Data money makers

An ethnographic analysis of a global cryptocurrency community

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5609732
AutoresKoray Caliskan (0000-0001-9876-9405, Parsons School of Design The New School New York City New York USA, autor de correspondencia)
Año2022
Volumen73
Número1
Páginas168-187
Fecha de publicación2022-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaBritish Journal of Sociology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0007-1315 • E-ISSN: 1468-4446
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1468-4446.12916
PMID34961928
OpenAlexW4200018912
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas17
Referencias citadas31

Proposed by an unknown young man using the pseudonym Electra01, Electra appeared in the cryptocurrency markets in 2018. Thanks to its innovative supply mechanism, the money's market capitalization briefly reached 136 billion USD, surpassing Bitcoin in value. Focusing on the empirical case of Electra, a project that was chosen as the "best cryptocurrency community" by the users of world's largest exchange, Binance, this paper ethnographically analyzes the sociological universe of a cryptocurrency community. The research consists of two years of fieldwork, interviews with the core team and the project's anonymous founder, a survey among its community members, and computational analyses of the interaction data of the project's Twitter community of 376,600 handles, as well as their Bitcointalk forum. The paper approaches the socio-technical universe of a cryptocurrency community by examining the devices, networks, and representations that the community actors produce, use, and maintain in data-money making and proposes a way to make visible and examine centers of power in a global community operating a seemingly "decentralized" blockchain

Business · Capitalization · Cryptocurrency · Economics · Ethnography · Political science · Pseudonym · Revenue · Sociology · Value (mathematics · World Wide Web · Anthropology · Blockchain Technology Applications and Security · Caching and Content Delivery · Computer Science · Finance · FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance · Law · Marketing