degree of quality, but being published in a big journal doesn't necessarily mean an article is groundbreaking. It just means you managed to pitch it right, and get past a panel of peers who might have the same biases as you. For example, it's widely suspected that the peer-review process in the big economics journals systematically excludes economic theories that don't follow neo-classical interpretations of markets. To be accepted into the hallowed halls of such journals, one must cow down and play the game, and couch everything in the apolitical language of mathematical equations and spurious models. Needless to say, some of the most interesting economics research is not found in the big prestige economics journals.

So, it's best to treat this list as an initial starting point to launch into papers, and to make your own decisions about how interesting they are.

Research themes: The tech, the law, the economics... the humans

There are a number of themes coming out in the research

1. Firstly, there is a huge amount of technical stuff about the cryptography, computer science, security and systems design. Computer science researchers have clearly enjoyed the chance to get involved in this cutting-edge area. The only problem with this though, is that the quantity of this research drowns out a lot of the equally important social sciences research, and tends to present Bitcoin as a technological issue, rather than a profoundly human phenomenon
2. Secondly, there is a sub-strand of the tech-related research that focuses on how to change Bitcoin, or create a variant of it, or point out some failing it has. See, for example, this piece on a Bitcoin-based emissions trading model
3. Thirdly, there is a pretty big strand of research on the regulatory status, tax status, and legal status of Bitcoin. This is clearly driven by the need to reach some clarity on these questions so that people know how to practically proceed in the short-term. There is also a nascent strand of accounting research - check out, for example, this new piece
4. Fourthly, there is a growing field of economic analyses of Bitcoin, mostly coming from pretty mainstream economics, or from Austrian-style libertarian economics. Like most economics, the attempt is to create models, or to analyse incentive structures, and they will tend to call people 'agents', rather than, well, 'people'. See, for example, this piece coming out in the prestigious Journal of Economic Perspectives
5. Then, finally, there is an emergent trickle of social sciences research on actual humans, including the sociology, anthropology, politics and even ethics of the system. This research remains hugely underrepresented though, which is ironic, because it's by far the most important area of research

Areas that need more attention: Humans

There are a number of areas, in my opinion, that need deeper research and analysis. 

• Bitcoin as money: There are surprisingly few real discussions about the monetary theory embedded in the Bitcoin code, or how it might function as money. The papers on 'the economics of Bitcoin' don't address it deeply enough (but then again, economics has always been pretty shite at money analysis). I'd love to see more deep analyses of the nature of decentralised electronic money, and the social dynamics of such money
• Despite the huge amounts of focus on the technology of Bitcoin, there is still very little critical reflection on the technological politics of Bitcoin, or critical studies of decentralised algorithm-based systems. My piece on the Politics of the Bitcoin Blockchain sketches out areas that need more focus
• Ethnographic studies of Bitcoin: There are a few surveys of Bitcoin users, and some interesting attempts to use social media to analyse users, but there are few true ethnographic studies 
• The geographical dynamics of Bitcoin: Bitcoin is often spoken of as a global currency, but in reality most of the writing about it comes from Americans and Europeans, and many of them sitting in cities. I'd love to see true studies on, for example, whether someone in rural Zimbabwe would actually use cryptocurrency (given that most of my family is from rural Zimbabwe this is not just a throwaway question)

25 interesting looking papers to peruse

I haven't had a chance to read all of these, but here are some really interesting looking articles that are probably not going to get as much attention as they should. 

1. “When perhaps the real problem is money itself!”: the practical materiality of Bitcoin (here): Written by the economic anthropologist Bill Maurer and his collaborators Lana Swartz and Taylor Nelms
2. "BitCoin meets Google Trends and Wikipedia: Quantifying the relationship between phenomena of the Internet era" (here)
3. "Virtual Currency, Tangible Return: Portfolio Diversification with Bitcoins" (here): One for  the investment portfolio analysts
4. "Nowcasting the Bitcoin Market with Twitter Signals" (here)
5. "The digital traces of bubbles: feedback cycles between socio-economic signals in the Bitcoin economy" (here)
6. "Who Uses Bitcoin? An exploration of the Bitcoin community" (here)
7. "Is Bitcoin a Decentralized Currency?" (here)
8. "Testing the Efficient Market Hypothesis on Bitcoin Exchanges" (here)
9. "Alderney: gambling, Bitcoin and the art of unorthodoxy" (here): From the Island Studies Journal, ha ha
10. "Coining Bitcoin's 'legal bits': Examining the regulatory framework for Bitcoin and virtual currencies" (here)
11. "Bitcoin and the legitimacy crisis of money" (here), coming out in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, from Beat Weber. Beat is critical of Bitcoin, and it's worth checking out his other piece in the Journal of Peer Production here
12. "Do the Rich Get Richer? An Empirical Analysis of the Bitcoin Transaction Network" (here)
13. "The (A)Political Economy of Bitcoin" (here) - this one is from Greek commons-based economy advocates from the P2P Lab
14. "Bitcoin: a regulatory nightmare to a libertarian dream" (here), from P2P law expert Primavera de Filippi
15. "Internet architecture and the layers principle: a conceptual framework for regulating Bitcoin"(here), from a Google employee
16. "Characteristics of Bitcoin Users: An Analysis of Google Search Data" (here)
17. "The politics of cryptography: Bitcoin and the ordering machines" (here): This is from Quinn Du Pont, who is doing intriguing work on cryptography political philosophy
18. "The paradoxes of distributed trust: Peer-to-peer architecture and user confidence in Bitcoin"(here)
19. "Synthetic commodity money" (here) - this one is in the Journal of Financial Stability, but free versions are floating around on the internet
20. "The Economics of Bitcoin and Similar Private Digital Currencies" (here) - this one is in the Journal of Financial Stability, but free versions are floating around on the internet
21. "The Ethics of Payments: Paper, Plastic, or Bitcoin?" (here): In the big-hitter Journal of Business Ethics
22. "Are Bitcoin Users Less Sociable? An Analysis of Users’ Language and Social Connections on Twitter" (here): A very intriguing paper, which suggests that 'Bitcoin followers are less likely to mention family, friends, religion, sex, and emotion related words in their tweets and have significantly less social connection to other users on the site'
23. "How Did Dread Pirate Roberts Acquire and Protect his Bitcoin Wealth?" (here): Everyone likes a pirate story
24. "Do libertarians dream of electric coins? The material embeddedness of Bitcoin" (here): Great title, and out in a pretty innovative Scandinavian journal
25. I'll let you decide what number 25 is: Perhaps a paper that you'd like to write?

