The Virtues and Risks Inherent in the 'Bitcoin' Virtual Currency

Ogunbadewa, Ajibola

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2425114

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The third type focuses on the claim that, even if the technology can be considered to be neutral, it still can be abused. For instance, it can be used for criminal activities, money laundering and blackmailing (Ogunbadewa 2014), and even (unintentionally) lead to a centralisation of power in the hands of a small number of Bmining pools^ . The fourth type focuses on the intrinsic power dynamics of the technology itself, on the way it mediates social relations of people conducting transactions and setting up Bsmart contracts^.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Blockchain as a Narrative Technology: Investigating the Social Ontology and Normative Configurations of Cryptocurrencies

Reijers

Coeckelbergh

2016

Philos. Technol.

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In this paper, we engage in a philosophical investigation of how blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies can mediate our social world. Emerging blockchain-based decentralised applications have the potential to transform our financial system, our bureaucracies and models of governance. We construct an ontological framework of Bnarrative technologies^that allows us to show how these technologies, like texts, can configure our social reality. Drawing from the work of Ricoeur and responding to the works of Searle, in postphenomenology and STS, we show how blockchain technologies bring about a process of emplotment: an organisation of characters and events. First, we show how blockchain technologies actively configure plots such as financial transactions by rendering them increasingly rigid. Secondly, we show how they configure abstractions from the world of action, by replacing human interactions with automated code. Third, we investigate the role of people's interpretative distances towards blockchain technologies: discussing the importance of greater public involvement with their application in different realms of social life.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%