INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGY This study seeks to contribute
This study seeks to contribute to the new discipline of cyber geography (Curry, 1996; Dodge, 1998;
Dodge & Shinode, 1998; Donert, 2000) through an analysis of: (i) systemic mechanisms and the actants
driving blockchain technologies, and (ii) how this is changing conceptions of space and place in everyday
life. More specifically, it seeks to make at least three main contributions to cyber geography. First, it seeks
to understand modes of spatial production from the perspectives of human agents and systemic actants
associated with DAOs/DACs. This dynamic is crucial for understanding how the processes of
cryptocurrencies and other blockchain technologies are displacing established financial regimes in
numerous human geographies. Second, it situates DAOs/DACs within traditional paradigms of capitalist
crisis and current systems of neoliberal globalization. These contributions will be addressed from the
perspective of Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency system and Ethereum as a decentralized, blockchaindriven
market place. Third, this study frames DAOs/DACs in terms of code/space (Kitchin & Dodge, 2014) and
network society (Castells, 2004).
In pursuit of the research statement which frames this study, I will start by elaborating on the
means by which I arrived at my current course of study. In looking at DAOs, I believe we must first
understand the conceptual construct as the sum of its parts while observing the theoretical foundations
of knowledge that have affected and could affect their evolutions. As expressions of unique, new
geographies, we then see how the foundational work of Bitcoin and the current work of companies (like
Ethereum) build an understanding of the actual and potential transformational roles DAOs and DACs play
in establishing geographies which are relatively autonomous from humans within cyberspace. This
problematic will be explored and explained primarily through an examination of the concept of “spatial
production” as defined by Henri Lefebvre (1991).
Research Questions
The broad research question for this thesis is as follows:
How do the systemic mechanisms and actant actions driving blockchain technologies indicate a new
evolution in the conceptions of space and place in everyday life?
This larger question was addressed through the following sub-questions:
(1) How does spatial production occur by and with DAOs/DACs from the perspective of human
agentsand systemic actants? How do these modes of spatial production distinguish these spaces from one
another in the scope of currently studied human geographies?
(2) How do DAOs/DACs situate themselves within traditional paradigms of capitalist crisis and
currentsystems of neoliberal globalization? How do processes of Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency system and
Ethereum as a decentralized, blockchain-driven marketplace displace established spatial fixes in human
geographies?
(3) How do DAOs/DACs fit the models found in Rob Kitchin & Martin Dodge's (2014) code/space
andManuel Castells (2004) network society? How do the similarities and differences between the two
frameworks distinguish or inhibit current exposition of the resulting spaces as produced by
blockchaindriven technologies?
Study Design
This study used an adaptive socio-technical design method to understand the nexus between
processes of spatial production, capital, and its unique expressions in code/spaces and cyber geographies.
This design was grounded in qualitative research which is critical in the study of human/machine spaces,
their dialectical relations, and their manifestations of code and code/space via those relations. Qualitative
methodologies allowed the researcher to implement data collection approaches that are sensitive to the
dynamic and complex natures of the study's subject matters. These methodologies allowed for a robust
understanding of human relations, the cultures they produce, and their unique spatial, political, and
economic processes in the everyday lives of the people who interact with and depend upon evolving
technological systems.
The goal of this thesis was to expose the modes of spatial production within and between the
blockchain spaces of Bitcoin and Ethereum through their political economies. Understanding how these
systems form, perpetuate, and evolve will help in determining how such spaces, utilizing a mix of human
and machine governance, create new spaces for alternate economies, but also harbor potential to
replicate existing systems of capital and its resultant contradictions. Qualitative research helps to identify
how these tendencies manifest inside the code/spaces and networks of blockchain-based technologies in
a manner that is not possible through quantitative means.
Due to the conditions of these systems as new, both in terms of their existence and their study in
geography, qualitative research allows for an inductive approach to the studies' data collection, accounting
for the broad spectrum of uncertainties that must be considered (Gomez and Jones, 2010). The data
gathered from interviews and informal conversations were extremely diverse, but also guided by popular
literature, news sources, and figureheads in the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other blockchain communities.
This research also incorporated notions of capital influence and autonomous functionality via narrow
artificial intelligence as key elements in their unique modes of spatial production. The social spaces and
dialectical relations were examined through a deconstruction of the collective discourses as well as
through an examination of the systems themselves: their coded architectures; their functionality; and their
respective conditions in relation to their varying forms of governance. Therefore, the assessments and
conclusions reached in this thesis focused on the systems, depending on the researcher’s depth of
knowledge and the novelty of his framework and approach. The design of these studies captured peoples'
varying aspects of, position to, utilization of, and situation within these systems. This allowed the
researcher to assess how the systems of cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications function as well
as how the systems act in relation to their utilization.
As this research progressed, the qualitative methods were sensitive to the emergent state of these
systems, forming deep and rigorous knowledge around the questions at the core of this thesis. The
following research methodology was chosen focusing on the unique aspects of the study that needed to
be captured in order to address the requirements of collection and analysis for the study’s key
components.
These research questions were framed on the basis of the conceptual and methodological tools
provided by phenomenology, dialectical materialism, and systems theory. As a phenomenological study,
this research focused on the personal experiences and knowledge of the Bitcoin and Ethereum systems
from a number of different perspectives ranging from developers to investors and daily users. From the
position of dialectical materialism, this study examined the status of Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency and
Ethereum as a digital marketplace. This approach situated these new systems in the context of neoliberal
globalization as these blockchain-driven technologies potentially bolster capitalist systems while
simultaneously exposing their utility as the newest means of production. From a systems theory
perspective, this study focused on how the frameworks of code/space (Kitchin & Dodge, 2014) and
network society (Castells, 2004) as applied to the relational conditions, architectures, and systems of
DAOs/DACs as situated within the context of Bitcoin and Ethereum. The combined approaches of
phenomenology and dialectical materialism allowed the study to describe how the underlying
architectures were conceived, formulated, and expanded over varying temporal and spatial scales.
Understanding the positions and perspectives of key individuals involved with these systems were critical
to making sense of the direction of development and in turn, the modes of spatial production for and of
these systems as both organic and inorganic parts of their natures. Additionally, systems theory allowed
the study to integrate aspects of actor-network theory and software analysis patterns in examining the
relationships between non-human actants, human agents, and the systems they depend upon.
