Abstract
In this study, I use the Critical Realism perspective of power to explain how the Bitcoin protocol operates as a system of power. I trace the ideological underpinnings of the protocol in the Cypherpunk movement to consider how notions of power shaped the protocol. The protocol by design encompasses structures, namely Proof of Work and Trustlessness that reproduce asymmetrical constraints on the entities that comprise it. These constraining structures generate constraining mechanisms, those of cost effectiveness and deanonymisation, which further restrict participating entities’ ‘power to act’, reinforcing others’ ‘power over’ them. In doing so, I illustrate that the Bitcoin protocol, rather than decentralising and distributing power across a network of numerous anonymous, trustless peers, it has instead shifted it, from the traditional actors (e.g., state, regulators) to newly emergent ones.
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Notes
It is not my intention to offer a detailed technical account of the Bitcoin protocol. For a detailed description, I direct the reader to Narayanan et al. (2016) who offer a comprehensive introduction.
There are additional structures in the Bitcoin protocol, as for example the underlying rules of cryptography; these are not referred to here, because comparatively, they are far less crucial as constraining structures for the protocol.
I refer to the Bitcoin protocol as ‘Bitcoin’ (capital first letter), and to bitcoins (i.e., the cryptocurrencies) as ‘bitcoins’ (lower case first letter).
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Zamani, E.D. The Bitcoin protocol as a system of power. Ethics Inf Technol 24, 14 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-022-09626-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-022-09626-1