Doctoral Dissertation Research: Blockchain Infrastructure, Decentralization, and Value

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

An emergent digital accounting system combining computer and financial engineering, the distributed ledger technology known as blockchain promises to transform socioeconomic relations. Its development today is bound up with political and moral desires and far-reaching claims that the technology has the capacity to challenge or even replace the existing financial system and its centralized institutions with decentralized organizations and governance. In the long wake of the 2008/09 financial crisis, blockchain's promise of decentralization has resonated. But if the vision of decentralization is initially based on the distributed networks architecture of computer systems, what happens when people try to translate it into social reality? What cultural, economic and political concepts and sensibilities underpin the making of blockchain, and how does the technology's development in turn influence human behavior? This project investigates the human dimensions of an opaque yet increasingly widespread technology, formulating both academic and non-academic descriptions and arguments about blockchain's sociocultural and political-economic contours for scholars and broader publics. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, the project would enhance scientific understanding by broadly disseminating its findings to organizations invested in developing more effective methods for communicating science and the scientific method to the public. The research will consist of fourteen months of ethnographic study in two established blockchain hubs, which are also home to lively crypto-communities. The two research locations allow for comparative tracking of how distinct political, economic, social, and cultural situations and discourses bear on blockchain development. Asking how a digital native or Internet-based infrastructure becomes meaningful across highly uneven economic, geopolitical, and cultural-linguistic contexts, the project also examines how blockchain gains traction in relation to or even at the expense of other matters of concern. In both locations, research will investigate how blockchain developers, entrepreneurs, and other stakeholders (1) define value, and how they understand blockchain as a technology that identifies, makes or manipulates value; (2) what attracts them to blockchain; (3) how they think blockchain will and/or should change human relations; and (4) how they imagine decentralization in relation to blockchain's promise. Through data gathered at blockchain-oriented promotional, educational, and networking events, conferences, and hackathons, from online, social and journalistic media, and through interviews with engineers, entrepreneurs, and other stakeholders, the investigation will produce results shedding light on the nature of blockchain as a technology of value and its promise of economic and social decentralization. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.