The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de) centralized money, hacker news

In recent years the development of cryptocurrencies and wider implementations of blockchain technology have been valourized as digitally decentralized networks that dissipate control evenly among their peers. With Bitcoin, the first blockchain-based cryptocurrency, monetary policy is enacted via software built through an open source consensus model. This promotes a techno-decentralist ideology that promises to democratize societies by eradicating centralized points of control in economic systems. Contrastingly, this paper demonstrates how Bitcoin’s production process operates through strict authoritative channels. The overall political framework for altering the Bitcoin code is described as senatorial governance: a (de) centralized model of bureaucratic parties who compete to change the monetary policy (codified rules) of the protocol. This model shows how Bitcoin is not an autonomous system but is assembled and maintained via human discretion.

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Jack(Parkin) *************** Jack Parkin

) is an Adjunct Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, where he researches the political economy of cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystems. His ethnographic work focuses on points of control in decentralized algorithmic networks, analyzing software development models, technical infrastructures, and start-up industries. He also provides consultancy services for automation and decentralized ledger technology solutions internationally.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Donald McNeill, Ned Rossiter, Liam Magee and Andrea Pollio for guiding many of the early thoughts that went on to form this paper. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers whose generous feedback helped synthesize the empirical and theoretical contributions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.