Open Conversations
Given the ease of access to user groups within the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities, informal
conversations with developers, users, and investors was a key data collection method. This helped to
expose the underlying sentiment of mainstream discussions surrounding these blockchain technologies.
These conversations were similar to semi-structured interviews, but allowed for a free flow of ideas and
opinions based on key questions regarding daily usage of these systems, how long they have been using
these technologies, why they are involved with the technologies, how they use these systems today and
plan to use them into the future, challenges to usage of and access to these systems, and where they see
the technologies headed in terms of the technologies and their applications. Participants' conversations
were anonymized to protect their identities and to keep these proceedings confidential. The primary goal
was to understand the relations between humans and these systems, relations between humans and other
humans in these communities, and how these sentiments vary based on the position of the participant.
Due to the relative open nature of these social groups, access and dialogue proved relatively easy. The
interviewer met with the participant as outline in the IRB methodology to talk on the main topic areas as
outline in the semi-structured interview questionnaire (e.g., history with blockchain technologies, present
involvement, perceptions of where these technologies will be in the future, ethics related to these
technologies, and accessibility issues). The interviewer would listen intently during the open conversation
and following its conclusion, details of the conversation were written down immediately. Analysis of the
conversations was performed using formative content analysis in which the conversations were examined
for patterns of themes and words within the collective body of data as expressed internal to a group and
between different groups in these larger blockchain communities.
Semi-structured Interviews
I also conducted semi-structured interviews with developers, users, and investors in the Bitcoin
and Ethereum communities, attempting to acquire insights from key personalities. I led with open-ended
questions in order to observe the participants and listen to what they felt and thought about these
technologies. Perceptions, concerns, and motivations were explored through these questions. Variance in
experience and intent yielded insights into patterns of thought and ideas that both guide usage and
development of these systems as well as how participants let the systems guide their considerations of its
applications and embeddedness in their everyday lives.
Due to the distributed nature of the technologies and those who interact with them on a global
scale, these semi-structured interviews were conducted via video teleconference (e.g., Skype, Google
Hangouts) that allowed for ease of access for both the researcher and participant, reducing the logistical
stresses of meeting in person for many key personalities. Online interviews have been shown to be
comparable to on-site interviews and tantamount in terms of ethical considerations and non-verbal
considerations (Janghorban, Roudsari, Taghipour, 2014). There were also additional considerations in
terms of how people would respond due to this medium (Enochsson, 2011), but the rapport building and
overall process of online interviews was more than adequate and proved an effective method of
communication and data collection (Rayner & Allen, 2013; Shapka, Domene, Khan, Yang, 2016). Inperson
interviews were also conducted at conferences and in offices based on availability and opportunity.
Documents, Grey Literature, and Other Sources
The use of community blogs, community forums, media in varying forms, white papers, grey
literature, the open-source software of Bitcoin and Ethereum itself, and any text providing information or
insight into how these spaces function, their conditions and contexts within capital relations, and their
manifestations within and due to these blockchain systems, were also used. Aggregation and collection
of the data was automated via customized web scraping and text analysis software tools. Web scraping
was performed using a modified Pythonic web crawler/scraper framework called Scrapy. The text analysis
was performed with custom Python scripts implemented in Jupyter Notebooks where tables, graphs, and
other figures were produced for analysis of the text data sets. Any acquisition and use of data from an
online source was verified by the individual publisher or within the guidelines of the End User License
Agreement (EULA) for the website or service. For the purpose of this thesis and initial, spatial examination
of Bitcoin and Ethereum, software for these systems were viewed as a text at the level of its documentation
and pseudo-code functionality.
CHAPTER TWO:
LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Technology is used to accomplish any number of tasks. From the advent of the telegraph to the
modern smartphone, we are constantly producing solutions to old and new problematics alike through
reproduction of those initial inventive processes. These reproductions are driven by many factors, one of
which is the desire of the capitalist to eliminate work. This has pushed technological developments to
grand heights while creating a plethora of challenges for globalized societies in which these technologies
are utilized. As technologies can affect labor and in turn the employment of people within different scales
and strata of societies, this of course raises great concern.
However, lost in the propaganda and rhetoric surrounding incredible technological leaps are the
effects of technology on space and time (Harvey, 1990). Technologies, especially within capitalism, are
produced with increased efficiency and compression of space/time at the core of their conceptions. While
this is done to great success, the results are reduction of human labor requirements and greatly reduced
frictions of distance, but with marginal benefit to the human laborers themselves (if not their overt
exploitation in order to foster the initial innovation). In turn, certain major technological advances have
forced generations of laborers to completely shift their places within societies and in turn societies'
expectations for the laborer within their dominant economic system. The resultant spaces, socially
conceived through these dialectics and technologically governed through those processes, are fraught
with persistent conflict, contradictions, and struggle.
While these processes have been occurring for years, there has been limited examination of their
latest incarnations within the realm of cyberspace. From the initial conception of ARPANET to our modern
global information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructures, we have quickly expanded our
ability to facilitate the above processes at accelerated rates far beyond any other time in human history.
With the spreading webs of fiber, copper, radio waves, and specialized machines, we have created new
geographies through our conceptions and evolutions of new spaces. For those who master the dynamics
of knowledge/power within these systems, a control over them manifests itself as it has throughout our
history in terms of abstracted spaces, territoriality, and class conflict. However, the dangers resulting from
a lack of knowledge combined with our growing integration of and dependency on these technologies
could have catastrophic effects on global systems at multiple scales. Despite these underlying instabilities,
humanity continues to embed itself within these architectures and in turn, these technologies deepen
their dominance on everyday lives affecting larger social spaces.
