Satoshi's broken promise: conflicting rhetorics in the Bitcoin ecosystem

This paper is an examination of the oft-made claim that bitcoin will ‘change the world’ by ushering in an era of secure, autonomous banking in agreement with cyber-libertarian ideology. Drawing on the work of Nathaniel Popper, Alexander Galloway, Robert Kutiŝ, Steve Holmes, James J. Brown Jr., and others, bitcoin is here analyzed as yet another digital artifact promising revolution while at the same time instituting its own brand of control. In the case of bitcoin, such control is not merely ideological, but procedural. Because the procedural rhetorics that govern persuasive technologies are not always in agreement with the discursive rhetorics surrounding these same technologies, users who choose bitcoin as a means to enact the cyber-libertarian argument are persuaded by the software to contradictory ends. In this sense, libertarian bitcoiners are more constrained than they are free.

Metadata

Year	2016
Peer Reviewed	not_interested