Trust in the Trustless

Chronotopes of Currency in Adult Industry Crypto

Bibliographic Data

ID7475209
AuthorsEsra Padgett (The Graduate Center, CUNY, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume13
Issue1
Publication date2025-12-22
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEconomic Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2330-4847 • E-ISSN: 2330-4847
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/sea2.70022
OpenAlexW7116968496
LanguageEN
References cited23

Disillusioned by decades of financial discrimination, from the closing of bank accounts to banning by payment processors and exclusion from mortgages, LLCs, and lines of credit, sex workers find themselves in need of an alternative means of transaction. One possible alternative is cryptocurrency, where a shared sense of distrust in financial institutions has created an alliance between two industries seeking financial autonomy and a way around financial exclusion. For many blockchain developers, the goal is trustlessness : the ability of a financial system to operate free of actors whose actions cannot be foreseen or controlled. However, even the sex workers implementing blockchain technology remain skeptical of trustlessness, particularly any system's or application's ability to sustain autonomy from the economic regulations that have impacted their livelihood. Building on ethnographic data, the article explores the analytic utility of trust for understanding the contradictions that inhere in illiberal economies and offers the conceptual framework of chronotopes of currency , an approach to monetary circulation that considers temporal and spatial scalability

Autonomy · Circulation (fluid dynamics · Currency · Distrust · Ethnography · Financial services · Financial transaction · Payment · Skepticism · Blockchain Technology Applications and Security · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access