Most recently, the rapid development of the technologies supporting cryptocurrencies has
allowed for not only the development of Bitcoin and the like, but has opened the flood gates to numerous
applications of these underlying technologies for everything from smart contracts to decentralized
autonomous organizations (DAO) and corporations (DAC). The DAO and DAC are of particular importance
as they reveal the power of how blockchain technologies and decentralized architectures reinvent the
current means and concepts of contracts, currencies, property, and markets. In doing so, they expose new
emergent dialectics between technology and capital, capital and everyday life, and everyday life in the
context of spatial production. As DAOs and DACs are conceived, developed, and used to augment or
substitute operations within existing capitalist entities, they will also change the paradigm by which labor
is used and valued within our current capitalist system. Neoliberal actors have been and will continue to
be swift in adopting these technologies so long as the profits and efficiencies are produced at the
diminished cost of labor. In that instance, the DAO/DAC is conceived in order to further the ultimately false
perceptions created by capitalist abstract spaces, homogenizing actions within while concealing their
contradictions and destroying (when at all possible) their differences. Capitalism in turn, through
redefining current forms, functions, and structures of existing systems, displaces crises to a digital realm
where current issues are disguised and new issues erupt (even violently at times). Therefore, the study of
these technologies within these frameworks is a critical task. Moreover, these innovations and their
potential have altered not only the ways in which we think about geo-economics, but have demonstrated
the potential to challenge multiple constitutive paradigms of 20th century capitalism at all scales. It is with
these premises in mind that I will critically explore the nature of decentralized autonomous organizations
for we are dealing with the questions of not just current modes of production, but of the numerous modes
of spatial production of cyberspace and everyday life for the foreseeable future.
Initial Considerations
I will be presenting the more technical aspects of this discourse pertaining to DAOs and DACs later
in this review as it will be difficult to understand their respective conditions without understanding their
utility and natures within the following theories' exegeses. However, they are also the most important
objects and processes to understand as we explore why they fit into the larger context of ‘cyber
geographies’ as analytically and methodologically distinct from 'human' and 'physical' geographies. In this
section, I will discuss Henri Lefebvre's theorizations of spaces as well as the time-space compression of
David Harvey (1990) and the simultaneities and multiplicities of space as explored by Doreen Massey
(2005). I will then apply these theories of space to Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin (2014), and Manuel
Castells' (2004) understandings of 'cyber geography'. Lefebvre's claims, in addition to my review of
Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity (1990) and Massey's For space (2005), are important as I believe they
constitute foundational theoretical points for DAOs (in regards to epistemological transition and
capitalization within the realm of cyberspace and its associated geographies) as a part of an abstracted
continuum of modes of production. Moreover, I will also challenge Manuel Castells' (2004) propositions
underpinning his “network society” as a counter-factual argument to test the idea that all geographies
require “borders” as a necessary condition of existence and as a basis for their control. As Lefebvre (1991,
p. 35) stated: “... in absolute space the absolute has no place.”
Before getting started, we must first address a few key assumptions. Early in his propositions of
'social space', Lefebvre (1991, p. 40) notes that in order to develop an internal understanding of space
within, one must do so from his/her body (Harvey, 1990). This is not just the organic process of sensing
the world around as a means by which to initiate the evolution of social space, but as a means by which
to orient knowledge around ones' physical body, as well as a means by which to understand and identify
contradictions and differential spaces (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 62-63). This is a continual process between the
body and the perceived/conceived/lived spatial dimensions within social space which I further elaborate
through the theories of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999). Their ideas on the embodied cognitive
condition round out Lefebvre's (1991) theories of social space. In order to focus on the modes of spatial
production as proposed by Lefebvre, I will assume that the epicenter for spatial production is an embodied
process as proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1999), as well as the work of Kellerman (2007) on cognitive
cyberspace. However, the addition of Lakoff, Johnson, and Kellerman is in keeping with Lefebvre's (1991)
modes of spatial production framework which stems from the Marxist school of thought (1998) dealing
with the relation between modes of production and urban and rural landscapes.
Cyberspace
Cyberspace, as both concept and reality, has evolved significantly since its initial conceptions in
Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984). Even before then, it has been perceived, conceived, and re-imagined in
countless ways. Early attempts to understand cyberspace were done so from numerous positions and
perspectives. It was seen as a collective, social-cognitive space, a legacy of technological means, a unique
architecture unto itself, and a mathematical form of nature (Benedikt, 1994). However, underlying all of
this are the human minds and ideas that gave birth to both cyberspace and its predecessors. Social
organization on the Internet would not be comprehensible without the deep literature of social spaces
nor would the hardware or software frameworks be understandable were it not for the profound work on
spatial architectonics (Lefebvre, 1991) and the like. Even today, technology is rife with spatial terminology,
metaphor, and context.
Presently, cyberspace extends far beyond the Internet, the World Wide Web, and the emerging
Internet of things. The world today, especially in urban environments, is layered with copper wires and
fiber optic cables. Even the air that surrounds us is saturated with electromagnetic radiation carrying any
number of signals that connects people to one another. Smartphones consume our time and attention
and in turn catalog our everyday lives in a series of short messages and never-ending activity logs.
Cyberspace has gone from being a means of accelerating communication and shrinking of distances to
being the new landscapes and mediums in which we exist. In turn, these landscapes and mediums are in
a constant state of becoming, at speeds and scales impossible for people to easily comprehend, and are
becoming one of the predominant socio-spatial problematics of the 21st century. The implications and
consequences of these concepts for geo-economics, geopolitics, and the spaces of everyday life are more
salient than ever before.
The cyberspaces considered in this study are the spaces of decentralized autonomous
organizations (DAO) and corporations (DAC) due to their unique characteristics and immense potential. As
an extension of the modern work on artificial intelligence (AI), these systems require autonomous actants
which, by design, have no direct human contact, yet function based on human/machine interactions. More
importantly, the resource that both human and machine require within the system (e.g., the blockchain)
has not only changed commerce online, but has begun to revolutionize the core of traditional economic
entities. The full extent to which these (r)evolutions have been addressed via strategic politics and geo-
economic agendas that are shaping these changes is yet to be seen (Bria, 2016).
Overall, the aspects of cyberspace of concern in this study are the modes of spatial production
within decentralized networks and blockchain technologies of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Political Economy of Modes of Spatial Production
Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) seminal text, The Production of Space, theorized the transition from the
mental spaces of philosophers to the social, everyday spaces of people via their material practices.
Lefebvre was quick to point out that knowledge of ‘space’ empowers those cognizant of its condition. This
knowledge allows for the control of space and that control could be enhanced by technological means
(Lefebvre, 1991, p. 8). This of course was part of his proposed spatial science in which the physical, mental,
and social were examined together in order to expose the modes of spatial production (Lefebvre, 1991).