Enjoy, comment, and please share

Thanks for reading this. If you see any mistakes in the list, or have any suggestions and additions you'd like me to make, please do comment, either here or on the Google Doc. I get sent an email every time that happens so I'll definitely see them. I'll update this list periodically as new pieces come out. Finally, please do share this with people who might find it useful - I spent a fair amount of effort creating this, so I want it to be as useful as possible.

Lastly: Much energy went into this, so feel free to buy me a beer

This took me at least four days to build and double-check, and it was pretty damn exhausting. If it's useful to you, and helps you in your own research or enlightenment, please do consider supporting me. Here are three things you could do:

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Much soul, very emotion: Why I buy into the cult of Dogecoin

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Please note: This piece was originally commissioned by the magazine MCD, and will be appearing in French in their December edition.

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I use Dogecoin because I’m emotionally drawn to the dog. Unlike the distant, fossil-like Queen on the Pound banknote, the Shiba Inu is at once transcendent and approachable, self-contained but cuddly, looking into my eyes with a sideways glance, as if it just noticed me and is wondering whether I want to play or be left alone. It’s not an aggressive dog, or for that matter, a bouncy dog trying to lick me. It has self-directed, quirky soul, and it’s almost impossible to imagine this dog being an asshole.

Some people in the crypto-currency community have written Dogecoin off as a joke, or even a scam.  Maybe it’s both, but does this matter? All currency in the final analysis is really a scam, and the real question is which of those scams we want to agree to. I for one would rather pledge allegiance to a mystical pooch than to worship the image of a redundant monarch.

Indeed, Dogecoin, to me, is the best of all of the so-called ‘alt-coins’, the alternative crypto-currencies that have emerged as offshoots from the original Bitcoin source-code. Here is why.

Money isn’t ‘rational’

Run this question through your brain: Why did people invent pottery?

The response from many people is ‘because it must have been useful to store food and water’, an answer which chimes well with our prevailing rationalistic world view. Nevertheless, not only is the assumption that pottery was explicitly ‘invented’ problematic, but evidence suggests that it was originally used to create abstract religious figurines. The details of such archaeological debates don't matter here - what matters is to realise that we often have an automatic bias towards thinking about history in terms of what we're used to in the present.

ANCIENT POTTERY: TOTALLY FUNCTIONAL

Why do I bring this up? I do so because there is a similar problem among many economists who attempt to peddle ahistorical narratives about ‘why people invented money’. Their story normally involves people ‘rationally’ designing money as an alternative to ‘barter’. There is very little immediately rational about exchanging real goods for pieces of paper or shiny bits of metal though. Sure, once the social convention of monetary exchange is set up, it’s useful, but the imagined process in which bakers and butchers ‘invent’ money to deal with the awkwardness of exchanging meat for sourdough loaves is an attempt to reverse-engineer history from the perspective of present dogma.

Money is not an object that can be invented. It is a social convention that has to be culturally constructed. The use of monetary tokens only appears rational once we’re party to a collective agreement (or delusion) to imbue those tokens with value, and that collective agreement needs to be constantly maintained.

State power, local trust, meta-national mysticism and labour

In the case of our normal fiat currency, the collective agreement is given strength by the psychological (and real) force of official authorities. Most of our fiat currency is created by commercial banks, but derives much of its ‘reality’ from state endorsement of its legal status.

In the absence of a state championing a currency, you need other factors to induce collective acceptance. For example, a very small community might be able to create and maintain a local currency backed by nothing but the preexisting communal trust network, woven together from mutual friendships, ties of honour and anxiety at facing exclusion from the social group.

To create belief in a non-national currency that is not located in a small community though, is especially hard. Bitcoin provides a fascinating case study of the process. When it first started, Bitcoin commanded almost no value. It had one crucial feature though. At its heart was a mysterious, almost immaterial figure called Satoshi Nakomoto, a focal point for a community to rally around.

The mystique of Satoshi was vital, imbuing what was otherwise a clever but cold piece of cryptography with a soul that people could believe in. Satoshi was the holy ghost in the machine, and the act of mining resembled a ritualistic quest to build on the blockchain started by the ghost. It’s through this process that the imagined value of Bitcoin came to life, and started taking on a reality.

By contrast, imagine if a well-known person, like Stephen Hawking, invented Bitcoin. It would be devoid of all mystery, resembling a science project or a corporate product, rather than an underground movement. The specifics of Stephen’s personality would replace the cryptic symbol that the Satoshi figure once stood for, and what would you have left? A clever piece of cryptography, and a somewhat banal act of using up energy in running computers.

That said, there is something about the pointless nature of randomly churning algorithms through a computer that is psychologically powerful. If you want to imagine that something essentially ephemeral is a useful commodity, it helps if you expend labour in creating it, because labour implies scarcity (you only need to work for things that are scarce), and scarcity implies a potential for an exchange value (if something is abundant there is no need to exchange anything for it).

The computing power (‘labour’) put into the Bitcoin network does not create value in itself, but is a further psychological backer to Bitcoin tokens’ imagined value. If they weren’t valuable we wouldn’t exert all this labour would we, and because we exert this labour they must be valuable, right?

The emergent myth of Bitcoin’s rationality

'WE WOULDN'T BUILD IT IF IT WASN'T VALUABLE... RIGHT?'

Interestingly, as the ritualistic process of mining has become increasingly competitive, and the commercialisation of Bitcoin has steamed ahead, new narratives have formed to explain why Bitcoin tokens ‘rationally’ have value.

Chief among these is the idea, touted by the Bitcoin foundation itself, that bitcoins have value ‘because they are useful’. It is part of a broader trend among the Bitcoin elite to rewrite history and claim, in hindsight, that the value of Bitcoin was always self-apparent, and that early adopters were just getting involved due to rational future expectations of increasing societal recognition of Bitcoin’s use value as a secure means of exchange.

In this formulation, Bitcoin tokens derive their value by being part of a potentially useful system, the value of each bitcoin reflecting the aggregate market assessment of how useful it is to have a secure means of exchange. It’s kind of like arguing that containers on train carriages derive the entirety of their value from the usefulness of the rail network. The implicit narrative is this: Hey, these things are useful as transmitters of value for exchange, so let’s compete over them, and in so doing create their market value, which can now be used for exchange.

