bitcoin

The first part of studio session today involved each group sending a representative to the whiteboard to come to a class consensus on a few core ideas and connections were made between ideas. Three main categories were internal reach, external reach, and tools of influence. Internal reach focused on the interplay between organization and community vs the use of tools of influence such as blogs, Facebook, and others. External reach was related to each topics interconnectedness to one another in both the public sphere and in individual cultures and communities.

After further discussion with the group on the direction of topics for the final assessment, we focused on different groups/stakeholders' interactions with Bitcoin. Many parallels arise when looking at Bitcoin and social media, most notably both systems affect on the general public and how communication through the public sphere impacts the usage and method of interaction with each system.

In studio session today the group was able to make a multitude of connections within the wide area of Bitcoin; from social media and consumer confidence, to transnationalism and the governance of cryptocurrency. A few interesting ties became apparent such as the government's increasing use of bitcoin in research of new voting methods. The irony of governments using a decentralized currency in its democratic election process is very interesting. Another connection was made between consumer confidence and social media.

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.

In the first studio session, our group discussed the more technical side of how bitcoin works, and pitched ideas to each other about the applications and importance that bitcoin can have around the world. The technical discussion of how bitcoin works took a while to go through, since its setup is very complex. I believe an overall general understanding of the way bitcoin works was reached by all of our group members. The most important two aspects of bitcoin are its permanent tracking of transactions that is unalterable, and its open source, unregulated nature.

The group first tried to determine what topics and articles that we would write on the vast topic that is Bitcoin. Alex, a 4th year Computer Science major on the team, led the group’s discussion as he is currently working on a large Bitcoin related social media project. The first step was trying to get a better understanding of exactly what Bitcoin is and how it works a form of exchange.