Expanding on this point, social space is, therefore, a social product stemming from mental and physical
spaces, concealed through various illusions, yet embracing and constituting itself through multiple
intersections (Lefebvre, 1991).
This initial consideration brings us to the core trialectic that Lefebvre (1991) used throughout this
text. Firstly, material spatial practices of a society cyclically produce their respective spaces which can then
be exposed through analysis of those “perceived” spaces. Secondly, representations of space are the
dominant spaces of a society in which abstractions are “conceived” via architects, engineers, and the like,
playing a part in that society's social practices while also being guided by those practices. Lastly,
representational spaces are products of the individual users and their minds' constant pursuit to modify
and control their environments within their “lived” spatial experiences. While the spatial practices
embrace the modes of production within the limits that space sets, the representations connect
themselves to the spatial practices and their imposed order. However, spatial practice and representations
of space are subject to the contingent embodiments of social life. This trialectic is key to understanding
space as a natural and social product which is tied to the processes of its spatial production and how shifts
between these modes of production generate and instantiate new spaces (Lefebvre, 1991).
Having explored the conditions surrounding social spaces, Lefebvre (1991) was keen to expand
upon absolute space and how it strips that which is natural, leaving only abstract spaces over time. These
abstract spaces are not commensurate with the perceptions of which they consist, yet they project
themselves as the dominant spaces through their conceived forms, functions, and structures (e.g.,
technological fixes in order to maintain power via control of knowledge). However, as abstract spaces
attempt to maintain their dominance, conflicts arise which are then met with social contention and
bureaucratic restrictions to hide emerging contradictions. These contradictions both dissolve old modes
of production and create new ones (Lefebvre, 1991). The resultant differential spaces are what abstract
spaces need in order to create new spaces while perpetuating the concealment of contradictions through
projecting the illusion of homogeneity (Lefebvre, 1991).
Keeping in mind Lefebvre's (1991) arguments regarding social space being established via its
physical and mental aspects as well as energy, space, and time as inseparable in our considerations of the
production of space, he also noted that these elements, in relation to the abstract space (of the powerful
and capitalist activity), depend on consensus. This insight is key to unlocking the spatial code of
DAOgenerated spaces in order to reveal both their modes of production and their concealment. This then
leads to the proposition that the production of social space is tied to complex micro-spatial practices, the
representations of those micro-spaces, and the representational nature of those micro-spaces within the
trialectic of the “perceived,” the “conceived,” and “lived” space. Lefebvre’s (1991) discussion of abstract
space resonates with contemporary understandings of how the cyclical production and transfer of value
in DAOs reestablishes the system as the basis of consensus within its peer-to-peer network. These ideas
are useful for understanding Ethereum, particularly how it differs from Bitcoin, as it continues to evolve
the uses of the underlying technologies within a growing number of digital spaces. In this context,
Lefebvre’s (1991, p. 60) brief remarks on “technological utopias” demonstrate his awareness that his
conceptual framework might be of potential use in developing the spatial epistemology of future cyber
geographies.
Spaces of Simultaneous Multiplicities
Expanding on the nature of spatial production, was central to the work of Doreen Massey several
decades after Lefebvre. Massey's (2005) thesis is that space is a product of interrelationships as constituted
by social interactions. This means that space is also produced within a sphere of simultaneity and
multiplicity (coexisting heterogeneities) and space is under constant construction as a living process. These
arguments provide ethnographic depth to Lefebvre's writing regarding space as produced through the
mechanisms of lived social experience. In the process of advancing Lefebvre's insight that the production
of space is an infinite process, Massey also draws out several distinctions of interest.
Massey's (2005) goal in examining space is to extract its politics which makes the manner in which
she does this unique from Lefebvre (despite his cognizance of this condition). She proposes that space
does not exist prior to interrelations and through an examination of the relations as embedded practices
between entities, an understanding of the world will emerge as the underlying politics of those spaces are
exposed (Massey, 2005). These spaces, through their overlapping intersections and coexistent entities,
allow for a realm of multiplicity to be examined as actants and actions simultaneously construct space
through numerous, open processes (Massey, 2005). Knowledge of these open systems of spatial
production is accomplished through a distinction between space as historic time and space as a product
of coeval relations within multiple, positive heterogeneous trajectories (Massey, 2005). This is the manner
in which Massey strives to understand ordinary social spaces of everyday life and their constructions.
Massey's (2005) understanding of the above processes is first achieved through a deep
hermeneutics of “space” stemming, in part, from Lefebvre's (1991) consideration as to how humans have
defined “space” through history and into modern day. Through her examination of space as seen through
the works of Henri Bergson, structuralists, and deconstructionists, as well as other philosophers and social
scientists, she addresses the use of space as a counterpoise to time in order to guide her resurrection of a
condition of space and time as implicated in one another (keeping in mind the above ideologues only
noted space as a secondary consideration within their primary disciplinary foci). Bergon's arguments
surrounding time were critical in Massey's (2005) consideration of his time as tamed, via representation,
by space. In this focus on time, a delineation between the discrete nature of difference/multiplicity and its
continuous counterpart assisted in the distinction between a process of static, representative space to a
space/time of multiple living processes. Massey (2005) pointed out that Ernesto Laclau perceived the
process of representing space as tantamount to submitting that space to a hegemonic regime thus
rendering it static. Laclau's work was later compared and contrasted with that of de Certeau in his victory
of space over time through representation; a static representation Massey once again moved to replace
with that of positive, heterogeneous trajectories.
The later structuralists' arguments furthered this definition of space and time in their observations
that one should not convolute or fuse geography and history as these disciplines are distinct via their
unique significations and symbolizations of space and time (Massey, 2005). Structuralist averted this
conflation through their considerations of each society as unique within the scope of their structures,
synchrony, and spaces. However, by equating of all that was not temporal as spatial, they negated time via
structure and synchrony and in doing so, furthered the perception of space as static, closed, and
synchronic in its structures, robbing it of the possibility of real change (Massey, 2005). This ultimately robs
space of its ability to establish interrelations between multiple trajectories. Massey (2005) then notes that
post-structuralists (like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) have deconstructed many of these
structuralist conceptions in their further examination of space/time while exposing the politics embedded
in their definition of power relations, semiotics, and hermeneutics. However, in Derrida's examination of
space, Massey still found problematics in its resultant negative heterogeneities and in his defining of
space/spacing through the use of negative hermeneutics, thus reinforcing the conception/perception of
those heterogeneities (2005).