Circular no? There may be a glimmer of truth in it, but it’s mostly an attempt to describe the essentially emotional and social process of currency creation with the language of cold individual rationality.

Tin-man currencies ain’t got no heart

This thinking has subsequently influenced the way that a lot of alternative crypto-coins have attempted to market themselves. Rather than embracing their own absurdity, many alt-coins have marketed their efficiency, their security, or their application to some specialist use case, as if the usefulness and competitiveness of the design was the most important aspect of why a person accepts a currency.

The crypto-conference has thus become the realm of ‘serious people’ discussing ‘serious business’, not wishy-washing mysticism and emotion. They appeal to rational functionality, rather than inspiringpeople to use them. They are techno-fetishistic. A guy with a PowerPoint presentation calmly explains the business case for why his crypto-currency is valuable because it uses a state-of-the-art turbo hashing system, but for fuck’s sake, tell me why I should BELIEVE in it!

It’s true that this strategy has worked to some extent for some alt-coins like Lightcoin, Quarkcoin and Peercoin, which have gained some popularity based on design, but think about this question: Why do you use British Pounds or Yen? The answer to that is never, ‘because they’re well designed’, and neither is it ‘because I rationally see how useful it is for me to have a medium of exchange’, and neither is it ‘because I’m intimidated by the state and they force me to use it’.

Our answer is mostly just ‘because everyone else seems to use it and I was taught to use it’. We are born into currencies just like we are born into languages, and we learn to use them in a social context. If you want to convince a person to accept ephemeral electronic records as a currency, you need a story for people to hold on to. You need heart.

Dogecoin is a cult, and that’s how it should be

Which brings us to Dogecoin. I can believe in Dogecoin because it gives me something to believe in. It’s a direct appeal to irrationality, a direct appeal to transcend the banal world of individual utility calculation and submit to something hilariously absurd. It is, above all, a cult, and that is infinitely more attractive than any cold appeal to robust design.

It is the peaceful, playful gaze of the Doge itself that is the mystical foundation of the currency. It doesn’t matter who invented it, because Dogecoin is not experienced as a narcissistic project of a particular person, and it’s the symbol itself that is the leader. The Doge is a figure without ego, with cross-cultural, cross-gender, and yes, even cross-species appeal. We can all get something from the gaze of the Shibu.

This is reflected in the resultant community that has emerged around Dogecoin, people who refer to themselves as ‘shibes’ and give each other gifts of Doge. While the Bitcoin subreddit has turned into a moshpit of aggressive trolling, Dogecoin forums feel inclusive and accepting, cohering around a surreal world of esoteric slogans and acts of goodwill.

In closing then, a word on design. If there has ever been any clever design in Dogecoin, it’s been in the way the core members have focused on creating a culture from the bottom-up, rather than fetishising currency creation as a technical solution to be marketed from above. The Dogecoin community has grown rapidly in response to community acts that establish a reason to believe in the currency, such as the sponsorship of underdogs like the Jamaican bobsleigh team, and oddball stunts like backing a Nascar racer. 

These are things you can sit in a pub and laugh about, outside conference halls, and that makes all the difference.

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Visions of a techno-leviathan: The politics of the Bitcoin blockchain

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(Please note that I originally wrote this essay for E-International Relations, and I have republished it here on a Creative Commons licence. If you wish to republish this piece, please respect E-IR's republishing guidelines)

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In Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic 1993 sci-fi novel Red Mars, a pioneering group of scientists establish a colony on Mars. Some imagine it as a chance for a new life, run on entirely different principles from the chaotic Earth. Over time, though, the illusion is shattered as multinational corporations operating under the banner of governments move in, viewing Mars as nothing but an extension to business-as-usual.

It is a story that undoubtedly resonates with some members of the Bitcoin community. The vision of a free-floating digital cryptocurrency economy, divorced from the politics of colossal banks and aggressive governments, is under threat. Take, for example, the purists at Dark Wallet, accusing the Bitcoin Foundation of selling out to the regulators and the likes of the Winklevoss Twins.

Bitcoin sometimes appears akin to an illegal immigrant, trying to decide whether to seek out a rebellious existence in the black-market economy, or whether to don the slick clothes of the Silicon Valley establishment. The latter position – involving publicly accepting regulation and tax whilst privately lobbying against it – is obviously more acceptable and familiar to authorities.

Of course, any new scene is prone to developing internal echo chambers that amplify both commonalities and differences. While questions regarding Bitcoin’s regulatory status lead hyped-up cryptocurrency evangelists to engage in intense sectarian debates, to many onlookers Bitcoin is just a passing curiosity, a damp squib that will eventually suffer an ignoble death by media boredom. It is a mistake to believe that, though. The core innovation of Bitcoin is not going away, and it is deeper than currency.

What has been introduced to the world is a method to create decentralised peer-validated time-stamped ledgers. That is a fancy way of saying it is a method for bypassing the use of centralised officials in recording stuff. Such officials are pervasive in society, from a bank that records electronic transactions between me and my landlord, to patent officers that record the date of new innovations, to parliamentary registers noting the passing of new legislative acts.

The most visible use of this technical accomplishment is in the realm of currency, though, so it is worth briefly explaining the basics of Bitcoin in order to understand the political visions being unleashed as a result of it.

The technical vision 1.0

Banks are information intermediaries. Gone are the days of the merchant dumping a hoard of physical gold into the vaults for safekeeping. Nowadays, if you have ‘£350 in the bank’, it merely means the bank has recorded that for you in their data centre, on a database that has your account number and a corresponding entry saying ‘350’ next to it. If you want to pay someone electronically, you essentially send a message to your bank, identifying yourself via a pin or card number, asking them to change that entry in their database and to inform the recipient’s bank to do the same with the recipient’s account.

Thus, commercial banks collectively act as a cartel controlling the recording of transaction data, and it is via this process that they keep score of ‘how much money’ we have. To create a secure electronic currency system that does not rely on these banks thus requires three interacting elements. Firstly, one needs to replace the private databases that are controlled by them. Secondly, one needs to provide a way for people to change the information on that database (‘move money around’). Thirdly, one needs to convince people that the units being moved around are worth something.

