Data Money: Inside Cryptocurrencies, Their Communities, Markets, and Blockchains

Economic sociologist Caliskan (Market Threads) gets into details of how cryptocurrency markets operate in this dense and informative ethnographic study. He finds that cryptocurrency is a novel and popular form of exchange—“data money,” defined as “the right to send data”—that is nevertheless dogged by money’s same old-fashioned problem of trust. While thorough overviews of both large and small cryptocurrency communities lead him to determine that crypto economies can no longer be dismissed as a fad “organized by nerds with strange ideals,” his case study of a single cryptocurrency community called Electra shows how crypto trading “[does] not entail a revolutionary parting from the past.” Caliskan extensively documents both the formation of a community around Electra as well as its founder’s attempt to destroy the currency (paranoid of being ousted by core members over his refusal to take financially risky steps, he sold all his shares at once, tanking the currency’s price), which resulted in users decamping to start a new group elsewhere. Thus, despite cryptocurrencies’ claims that blockchain technology ensures transparency, “[the] blockchain did not help them fix [the] fundamental issue of trust.” Caliskan persuasively argues that cryptocurrency, as a new form of money, needs new forms of regulation, in part to fix this lack of trust. It’s a well-articulated take on a particularly obtuse subject. (Aug.)