Massey (2005) then hearkens back to Lefebvre (1991) in her observation that production of space
is accomplished, in part, with material practices exposing the sensation of social dimensionality. She then
proceeded to examine modernity through the lens of globalization and spatialization, drawing out spatial
histories and the multiplicity of trajectories, in which the distinct geographies of control (rule) and of
power/knowledge impacts space’s operations and futures (Massey, 2005). Within globalization's
tendencies of spatial erasure, there is the occlusion of the underlying economic and technological
mechanisms bolstering its political facades. Globalization, therefore, averts acknowledgment and outward
demonstration of the numerous, open multiplicities that produce its many dimensions (Massey, 2005).
However, in Massey's (2005) brief exploration of cyberspace, we see that this occlusion of the economic
and technological becomes much harder to accomplish as dependencies on the technological expose
these connections and their fundamental multiplicities. This is also where she critiques the perceived
aspatial nature of cyberspace as the seemingly instantaneous communications can actually exhibit new
forms of social division via fractures between cyberspaces' supposed effects and its modes of production
(Massey, 2005). In addition to drawing on the works of Kitchin and Dodge (2014), she specifically calls on
the work of Stephen Graham (1998) in his models for conceptualizing space and place within ICTs. These
roughly fall into the realms of aspatial technological determinism, parallel social production, and mutual
constitution of technology and society (in which it is argued we can best understand the processes of
spatial production) (Graham, 1998).
In light of the above discussion of space, we see that which has yet to take form in and of itself, or
only take form contingently. Moreover, if we take Massey's concepts of the simultaneity of discrete
multiplicities into account, we then start to see the processes in which multiple experiences of place, as
spatio-temporal events, start to produce space through their interactions which leads to even more
multiplicities and simultaneities, ad infinitum. Her persistent comments on multiplicities as discrete also
begs interrogation as to the multi-scalar effects of trajectory and position within their positive,
heterogeneous interrelations (space/time as fused within processes of continual renewal promote
emergence of their condition and politics not just though examination, but through their position to the
subjective perception of the viewer and that viewer's position/condition/persistence to and within that
space/time). This is an important analytical insight with enormous implications for our understanding of
DAOs. Miners produce spatio-temporal events in their continuous construction of the blockchain despite
their lack of perception as defined by humans (though dependent on the hardware furnished by humans).
The humans creating the infrastructure in which the blockchain and miners dwell surely have a sense of
place in their human geographies and within their spaces and places. This may even extend to the point
of transduction by which their actions enter the digital realm of cyberspace, but at what point does our
ability to “sense place” have to be superseded by other actants in order to create newer post-human
constructions of space?
The answer, or perhaps more apt the questions, may be tied to the definition of place by or for
the numerous actants. Over time and throughout various histories, humans have refined multiple
meanings and senses of place and these senses vary depending on the spaces in which they occur
(whether in nature or in the home). This is further complicated through and by the aggregate processes
of individuals' momentary experiences of space as it produces a unique sense of place via contingent
perceptions and positions of the viewer (Meinig, 1979). If cyberspace is indeed a space, can humans truly
experience a sense of place despite their inability to physically inhabit it? This issue could be explored
through an examination of Kellerman (2007), Lakoff, and Johnson (1999) as I believe that humans have to
create proxies by which to inhabit and/or experience these spaces, facilitating new forms of spatial
creation. However, this could be explained via Lefebvre in that spatial practice through the representations
of space can allow for the manifestation of varied representational spaces, human and machine alike.
We then come back to the question as to whether it is human or machine that truly facilitates the
representations of space, harboring the contradictions between actants and the resultant differential
fractures, ultimately leading to other abstracted spaces.
Space/time Compression in Production
Up to this point, I have yet to address the temporal aspect of the production of space. To do so I
now turn to the writings of Harvey (1990) that are pertinent, especially his discussion on time-space
compression that was influenced by both Marx and Lefebvre who wrote during very different political
economies. Harvey is quick to point out that multiple senses of time are often lumped together causing
conflict and confusion while space, prone to the same tropes and in many ways being more complex than
time, is simplified to a point of acceptance and in some cases irrelevance (1990). He then draws on
Lefebvre by stating that recognition of the multiplicity of space and time experiences via social practice is
due, but through the study of material practices (Harvey, 1990). This proposition is intimately tied to the
reproduction of social life as each mode of production embodies a set of spatial and temporal practices.
Harvey keeps in mind, however, that different situations can and do manifest these practices in different
ways which can lead to conflict (1990). It is here where he draws out the distinction of becoming through
temporal processes as distinct from being in space and place in the course of examining how aesthetic and
social theory can be leveraged to understand how such changes occur (through class struggle and the
resultant geopolitical conflicts that persist throughout geo-economic processes followed by inevitable
uneven development and over-accumulation) (Harvey, 1990). This understanding is then examined within
symbolic orderings of space and time as the relationship between the individual and these orderings
determine spatial practices and representations (allowing being to emerge from the shadows of becoming)
(Harvey, 1990).
Harvey then hearkens to Lefebvre's (1991) trialectic in order to understand and explore the
complexities of the above concepts. Though initially taking issue with the vague nature of Lefebvre's
dialectics between “the experienced, the perceived, and the imagined”, Harvey expands on them through
aspects of spatial practice (accessibility and distanciation, appropriation and use of space, domination and
control of space, production of space) (1990, p. 219). In doing so, he draws out not just the dialectics, but
the causal natures of these relationships as well as building on how these elements affect frictions of
distance and inevitably the compression of space/time (primarily done through his examination of
capitalism) (Harvey, 1990). Harvey's examination of social power through domination of space and time
are in this vain. Leveraging Lefebvre permits him to exposit on how power is garnered through control of
material spatial practices via its forms, functions, and structures (namely, money's command over
space/time and how social action is consumed in the struggles of class and politics) (Harvey, 1990).