To solve the first element, Bitcoin provides a public database, or ledger, that is referred to reverently as the blockchain. There is a way for people to submit information for recording in the ledger, but once it gets recorded, it cannot be edited in hindsight. If you’ve heard about bitcoin ‘mining’ (using ‘hashing algorithms’), that is what that is all about. A scattered collective of mercenary clerks essentially hire their computers out to collectively maintain the ledger, baking (or weaving) transaction records into it.

Secondly, Bitcoin has a process for individuals to identify themselves in order to submit transactions to those clerks to be recorded on that ledger. That is where public-key cryptography comes in. I have a public Bitcoin address (somewhat akin to my account number at a bank) and I then control that public address with a private key (a bit like I use my private pin number to associate myself with my bank account). This is what provides anonymity.

The result of these two elements, when put together, is the ability for anonymous individuals to record transactions between their bitcoin accounts on a database that is held and secured by a decentralised network of techno-clerks (‘miners’). As for the third element – convincing people that the units being transacted are worth something – that is a more subtle question entirely that I will not address here.

The political vision 1.0

Note the immediate political implications. Within the Bitcoin system, a set of powerful central intermediaries (the cartel of commercial banks, connected together via the central bank, underwritten by government), gets replaced with a more diffuse network intermediary, apparently controlled by no-one in particular.

This generally appeals to people who wish to devolve power away from banks by introducing more diversity into the monetary system. Those with a left-wing anarchist bent, who perceive the state and banking sector as representing the same elite interests, may recognise in it the potential for collective direct democratic governance of currency. It has really appealed, though, to conservative libertarians who perceive it as a commodity-like currency, free from the evils of the central bank and regulation.

The corresponding political reaction from policy-makers and establishment types takes three immediate forms. Firstly, there are concerns about it being used for money laundering and crime (‘Bitcoin is the dark side’). Secondly, there are concerns about consumer protection (‘Bitcoin is full of cowboy operators’). Thirdly, there are concerns about tax (‘this allows people to evade tax’).

The general status quo bias of regulators, who fixate on the negative potentials of Bitcoin whilst remaining blind to negatives in the current system, sets the stage for a political battle. Bitcoin enthusiasts, passionate about protecting the niche they have carved out, become prone to imagining conspiratorial scenes of threatened banks fretfully lobbying the government to ban Bitcoin, or of paranoid politicians panicking about the integrity of the national currency.

The technical vision 2.0

Outside the media hype around these Bitcoin dramas, though, a deeper movement is developing. It focuses not only on Bitcoin’s potential to disrupt commercial banks, but also on the more general potential for decentralised blockchains to disrupt other types of centralised information intermediaries.

Copyright authorities, for example, record people’s claims to having produced a unique work at a unique date and authoritatively stamp it for them. Such centralised ‘timestamping’ more generally is called ‘notarisation’. One non-monetary function for a Bitcoin-style blockchain could thus be to replace the privately controlled ledger of the notary with a public ledger that people can record claims on. This is precisely what Proof of Existence and Originstamp are working on.

And what about domain name system (DNS) registries that record web addresses? When you type in a URL like www.e-ir.info, the browser first steers you to aDNS registry like Afilias, which maintains a private database of URLs alongside information on which IP address to send you to. One can, however, use a blockchain to create a decentralised registry of domain name ownership, which is what Namecoin is doing. Theoretically, this process could be used to record share ownership, land ownership, or ownership in general (see, for example, Mastercoin’s projects).

The biggest information intermediaries, though, are often hidden in plain sight. What is Facebook? Isn’t it just a company that you send information to, which is then stored in their database and subsequently displayed to you and your friends? You log in with your password (proving your identity), and then can alter that database by sending them further messages (‘I’d like to delete that photo’). Likewise with Twitter, Dropbox, and countless other web services.

Unlike the original internet, which was largely used for transmission of static content, we experience sites like Facebook as interactive playgrounds where we can use programmes installed in some far away computer. In the process of such interactivity, we give groups like Facebook huge amounts of information. Indeed, they set themselves up as information honeytraps in order to create a profit-making platform where advertisers can sell you things based on the information. This simultaneously creates a large information repository for authorities like the NSA to browse. This interaction of corporate power and state power is inextricably tied to the profitable nature of centrally held data.

But what if you could create interactive web services that did not revolve around single information intermediaries like Facebook? That is precisely what groups like Ethereum are working towards. Where Bitcoin is a way to record simple transaction information on a decentralised ledger, Ethereum wants to create a ‘decentralised computational engine’. This is a system for running programmes, or executing contracts, on a blockchain held in play via a distributed network of computers rather than Mark Zuckerberg’s data centres.

It all starts to sounds quite sci-fi, but organisations like Ethereum are leading the charge on building ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisations’, hardcoded entities that people can interact with, but that nobody in particular controls. I send information to this entity, triggering the code and setting in motion further actions. As Bitshares describes it, such an organisation “has a business plan encoded in open source software that executes automatically in an entirely transparent and trustworthy manner.”

The political vision 2.0

By removing a central point of control, decentralised systems based on code – whether they exist to move Bitcoin tokens around, store files, or build contracts – resemble self-contained robots. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase are human faces behind the digital interface of the services they run. They can overtly manipulate, or bow in to pressure to censor. A decentralised currency or a decentralised version of Twitter seems immune from such manipulation.

It is this that gives rise to a narrative of empowerment and, indeed, at first sight this offers an exhilarating vision of self-contained outposts of freedom within a world otherwise dominated by large corruptible institutions. At many cryptocurrency meet-ups, there is an excitable mix of techno-babble infused with social claims. The blockchain can record contracts between free individuals, and if enforcement mechanisms can be coded in to create self-enforcing ‘smart contracts’, we have a system for building encoded law that bypasses states.

Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies, though, are empowering right now precisely because they are underdogs. They introduce diversity into the existing system and thereby expand our range of tools. In the minds of hardcore proponents, though, blockchain technologies are more than this. They are a replacement system, superior to existing institutions in every possible way. When amplified to this extreme, though, the apparently utopian project can begin to take on a dystopian, conservative hue.

Binary politics

When asked about why Bitcoin is superior to other currencies, proponents often point to its ‘trustless‘ nature. No trust needs be placed in fallible ‘governments and corporations’. Rather, a self-sustaining system can be created by individuals following a set of rules that are set apart from human frailties or intervention. Such a system is assumed to be fairer by allowing people to win out against those powers who can abuse rules.

The vision thus is not one of bands of people getting together into mutualistic self-help groups. Rather, it is one of individuals acting as autonomous agents, operating via the hardcoded rules with other autonomous agents, thereby avoiding those who seek to harm their interests.

