Social Payments: Innovation, Trust, Bitcoin, and the Sharing Economy

Abstract

The payments industry – the business of transferring value through public and corporate infrastructures – is undergoing rapid transformation. New business models and regulatory environments disrupt more traditional fee-based strategies, and new entrants seek to displace legacy players by leveraging new mobile platforms and new sources of data. In this increasingly diversified industry landscape, start-ups and established players are attempting to embed payment in ‘social’ experience through novel technologies of accounting for trust. This imagination of the social, however, is being materialized in gated platforms for payment, accounting, and exchange. This paper explores the ambiguous politics of such experiments, specifically those, like Bitcoin or the on-demand sharing economy, that delineate an economic imaginary of ‘just us’ – a closed and closely guarded community of peers operating under the illusion that there are no mediating institutions undergirding that community. This provokes questions about the intersection of payment and publics. Payment innovators’ attenuated understanding of the social may, we suggest, evacuate the nitty-gritty of politics.

Online Food Shopping: A Conceptual Analysis for Research Propositions

“…Hence, existing discussions/examinations relied heavily on technical aspects of payment mechanisms (or schemes). However, technologies in business world can generate implications beyond technical dimension, but also in the social, cultural, psychological, and/or even political dimensions (e.g., Yang et al, 2012;Koenig-Lewis et al, 2015;Nelms et al, 2017;Verhoef et al, 2019). Hence, interdisciplinary works, either conceptual or empirical, can contribute to the literature for analyzing on more complex dynamics of online payment -not just about the technology/system per se, but also about the ecosystem composed of human, system, and knowledge in it.…”

Blockchain Technologies and Remittances: From Financial Inclusion to Correspondent Banking

“…While blockchain technologies disintermediate internally, they re-intermediate, albeit in a decentralized way, between each other. As Nelms et al (2018) have it, blockchain disintermediation coexists with walled gardens and "siloed" networks that cannot interoperate with each other. The frontier of disintermediation and transaction fee reduction is moving to the so-called "Layer 2" and "Layer 3" technologies, such as payment channels, decentralized exchanges, and open interoperability protocols (Poon and Dryja, 2016;Casey, 2018;Herlihy, 2018).…”

“…Instead, this paper investigates the political economy inscribed in the materiality and design of applications of blockchain and DLTs in remittances and cross-border payments (see Bátiz-Lazo et al, 2014;Nelms et al, 2018;Swartz, 2018). Specifically, we will focus on how blockchain technologies formalize remittances by streamlining their underpinning clearing and settlement infrastructure, i.e., correspondent banking.…”

Cultural Cosmologies of the Internet: Situating Digital Networked Technologies in Diverse Moral Universes

“…We can connect these observations to define Silk Road as an autonomous pirate state in the Dark Web that was operating on decentralised and securitised principals of trade. The early work of Barratt (2012) describes the peer-to-peer architecture of Silk Road as producing an eBay for drugs and the central role of encryption and cryptocurrencies for decentralised exchange and privacy practices (Gehl 2018;Nelms et al 2018). Because of the site founder and initial core member's orientation towards information liberty, anonymity and personal privacy linked to notions of self-sovereignty, they initiated a secure platform and marketplace based upon anonymising technologies that bootstrapped cryptocurrencies and started a whole wave of innovation.…”