Power is tied closely to constant creative destruction of labor in order to accelerate economic processes
that ultimately influence social actions supporting that power, but not without the emergence of
numerous crises (Harvey, 1990). Innovation in this sense has the aim of not only speed-up, but of erasing
borders. However, I would argue that in the process of eliminating such borders, newer ones emerge at
multiple scales that is in keeping with Lefebvre's (1991) notion of the fracturing of abstract spaces with
the ultimate goal of concealing conflicts for the sake of shrinking of frictions of distance while maintaining
a visage of homogeneity at the macro scalar. The resultant conflicts in the form of competition and crises
accelerate the reconstruction of spaces through devaluation of specific assets (Harvey, 1990). In this
context, the production of space is a means by which to increase social power while balancing the equally
important dynamic between representations of space and the actual material control of spatial
organization (Harvey, 1990).
The above dynamic leads to an important distinction between the mobilities of capital and labor
in which accumulation drives expansion while technological fixes assist in overcoming issues related to
competition in the process of these spatial reconstructions (Harvey, 1990). This conflict between
bourgeoisie and working class interests sees capitalism rise above the spaces of the national while using
those very spaces to secure its power over space and time. Even though the working class and counter
capitalist movements gain temporary control over place, it is seemingly always at the behest of capitalism's
control over the spaces containing these counter movements (Harvey, 1990). This conflict, throughout its
long history, is the basis for Harvey's definition of time-space compression defined by accelerating the rate
of everyday life while overcoming of borders, ultimately leading to “shrinking” the world.
In this time-space compression, perspectives (indeed multiple perspectives) are essential to
perpetuate the constant interplay between coding of spaces and their reproduction allowing for their
abstraction, conquest, and ultimate control (initially accomplished through the maps and later through
the commodification of the lands they represented) (Harvey, 1990). Harvey again draws on Lefebvre (1991)
to understand the politics of space through specific tropes related to the conflict between social and
private utilization of space. Through an examination of the principles of spatial fragmentation, production
of space via its political and economic contexts, the interdependence of the political and social,
homogenization of space over conception of place, and spaces domination through its production, we
then start to see how crisis in representations of space emerges (Harvey, 1990). Therefore, “the more
unified the space, the more important the qualities of the fragmentations become for social identity and
action” (Harvey, 1990, p. 271). The epitome of these manifestations is expanded upon by Harvey (1990)
through his look at the conflicts between the local and global during the modern and postmodern eras.
In the postmodern era, shifts in capitalist modes of accumulation (new organizational forms,
production technologies, and intensification of labor) have led to drastic changes in geopolitics,
geoeconomics, cultures, and societies (Harvey, 1990). This has resulted in laborers having to retrain
themselves within increasingly small time-frames to meet the shifting demands in labor needs. The result
is increased volatility and ephemeral practices, decrease in the ability to plan strategically, and the
production of new symbolic systems to instill the ideals of the bourgeois as aspirational (Harvey, 1990). In
turn, the overcoming of spatial barriers has become more important as the means by which the frontiers
were originally breached exposes our sensitivities to the larger spaces rendering our understanding of
those spaces more critical.
As previously discussed, labor time is central to establishing value (Marx, 1976) and this can be
expanded to say “within a set of spaces”. I am specifically interested in addressing the experience of time,
as elaborated by Harvey (1990), from three important perspectives: (i) from the perspective of human
actors involved in the production of DAO in order to extract “value” in a particular form; (ii) from the
perspective of algorithmic actors within the “social spaces” of DAO, pushing outward to deliver a
commodity with exchange value; and (iii) from the perspective of algorithmic actors in any number
arrangements within the spaces of the DAO in the labor of value creation and competition to these ends.
On the last of the three, it is important to consider that due to the decentralized nature of the system, we
could be dealing with an infinite number of “perceived,” “conceived,” and “lived” spaces within the labor
process.
Harvey (1990) pointed out a paradox I think is critical to any examination of DAOs in that
diminished spatial barriers increase sensitivity of capital to shifts of place within spaces resulting in
unstable, fragmented, and uneven development within a now globally dominant economic system.
Decentralization of production and money's relation to value are of key concerns to Harvey and is part of
the larger examination as to how Bitcoin and Ethereum offer new alternatives to the above tribulations
while simultaneously battling within them.
Harvey's exposition of the experience of space and time in social spaces is a framework flexible
enough to be applied to all these aspects and could be used to further elaborate the idea that autonomous
actants can experience and produce space at speeds that are much faster than those of humans, but no
less meaningful in their implications (keeping in mind that his examination was intended for expanding on
the nature of postmodernism's relationship to capital accumulation through space, time, and space-time
experiences) (1990, p. 201). This is both in terms of the establishment of unique spaces and geographies,
and the reinforcement of the fact that these entities do not overcome space and time; they merely
transform and continuously shift the perspective from which it is produced. As a result, this study could
have immediate implications for discerning capital as process/thing, relations between technology and
human labor, and produced spaces of uneven geographic development with the potential to impact many
other contradictions (Harvey, 2015).
Bitcoin
The majority of the literature related to the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and its mechanisms, which are
central to this study, can be found in a white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto (2008). There is also a vast body
of “grey literature” which is being generated by online forums such as Reddit. Phil Champagne compiled
the white paper and the bulk of these posts into The Book of Satoshi (2014). However, Nakamoto’s original
thoughts are of the greatest importance as they laid the ground work for how Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies
that followed function. Bitcoin's functionality is based on three core concepts: a public ledger of
transactions called the blockchain; a cryptographic algorithm for encryption, authorization, and execution
of transactions; and a distributed network of computational nodes called miners. Every member of the
network shares the open ledger and utilizes an encrypted wallet to make payments and store his/her
unique information (primarily a balance). Those same wallets utilize public-key cryptography in order to
secure transactions within the network.
Here is the most interesting part. Miners are distributed all around the world and operate the
Bitcoin network which is composed of machines via the Bitcoin software framework (which runs the
overarching Bitcoin blockchain protocol). They work to verify valid transactions and update the blockchain
with new blocks (or pages in the open ledger) approximately every ten minutes. Each miner creates its
own version of this block and competes with all other miners to have its specific block added to the globally
shared blockchain. Miners compete by seeing who can come up with a solution to a computational
problem (in this case, finding a hash value that is beneath the threshold value generated by the Bitcoin
network tied to the next block in the blockchain). When a miner finds a solution, called proofof-work, the
solution is validated and all other miners move on to work on the next page in the open ledger. The reward
for the miner who solved the problem is a number of new Bitcoins (currently 12.5 which is reduced by
50% every 4 years), plus all transaction fees resulting from exchanges between wallets within that block in
the blockchain.