Note the underlying dim view of human nature. While anarchist philosophers often imagine alternative governance systems based on mutualistic community foundations, the ‘empowerment’ here does not stem from building community ties. Rather it is imagined to come from retreating from trust and taking refuge in a defensive individualism mediated via mathematical contractual law.

It carries a certain disdain for human imperfection, particularly the imperfection of those in power, but by implication the imperfection of everyone in society. We need to be protected from ourselves by vesting power in lines of code that execute automatically. If only we can lift currency away from manipulation from the Federal Reserve. If only we can lift Wikipedia away from the corruptible Wikimedia Foundation.

Activists traditionally revel in hot-blooded asymmetric battles of interest (such as that between StrikeDebt! and the banks), implicitly holding an underlying faith in the redeemability of human-run institutions. The Bitcoin community, on the other hand, often seems attracted to a detached anti-politics, one in which action is reduced to the binary options of Buy In or Buy Out of the coded alternative. It echoes consumer notions of the world, where one ‘expresses’ oneself not via debate or negotiation, but by choosing one product over another. We’re leaving Earth for Mars. Join if you want.

It all forms an odd, tense amalgam between visions of exuberant risk-taking freedom and visions of risk-averse anti-social paranoia. This ambiguity is not unique to cryptocurrency (see, for example, this excellent parody of the trustless society), but in the case of Bitcoin, it is perhaps best exemplified by the narrative offered by Cody Wilson in Dark Wallet’s crowdfunding video. “Bitcoin is what they fear it is, a way to leave… to make a choice. There’s a system approaching perfection, just in time for our disappearance, so, let there be dark”.

The myth of political ‘exit’

'SEE YOU LATER'

But where exactly is this perfect system Wilson is disappearing to?

Back in the days of roving bands of nomadic people, the political option of ‘exit’ was a reality. If a ruler was oppressive, you could actually pack up and take to the desert in a caravan. The bizarre thing about the concept of ‘exit to the internet’ is that the internet is a technology premised on massive state and corporate investment in physical infrastructure, fibre optic cables laid under seabeds, mass production of computers from low-wage workers in the East, and mass affluence in Western nations. If you are in the position to be having dreams of technological escape, you are probably not in a position to be exiting mainstream society. You are mainstream society.

Don’t get me wrong. Wilson is a subtle and interesting thinker, and it is undoubtedly unfair to suggest that he really believes that one can escape the power dynamics of the messy real world by finding salvation in a kind of internet Matrix. What he is really trying to do is to invoke one side of the crypto-anarchist mantra of ‘privacy for the weak, but transparency for the powerful’.

That is a healthy radical impulse, but the conservative element kicks in when the assumption is made that somehow privacy alone is what enables social empowerment. That is when it turns into an individualistic ‘just leave me alone’ impulse fixated with negative liberty. Despite the rugged frontier appeal of the concept, the presumption that empowerment simply means being left alone to pursue your individual interests is essentially an ideology of the already-empowered, not the vulnerable.

This is the same tension you find in the closely related cypherpunk movement. It is often pitched as a radical empowerment movement, but as Richard Boase notes, it is “a world full of acronyms and codes, impenetrable to all but the most cynical, distrustful, and political of minds.” Indeed, crypto-geekery offers nothing like an escape from power dynamics. One merely escapes to a different set of rules, not one controlled by ‘politicians’, but one in the hands of programmers and those in control of computing power.

It is only when we think in these terms that we start to see Bitcoin not as a realm ‘lacking the rules imposed by the state’, but as a realm imposing its own rules. It offers a form of protection, but guarantees nothing like ‘empowerment’ or ‘escape’.

Techno-Leviathan

'COME INTO MY ARMS, CONTRACT TO ME'

Technology often seems silent and inert, a world of ‘apolitical’ objects. We are thus prone to being blind to the power dynamics built into our use of it. For example, isn’t email just a useful tool? Actually, it is highly questionable whether one can ‘choose’ whether to use email or not. Sure, I can choose between Gmail or Hotmail, but email’s widespread uptake creates network effects that mean opting out becomes less of an option over time. This is where the concept of becoming ‘enslaved to technology’ emerges from. If you do not buy into it, you will be marginalised, and that is political.

This is important. While individual instances of blockchain technology can clearly be useful, as a class of technologies designed to mediate human affairs, they contain a latent potential for encouraging technocracy. When disassociated from the programmers who design them, trustless blockchains floating above human affairs contains the specter of rule by algorithms. It is a vision (probably accidently) captured by Ethereum’s Joseph Lubin when he says “There will be ways to manipulate people to make bad decisions, but there won’t be ways to manipulate the system itself”.

Interestingly, it is a similar abstraction to that made by Hobbes. In his Leviathan, self-regarding people realise that it is in their interests to exchange part of their freedom for security of self and property, and thereby enter into a contract with a Sovereign, a deified personage that sets out societal rules of engagement. The definition of this Sovereign has been softened over time – along with the fiction that you actually contract to it – but it underpins modern expectations that the government should guarantee property rights.

Conservative libertarians hold tight to the belief that, if only hard property rights and clear contracting rules are put in place, optimal systems spontaneously emerge. They are not actually that far from Hobbes in this regard, but their irritation with Hobbes’ vision is that it relies on politicians who, being actual people, do not act like a detached contractual Sovereign should, but rather attempt to meddle, make things better, or steal. Don’t decentralised blockchains offer the ultimate prospect of protected property rights with clear rules, but without the political interference?

This is essentially the vision of the internet techno-leviathan, a deified crypto-sovereign whose rules we can contract to. The rules being contracted to are a series of algorithms, step by step procedures for calculations which can only be overridden with great difficulty. Perhaps, at the outset, this represents, à la Rousseau, the general will of those who take part in the contractual network, but the key point is that if you get locked into a contract on that system, there is no breaking out of it.

This, of course, appeals to those who believe that powerful institutions operate primarily by breaching property rights and contracts. Who really believes that though? For much of modern history, the key issue with powerful institutions has not been their willingness to break contracts. It has been their willingness to use seemingly unbreakable contracts to exert power. Contracts, in essence, resemble algorithms, coded expressions of what outcomes should happen under different circumstances. On average, they are written by technocrats and, on average, they reflect the interests of elite classes.

