The social layer: an ethnography of two cryptocurrency communities in the United States

In the years since the financial crisis and the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, challenges to American economic governance have increasingly taken place on the internet rather than in the streets. Indeed, cryptocurrency communities such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have arguably become the vanguard of popular opposition to U.S. monetary policy and financial regulation, though they are rarely recognised as such by academics or the media. This thesis contends that these communities are not simply protest movements—or worse, unbridled gamblers—but rather serious experiments in alternative forms of governance, which both contest existing structures of authority, expertise, and resource distribution in the United States and create new possibilities for accumulating wealth. This thesis draws on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and diverges from previous scholarship in attempting to think with the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities rather than against them. It highlights the lively, polyvocal sociality that has developed around blockchains and examines the political, economic, regulatory, and social issues to which the communities regularly respond. It details the way that Bitcoin and Ethereum organise social relationships in ways that intentionally diverge from existing economic institutions and explores the implications of this for subjects such as financial inclusion, value, power, and community. The thesis also situates Bitcoin and Ethereum in an extended history of quarrels over monetary policy and financial regulation in the United States, identifying frustrations stemming from the development of securities regulations in the twentieth century and locating their antecedents in the Greenbackers and populists of the nineteenth century. Bitcoin and Ethereum, the thesis concludes, represent popular contributions to debates on economic governance and inequality that often go unheard but which nonetheless have pressing implications for society and policy in America and beyond.