In the event that there is a tie, a fork is made in the blockchain (or two ledgers temporarily exist).
As soon as the next solution is found, the blockchain branch that this occurred on becomes the true
blockchain and the other branch in this fork is orphaned (meaning that miner did not get paid and moves
on to work on the newest open block in the blockchain). Moreover, in order to keep the Bitcoin network
producing new blocks approximately every ten minutes, the difficulty of the block hash to be solved is
adjusted based on the speed of the previous solution which ensures that increases in computational power
thrown at a problem does not upset this tempo in block creation. In effect, miners act as minters of the
currency, keepers of the ledger, and regulators of the system, switching roles at different times and speeds
during this cyclical process of blockchain renewal (Champagne, 2014).
The implications of the miner network and blockchain generation are great. The Bitcoin network
operates as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and if we define Bitcoin as ‘money’ (a medium
of exchange value that is representational of social labor) as opposed to ‘currency’ (the socially accepted
representation of money), then we can move Bitcoin into the money/commodity dialectic as proposed by
Marx (1976). In doing so, we have to ask at what point do we consider these “miners” part of the socially
necessary labor time required to create value within and outside the Bitcoin system? Members
participating in this peer-to-peer system consider Bitcoin a system unit of value. If miners are in fact part
of value creation and transfer, how has this distributed network become a ‘space’ as defined by Lefebvre
(1991) from the perspectives of the miners and the humans?
Ethereum
Satoshi Nakamoto's pioneering concept led to the creation of several alternate cryptocurrencies,
or alt-currencies, within this initial blockchain framework generally accepted as blockchain 1.0 (Swan,
2015). Blockchain 1.0 paved the way for expanded usage of the blockchain and cryptography in smart
contracts. Whereas blockchain 1.0 was built for decentralized money and payments, blockchain 2.0 used
its predecessor to accommodate the decentralization of entire financial markets, using a custom
programming language as its foundation, which could track transfer activities of not only smart contracts,
but smart properties and other DAOs.
Before going any further into the mechanisms of blockchain 2.0, we need to discuss the
terminology underpinning these new technologies in order to clearly distinguish between the
signifier/signified (Selden, Widdowson, Brooker, 2005) within the online communities still struggling with
universally accepted terminology. The set of definitions for the purpose of this study will be derived from
those published by Vitalik Buterin (2014b) through Ethereum's blog. Thus, a DAO is an autonomously
existing entity within cyberspace, having internal capital (some form of property having “value”) which it
uses to reward certain activities. The DAO has autonomous actants at its core that work within the system
to maintain the organization and aside from the initial implementation of hardware, requires no human
activity aside from functions outside of the charter governing its predetermined functionality. A DAO can
“hire” humans for tasks it is incapable of doing itself (this is the feature by which it is argues Bitcoin is not
a DAO) and can make a profit, but it is usually through the actants
(machine and human) participating in the organization. DACs are considered to be a subclass of the DAO.
The primary distinction between DAO and DAC is in the use of shares which can be purchased or sold and
entitle the shareholder to potential returns based on the success of the DAC.
Some scholars and inventors have taken to this concept of DAOs via blockchain 2.0 and are
attempting to expand upon it. Vitalik Buterin (2014a) of the Ethereum project proposed a variation to the
Bitcoin model and in doing so is expanding the potential of DAOs and their spatial implications within
human and cyber geographies. Keeping in the spirit of transparency, the Ethereum project maintains the
concepts of a decentralized database (or blockchain) and tokenization (via cryptocurrency) within the
system for making transactions. However, a large advance was made when Vitalik Buterin and the
Ethereum team applied a Turing-complete language to this environment. To this end, Ethereum uses a
featureless blockchain so that the user can define what goes into the open ledger. Currently, this is
performed using proof-of-work, but the Ethereum Foundation is currently working to implement the
Casper proof-of-stake protocol (which remain in development and has received both praise and criticism
as will be discussed later).
Much like an ‘open' app market (such as Google Play), one can join this system, build an application
in accordance with a set of agreed terms (a smart contract), and can then distribute that application
around the world in a trusted process. A cryptocurrency called Ether is required for any transaction in
Ethereum and while individuals (both human and machine) in the network interact with that app, the
miners would work in a similar fashion to those within the Bitcoin network in processing of transactions
and validating blocks generating new Ether to be spent.
The interesting part of Ethereum is how it utilizes smart contracts. Smart contracts within this
system are programmatic frameworks that are deployed in much the same fashion a paper contract is
employed; it sets the terms and costs of transactions within a given function or set of functions ranging
from basic monetary transactions to building social network applications and establishing entire DAOs.
This results in a system that persists on the generation and maintenance of smart contracts as opposed to
the limited purpose of cryptocurrency generation via maintenance of transaction states-of-value as found
with Bitcoin. These contracts can interact with other contracts in a completely automated and
autonomous fashion if so desired by the originating user (leading to the condition and structure currently
used for DAOs/DACs). Even though the contracts in and of themselves are immutable (unless drafted
otherwise), they make possible a much more flexible and efficient legal framework to govern autonomous
corporate activity within Ethereum and in future generations of blockchain technology.
In less than a decade, we have moved from a conceptual framework of decentralization and
currency generation within a functioning monetary system that is perpetuated in large part by
autonomous actants within a few cyber geographies to a condition of numerous decentralized
organizations operating without human guidance based on smart contracts and cryptographic rule sets
(Swan, 2015). In view of this shift, we must ask a number of complex questions not previously asked of
Bitcoin. For instance, if we are shifting the dynamic relationship between commodity, value, and money,
then what are the implications of a system in which socially necessary labor time is conducted
autonomously at near 100% efficiency and produces use value without direct continuous human labor?