That is why liberation movements always seek to break contracts set in place by old regimes, whether it be peasant movements refusing to honour debt contracts to landlords, or the DRC challenging legacy mining concessions held by multinational companies, or SMEs contesting the terms of swap contracts written by Barclays lawyers. Political liberation is as much about contesting contracts as it is about enforcing them.

Building the techno-political vision 3.0

The point I am trying to make is that you do not escape the world of big corporates and big government by wishing for a trustless set of technologies that collectively resemble a technocratic crypto-sovereign. Rather, you use technology as a tool within ongoing political battles, and you maintain an ongoing critical outlook towards it. The concept of the decentralised blockchain is powerful. The cold, distrustful edge of cypherpunk, though, is only empowering when it is firmly in the service of creative warm-blooded human communities situated in the physical world of dirt and grime.

Perhaps this means de-emphasising the focus on how blockchains can be used to store digital assets or property, and focusing rather on those without assets. For example, think of the potential of blockchain voting systems that groups like Restart Democracy are experimenting with. Centralised vote-counting authorities are notorious sources of political anxiety in fragile countries. What if the ledger recording the votes cast was held by a decentralised network of citizens, with voters having a means to anonymously transmit votes to be stored on a publicly viewable database?

We do not want a future society free from people we have to trust, or one in which the most we can hope for is privacy. Rather, we want a world in which technology is used to dilute the power of those systems that cause us to doubt trust relationships. Screw escaping to Mars.

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Crypto-Patriarchy: The problem of Bitcoin's male domination

(Note: This is based on a talk I first gave at London Bitcoin Expo 2013)

Imagine a scenario 10 years from now in which Bitcoin has managed to establish itself as an important global currency, supported by a myriad of Bitcoin companies, trade associations, and educational institutions. Now imagine the board meetings of those organisations. What will their demographic breakdown be? Will it resemble this, or this, or this?

It's no secret that the directorships of large FTSE 100 or S&P 500 companies are overwhelmingly dominated by men, and white men at that. This is not just due to random chance, or men's innate brilliance. This is due to our society having a lingering, systematic male bias built upon hundreds of years in which men have had the most access to job opportunities, educational opportunities, political rights, and (perhaps most importantly) cultural encouragement to actually seek those positions. This has helped men build capital, skills and to normalise the idea that they should dominate those industry sectors that command the highest market values (not to mention government positions and academia).

I clearly put a negative spin on that, but I am aware that some people (such as traditional conservatives) see nothing wrong with the idea of the overlord male figure, watching over woman and child (and society) like a sometimes-benevolent-sometimes-wrathful authoritarian god. It particularly disturbs me though, when I detect this domination seeping into areas that are supposed to be challenging traditional structures. Such as the Bitcoin community.

Crypto-patriarchy: Gender bias in Bitcoin demographics

I first started thinking about the problem of crypto-patriarchy when I was asked to speak at a the London Bitcoin Expo, which had an epic line-up of over 15 male speakers. Faced with such a blatant wall of testosterone, I contacted the organiser and asked him why this was the case. He told me that he'd tried, but couldn't find any women to speak. I sent a few emails to people deeply involved in the bitcoin scene and asked them if they knew any women involved. 'Pretty much no' was the answer.

Then I realised that all but two of the 30 people who have used bitcoin to buy my book have been male. This is in contrast to sales I've made in other alternative currencies - such as time credits and local currencies - which have included far more women.

UCL researcher Lui Smyth conducted a survey of the Bitcoin community and found 95% to be male. This rings true to my experience of the London Bitcoin Expo, which felt like - to use an academic term - a 'cockfest' (echoed by Victoria Turk's observations about the event). Out of the 381 people signed up here, only around 10% are women. I used to work in financial derivatives brokering, a male-dominated world if ever there was one, but in my anecdotal experience Bitcoin seems even more male-dominated than traditional finance. And of those women that are involved, they remain hugely under-represented on the panels at Bitcoin conferences.

#Bitcoin #bitcoinexpo was fascinating only saw the end-- #goldmansachs represented very few women though cept for the lovely @stacyherbert
— Vivian Norris (@vivigive) November 30, 2013

There are also obvious cases of bigotory towards women in the Bitcoin scene. Check out this comment by a paragon of humility on Bitcointalk: "Most [women] just don't know jack shit about bitcoins, and that's okay... they will just marry all the men who are bitcoin millionaires", followed by a picture of an abused woman with the caption 'Women deserve equal rights... and lefts' (aka left-hooks). Wow. (Update 24th Jan: For further examples of such behaviour see 'What it's like to be a women at Bitcoin Meetup' by Facebook's Arianna Simpson)

Why should we care? A rare chance to make something different

Aside from 1) the obvious issue of injustice, and 2) the fact that there's something wrong when an apparently revolutionary technology seems to receive lukewarm reception from people who make up 51% of the world's population, it's also 3) incredibly boring hanging around in scenes with only men (especially if they're the type of men who only like to hang around other men).

Furthermore, if something is not done about it, men's first-mover advantage will set in. They'll accumulate the capital and skills and set the tone of the culture. And yes, the boards of bitcoin companies will be male-dominated in 10 years time.

Bitcoin's community though, is still new, and it still has a rare opportunity to prove that it's cutting edge in every sense of the word, inclusive as well as technologically advanced (not just something that some people get very rich off... do I sound idealistic?), but to do so there needs to be reflection on barriers to inclusivity.

So what are the causes?

Anybody got theories about why #bitcoin scene is so male-heavy? Feels like giant cockfest, esp when compared to other alternative currencies

— Brett Scott (@Suitpossum) November 14, 2013

I wanted to get to the bottom of this, so I threw out the question above to that giant decentralised think-tank Twitter. I got a range of explanations back from people (admittedly mostly men). Let's go through some of those.

Explanation 1: Historical chance ('Guys started it, and brought their friends')

Kenny suggested that the reason was that men just happened to be the first to jump on board, and that the scene was built from that basis. He implies a kind of historical path-dependency to the process. We might construct a counterfactual history: It's plausible that if Bitcoin had been started by a group of female scientists at MIT, more women would have subsequently got involved via peer effects and role models. (Strangely enough, in all the speculations about the figure of Satoshi Nakomoto, almost nobody has suggested that she might have been a woman.)

