Trust, reputation and ambiguous freedoms: financial institutions and subversive libertarians navigating blockchain, markets, and regulation

ABSTRACT

This article departs from the post 2008 financial crisis context, from its intersection with technological developments, and from the socio-technical arrangements configured by this conjuncture. It explores plans and actions – of mainstream financial institutions, and of a community seeking for alternatives to centralised economy and governance – for the use of digital platforms supported by blockchain infrastructure. In particular, it explores how such plans and actions relate to conceptions of public and peer trust and how they appear to produce, or reinforce, reputational imaginaries and quantification practices within added value philosophies. By illuminating a tension between the two identified case examples, I seek to render alternative communities’ and financial institutions’ conceptions, imaginaries and practices (more) visible and to analyse their organisational marketing strategies – where there is a pragmatic and discursive operationalisation of technology as well as of trust as means to gain more self-sovereignty in action, while navigating markets and regulated actual world contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Blockchain
• quantification
• trust
• reputation
• markets
• regulation

Acknowledgements

I thank Daniel Seabra Lopes, Sandra Coelho, Carla Rodrigues and JCE’s anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. I also thank the participants in the research and the participants in workshop sessions where I discussed the material in which the article is based.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Inês Faria has a PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of Amsterdam. In the beginning of 2017 she started as a post-doc researcher at the Research Centre in Economic and Organizational Sociology of the University of Lisbon. Her research interests include medical anthropology, reproductive health and biosocialities, economic and organisational sociology, social studies of finance and science and technology studies. At the moment, she is particularly interested in the contextualised analysis of agencies and discourses produced around technology. Inês is currently developing research about ‘alternative’ and mainstream financial uses of blockchain infrastructure within the project Finance Beyond Fact and Fiction that explores financial changes and continuities in Europe after the 2008 crisis.

ORCID

Inês Faria http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8165-0878

Notes

1 Despite comprising many material and social dimensions, and being open for discussion within and beyond blockchains and cryptocurrencies (Swartz 2018), for the sake of simplification in this article value – as in added value philosophies – stands for the ultimate (desired) monetary outcomes underlying private or distributed cost-cutting and/or profit seeking organisational intentions and actions.

2 Such as assemblages of asset backed securities and collateral debt obligations, and the instruments created to hedge against them, for instance credit default swaps (see MacKenzie 2011).

3 See: https://github.com/Bit-Nation/BITNATION-Constitution [Accessed 20.03.2018].

4 The project contains about 30 people in the core team and more than 2000 voluntary contributors who work in the form of a temporary community, in a flexible and mostly online format.

5 The open letters of resignation were published in Bitcoin Magazine: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/why-we-wont-be-a-part-of-the-bitnation-crowdsale-1413212734/ [Accessed 26.03.2018].

6 There is a limited number of PATs (41 billion). 18% are already reserved for the platform’s founders, contributors, and early adopters. When/if the platform goes online, the percentage of PATs distributable within the reputation system will be 40%; the remaining 60% will be ‘Kept in reserve for the development of the platform and other expenses’ (Tempelhof et al. 2017, p. 33). The name PAT is that used in the white paper and hence used here irrespective of future token name changes.

7 For more details, see: https://steemit.com/bitnation/@bitnation/bitnation-token-sale-post-2-the-bitnation-token-sale-structure [Accessed 10.05.2018].

8 For more on this, see: https://www.netexplo.org/en/intelligence/innovation/bitnation-refugee-emergency-response-brer?flag=Grand±Prix [Accessed: 20.03.2017].

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) as part of the research project Finance Beyond Fact and Fiction: financial transformations in post-2008 Europe [PTDC/IVC-ANT/4520/2014] and by a Postdoctoral fellowship [UID/SOC/04521/2013] at CSG-SOCIUS/ISEG,University of Lisbon.