Article 2: Transnationalism and a little bit on serendipity?

After putting down all of the ideas and topics we had after our cursory research / in-depth discussion last class, our group got a better sense of how complicated the Bitcoin network is (and we didn’t even have our interactional-bitcoin-guru with us this time). The part of the studio where we attempted to group together all of our stuff/people/places/topics on the whiteboard was difficult because there were so many interactions on so many different levels. Nevertheless, our attempts to map “Bitcoin” (broadly construed) and overlay our thoughts on top of course content was fruitful. Two things stuck out to me: transnationalism and serendipity. For transnationalism, we briefly glanced over the history of Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s “origin story”—the work of an unidentified Satoshi Nakamoto—is not bounded to one nation-state; in fact, the very nature of a decentralized cryptocurrency network is diametrically opposed to the centralization of power inherent in nation-ness. Yet Bitcoin itself has taken different ‘shapes & sizes,’ if you will, within each geographic nation. China bans companies from participated in Bitcoin transactions. Countries in S. America use Bitcoin as a form of social protest. Different exchanges dominate different geographic locations. The Bitcoin network, in this regard, embodies transnationalism as it moves across national boundaries and reinforces “boundedness” via the different saliencies of its use within these boundaries. On an unrelated topic, serendipity really resonated with me. Throughout the course we have been talking about uses of the internet that deviate from its original use. I see Bitcoin doing the same thing. In particular, Nick and Alex’s project on using the blockchain to encode indelible tweet-sized messages is particularly interesting. I don’t think Satoshi foresaw this network being used as a free-speech platform; at the same time, the use of this bitcoin-messaging-system requires a form of recentralization via software interface. Another point of serendipity (which may or may not have a ‘happy’ connotation) is a thought experiment I have been playing with for the past week: could the bitcoin network be used as an electronic voting platform? Online voting technologies are a very controversial subject--security concerns, questions of access, and public confidence abound. If the Bitcoin network were somehow leveraged as a U.S. e-vote platform, there would most certainly be backlash on both sides due to the seemingly conflicted ideologies of bitcoin and government (decentralized and centralized). I’ll unpack this idea some more next time after I think about it some more…