Explanation 2: Inherent masculinity (the 'boys and their toys' explanation)

The obvious next possible explanation is that there is something intrinsic to Bitcoin that simply appeals to men. Tom here actually had a psychoanalytic explanation:

@Suitpossum @jimmygreer it´s the underlying concept of an "erection-like" growth, stopping at 21 Mio BTC - versus the mutual credit approach
— Tom Hoepfner (@TomHoepfner) November 14, 2013

Here's another light-hearted Freudian explanation. Maybe though, there's something to this. Bitcoin evangelists frequently claim that it's an apolitical value-free protocol that doesn't exclude anyone, but perhaps there is some inherent 'male-ness' within the design, or perhaps even within the choice of imagery or language used by the original community to promote it ('the aesthetic').

The more popular theory though, is that Bitcoin is 'risky', and that it thus 'takes balls' to get involved because of its situation, being volatile and semi-illegal. One can imagine men - feeling emasculated by their desk jobs - baying for (a relatively safe) adventure, like a digital version of Fight Club, jockying for position in an ego-driven goldrush. This same myth of 'the risk-taking trader' is what spreadbetting companies exploit to sell their services, beautifully exemplified by this utterly wank video.

Finally, there's the classic "men just enjoy technology more", or "men are just more analytical". This again suggests that the reason lies not in social construction of gender roles (see Explanation 5 below), but in some intrinsic biological propensity of men to love machines, code, analysis, leadership, or pretty much anything that is also strangely correlated with also being able to make large amounts of money (yay, we naturally become rich through our inherent nature!)

Explanation 3: Female disdain for Bitcoin ('why would I want to use it?')

The flip side of the explanation that men are naturally drawn to Bitcoin, is the idea that women are repelled by it. One version of this argument is that women find it stupid or lame or juvenile, and that they have better things to do with them time than waste energy on pointless currency speculation (you find a similar argument with women and computer games). This Twitter respondent here certainly feels that way.

Contrary to the notion that somehow men are more analytical or 'rational', several woman have pointed out to me that there's not much you can really do with Bitcoin right now, and that they're sceptical of it because they're more pragmatic than men, better able to override their own egos and see through their own hype. Indeed, even the much-touted notion that Bitcoin allows you to escape the watchful eyes of the NSA carries with it a slightly egotistical belief that the NSA would somehow care what you're doing.

Explanation 4: The growing culture of anarcho-capitalist brutalism

Ok, so let's get more controversial. Tune and Eric suggested that women are repelled by Bitcoin, not because of them thinking it's stupid, but by the large numbers of libertarian/anarcho-capitalists in the scene, and the increasingly aggressive culture that surrounds it.

@Suitpossum Always thought the same. Maybe because of the big Ancap-concentration around #bitcoin. Not many woman round that lot!
— Tune Revsgaard (@Revsgaard) November 14, 2013

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy some elements of the balls-to-the-wall bravado of the libertarian ethos, and it makes for a decent self-help philosophy. But, it can also have the side-effect of attracting those who already feel empowered (or who feel entitled to power). Let's not beat around the bush: in its hardest right-wing formulations it is a philosophy for why being individually powerful relative to others is also morally right, carrying a certain brutalism, and a winner-takes-all, screw-the-weak callousness which is more likely to take root with someone already thinking in an aggressive patriarchal frame. I always sense that it naturally appeals to those who feel they are on the cusp of power that they are entitled to, but that has not yet fully come due... like 32 year old men for example.

FEEL MY POWER! RESPECT ME!

Let's face it - Ayn Rand ain't a feminist hero. Not only did Rand state that "an ideal woman is a man-worshipper", but Randian libertarianism glorifies the myth of a Greek deity holding the world up on HIS shoulders. Later scientists actually discovered that the world held itself together - and that deities themselves were constructions built by ordinary people - but the John Galt myth persists, and being around so many people who have a belief that the world should rightfully be dominated by those who are most powerful, well-educated or aggressive enough to claw their way up the ladder, probably isn't that welcoming for say... many women, ethnic minorities, or pretty much anyone that's experienced the brunt of being on the wrong side of power historically.

(Additional note 17th January: For an example of this mentality, check out this post by a newly minted Bitcoin baron, thinly masquerading as a story of societal empowerment whilst dripping in triumphalist, patronising scorn for his girlfriend, her 'dumb friends' and the female coffee barista who is too stupid to have 'got in early' like him. Classic quote: "Unlike some of the other early ones, I fortunately — God is merciful — do not have a wife. What I have is a long-term girlfriend, and I’m under no legal obligation to spend any of my hoard to impress her dumb friends.")

(Side note: Interestingly, women are pioneers in the so-called sharing economy, which conservative Milo Yiannopoulos slated as an "emasculating, dispiriting and demotivating" realm of insipid do-gooders. Poor Milo, frightened by the thought of his manhood being threatened by people actually wanting to co-operate and share stuff.)

Explanation 5: The cultural dynamics of the technology scene

@Suitpossum Coz it's tech...
— Antonie Fountain (@antonie) November 14, 2013

Antonie here offers this apparently self-explanatory reason for crypto-patriarchy. He's not unique in holding this viewpoint. It's frequently repeated, not just about Bitcoin, but about the entire technology sector. This is a complex issue that I cannot do justice to in a single post, but it raises the question about whether crypto-patriarchy is actually due to something intrinsic to Bitcoin, or whether it is just a localised version of a much more widespread problem of women not being culturally encouraged to get involved in technology.

MAN=MONEY/TECH/POWER/SEX/MUSCLES      WOMAN=SUBMISSIVE ANOREXIC SHOPPER

It's an issue that this article addresses very well. Consider the imagery of the magazines above. Women's magazines almost never promote interest in technology as normal, whereas men's magazines always do. The key question here is whether such magazines are presenting a descriptive account of the world ("we merely reflect what women want to see"), or a normative one ("Oh, and we implicitly reinforce the idea that what we project is normal, or how things OUGHT to be").

Descriptively though, it's inaccurate that women are 'not into' technology. During the world wars, for example, historically constructed gender roles were disrupted as women took up industrial jobs (leading to a backlash after men returned home from wars). And as Alice Bell and Georgina Voss note, "Whilst programming was originally ‘woman’s work’, it morphed into a male dominated field where hiring practices actively discriminated against women, setting up the straw man of the geeky, asocial male coder".

Normatively, of course, the idea that it's not "women's natural place" to be involved in technology runs into a conflict of interest: It's strangely convenient for men that women are naturally 'not interested' in getting involved in anything associated with power, isn't it? It reminds me a bit of the apartheid history of my home country South Africa, where apparently black people 'didn't have an aptitude' for doing maths or science, so were trained to do things like, um, minimum wage mine labouring.

"Nobody's stopping you": Negative Freedom and the Moshpit Effect

"JOIN IN, NOBODY'S STOPPING YOU"

When pushed about this issue, some Bitcoin enthusiasts irritatedly say "nobody's stopping women from joining". 'Nobody is stopping you' is the classic articulation of negative freedom, and its problems are best exemplified by the moshpit. Nobody is stopping you from entering the moshpit, but you're only likely to enter if you feel encouraged to, or if you feel you'll be free of victimisation and subtle disapproval. It's the same feeling a young woman feels walking past a pub full of leery men eyeing her. Nothing's stopping you entering, except that condescending projection of de-facto power the men implicitly thrive upon. 'Come in darling... if you dare'.

I personally love moshpits - and perhaps we need such spaces in society for men to vent their excess aggression - but there's no doubting that they are wired towards disenfranchising women of their place on the dance-floor. Sure, you occasionally get the punk-rocker riotgrrrl who sets out to prove that she outdo the boys, but the parameters of the social conversation are very clearly set by the male action. The stark fact is that most women will simply be barged out of the way, repelled by the sweaty oafs, and just retreat to watch the band from the outskirts.

@Suitpossum I'm so sick of arguing with men about bitcoin. I'm reluctant to mention mutual credit for fear of aggro bitcoin freaks.
— Annette Loudon (@niftycorp) January 14, 2014

Moshpits are a comparatively harmless example of the problems of negative freedom, limited to certain ritualistic times and places. But if the principles of the moshpit are found in what is supposed to be an inclusive global exchange system, you've got problems. I think that Bitcoin is turning into a covert form of monetary partriarchy. It may define itself against a status quo, but if you're going to challenge one power structure, don't make it at the expense of accepting another. You don't dig big government and big banks? Why then tolerate male domination?

The myth of apolitical neutrality

STRAW MAN: IT'S NOT ABOUT THE BOUNCER

The comeback from the hard libertarian is likely to be that Bitcoin is an apolitical commodity, 'free from intervention', that 'everyone's free to join', that 'we're all adults', that it's neutral, and that they have no time for wishy-washy political correctness.

The average problem with the average libertarian though (and by this I mean someone who comes to such ideals not via a critical intellectual process, but because they like the sound of it), is that they're hypersensitive towards recognising overt forms of power - like the bouncer standing at the nightclub door - but have muted ability (or desire) to recognise implicit forms of power, the subtle structures of exclusion that actually do most of the work in maintaining a status quo.

They assume that in the absence of the bouncer there's a level playing field. 'There's no bouncer stopping you entering'. They fail to see that most people will be repelled from the nightclub not by the bouncer, but by things like a lack of money, or a lack of cultural access, or by the perception that they don't belong there. The Ritz doesn't even need bouncers. Those without power naturally shrink away from it. Or, in the immortal words of Withnail:

"FREE TO THOSE WHO CAN AFFORD IT, VERY EXPENSIVE TO THOSE WHO CAN'T"

Indeed, in the context of a non-level playing field, not making an overt effort to include is just a subtle (albeit non-deliberate) form of exclusion. As Howard Zinn puts it:

" ... it is impossible to be neutral. In a world already moving in certain directions, where wealth and power are already distributed in certain ways, neutrality means accepting the way things are now."

When men say that women are just different, or just not interested, it's normally just a convenient mask for the fundamental lack of concern about whether they're included. If the discussants on this forum are to be taken seriously, it seems that women's current designated role in the Bitcoin community appears to be as cheerleaders for the men, girlfriends of Bitcoin millionaires, or singers of songs of the Bitcoin heroes (no disrespect intended towards the musicians). To my knowledge, the only site focused on Women & Bitcoin is The Bitcoin Wife, a great site, but focused mostly on the concept of women as (married) consumers.

And while I've had pushback from women in the Bitcoin scene who say most of the guys are friendly, I also question how much someone could raise an issue of discrimination before being frowned upon as an unwelcome element. This is a big problem in mainstream finance, where women often don't report discrimination for fear of being seen as 'whiners' (why do I keep thinking of Stockholm Syndrome?).

So, what should be done? Combating Bitcoin inequality

The material from this article is drawn from my talk at the London Bitcoin Expo. After my talk I was approached by a man of African descent who was working as the doorman. He thanked me for addressing the issue. My topic of gender exclusion resonated with forms of exclusion he'd experienced in his own life. He'd been standing all day watching comparatively wealthy white men talk about the earth-shattering potential of BTC.

It's important to stress though, that this problem is found throughout society, not just in Bitcoin. All sorts of groups are marginalised from the broader technology scene (for an interesting, semi-conservative take on that, see 'Silicon Chasm: The class divide on America's cutting edge'). Interestingly, one technology area that does have a more inclusive vibe is ICT4D, which explicitly defines itself by a deliberate attempt to include women and poorer communities in technologies that are otherwise prone to being the preserve of elites making themselves wealthier.

It's also important to stress though, that I'm not claiming there is a deliberate attempt on the part of men to exclude others. People with privilege are frequently prone to seeing the world as a flat, level playing field, and it takes practice for them to see the hidden barriers that others face on a day-to-day basis. So, here are a few things I personally wish the Bitcoin (and wider tech) community would implement:

1. I wish the community would stop denying that there is a problem
2. I wish the community would stop repeating self-serving dogma like 'women don't like tech'
3. I wish the community would stop having all male panel discussions - no wonder women don't want to get involved if they're constantly faced with a wall of male faces
4. I wish the community would make a collective and concerted effort to identify, build up and showcase female role models 

Similar dynamics are found when considering ethic minority youth in countries like the UK. The old successful man throws his hands in the air and says "Why don't black teenagers express any interest in a career in law?". Um, have you ever thought that maybe they don't relate to people like you, don't feel included by people like you, cannot imagine themselves being like you, and mostly view lawyers as being figures of white oppression? Developing role models is vital to developing people's desire to participate.

So yes, can we break out of the passive negative freedom mode of "nobody's stopping you", and enter into an active positive freedom mode, which involves deliberately seeking inclusion, and deliberately building up people's capacity to act on their potential freedom? And, if this doesn't happen, think about how dreary, bloated and conservative it's going to be in 10 years time.

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