One could argue, however, that humans maintain and partially produce the physical infrastructure in which
these processes occur. But, does that necessarily imply that humans are the only ones supplying the actual
living labor to produce value via their creation of this system, or does the introduction of a Turing-complete
application via smart contract foreshadow the potential for hyper-reduction of human necessity in value
production found in these new cyber geographies? If the human actants in this system are in fact only
providing what Marx (1976) refers to as dead labor in order to reap the benefits facilitated by the miners
and DAOs/DACs, what are the implications for existing markets and economies? Does this also imply that
these geographies are in large part post-human in nature given the concept of produced “lived” space as
perceived by Lefebvre?
The above elements within the modes of spatial production bring out many items for exploration.
In looking at the historical transformations between absolute spaces into the realm of abstract spaces
(keeping in mind their mental origins), we are faced with the question as to which modes of production
are dominant within the context of the blockchain-based DAO. We can see the evolution from absolute to
abstract through the utilization of communications and computer technologies in these decentralized
networks, but we are seeing multiple parties defining numerous systems in different ways. As the
technologies evolve from the blockchain 1.0 and 2.0 into newer generations in terms of technical
advancements and innovative applications, we start to see groups with different spatial practices conceive
different architectures. Meanwhile, the individuals utilizing these DAOs are experiencing very different
representational spaces within those architectures based in cyberspace and through the potential
expressions of those spaces in human geographies. However, as previously discussed, there are already
very different applications and, in turn, intentions behind the usage of these technologies in cyberspace.
These various agendas expose the contradictions within and between spaces as people attempt to extract
profit, thus leading to conflict and numerous differential spaces.
In order to explore the topics above and to understand how these systems manifest unique
productions of space, I propose three approaches in this endeavor. Each theoretical approach is aligned
with a specific research question, but flexible in their ability to make valuable connections to the others.
Phenomenological description of the modes of spatial production related to Bitcoin and Ethereum exposes
the numerous connections and interactions that form human agents' positions and perspectives towards
the systems, ultimately guiding how they approach their applications. Secondly, notions of dialectical
materialism contextualize the human agents within the mechanisms and structures of the systems as their
evolutionary processes drive the numerous facets of these hybrid spaces and their potential conditions as
spatial fixes within displaced capital crises. Finally, the systems theories of these code/spaces are used to
examine the systems from the machines outward, exploring the systems of Bitcoin and Ethereum as their
design guides the types and forms of human interaction, but how they are also guided by those
interactions in their continued development.
Phenomenology and the Production of Space
A phenomenological approach to the notion of production of space helps describe the conditions
of human agents and systemic actants within the blockchain-driven systems of DAOs/DACs.
Phenomenology is concerned with the individual's uniquely enacted and defined environmental elements
which influence and guide various scales of behavior (Johnston & Sidaway, 2004). In terms of technology,
this methodological approach is highly suitable as it can describe lived experiences of humans with
technology, assist in understanding formations of world view based on those experiences, and the extent
to which these technologies are embedded in the spaces and places of everyday life (Cilesiz, 2011). This
technological problematic is seen in the works of Martin Heidegger, both in his early observations of
human/technology relations as concretely present and/or tangentially flowing through his later work on
technologies' ability to enframe nature as a resource for human exploitation (Hongladarom, 2013). The
strength of such phenomenological approaches can be used not only in the immediate consideration of
human/technology interactions, but in addressing the conditions of Bitcoin and Ethereum within existent
systems of capitalism, globalization, science and technology (Obi-Okogbuo, 2015). Doreen Massey (1995)
was quick to point out the dualisms within Western thought between humans and technology as
influential in structuring the forms and practices of social relations. This parallels the sentiments of
Francois-Regis Puyou and Eric Fay's (2015) application of Michel Henry's phenomenology of life
(intentionality and affectivity) in that a laborer's reliance on systems of abstract representations results in
aversion of ethical considerations for those who their action effects via their use of information
technologies. As a result, this methodology also aids in the development of ethical considerations within
and surrounding usages of blockchain technologies.
There have been numerous considerations in the selection of phenomenology for the purpose of
this study. A critique levied by Dominic Smith (2015) pleads for a more transcendental, empiricist
postphenomenology for technological inquiry in line with the works of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida,
and Gilles Deleuze. Smith (2015) challenges the context of language and the post-structuralist thinkers
themselves to move towards a more transcendentally focused phenomenology of technological
philosophy. Peter-Paul Verbeek (2008), focusing partially on limits in Don Ihde's analysis of
human/technology relations (both mentioned by Smith in his critique of post-structuralism), explores
varying blends of human/technology spatial relations within what he terms “cyborg intentionality”.
Verbeek's (2008) spectral trilogy aims to re-conceptualize the phenomenon of human intentionality.
Moreover, Sana Murrani (2011) challenges phenomenological and cybernetic approaches in exploring the
conditions of being and becoming in architectural discourse. This approach takes from
postphenomenology and technoscience (Obi-Okogbuo, 2015) in the development of the discourse which
addresses the relationship between humanism, mechanism, and technology.
Lefebvre's (1991) Production of Space is foundational in terms of these modes of thought, the
systems, their constituent parts, and the human/technology paradigms that are the foci of this research.
Given the above considerations of phenomenology and technology, the application of the
phenomenological approach will take the human process of space/place construction and apply it to the
realm of the human/technology interactions, dialectics, and systematics. As briefly explored above, the
manner in which humans have conceptualized technologies and then situated themselves in relation to
them has parallels in how Lefebvre (1991) explores the evolution of abstract spaces within the perceived,
conceived, and lived experiences of humans and their environments. These interactions are in turn guided
by numerous external actants, such as capitalist entities and cryptocurrency markets, that have unknown
effects on both humans and technologies. Therefore, the study of DAOs in relation to human interactions
seeks to expand on the latest evolution of space/time relations within technological regimes.
As already mentioned, Doreen Massey (2005) adds significant depth to how place is defined by
Lefebvre's space, deepening the rigor of my exploratory framework. This is twofold in its relevance. First,
Massey addresses many issues surrounding spatial conceptualization and production resulting from
historical reductions of space to time and in doing so, promotes place as locations (Agnew, 2011) of
change. Secondly, through her critiques of post-structuralist concepts of space, she develops a framework
of mutual constitution between the social and spatial which will assist in forming a phenomenological
approach to understanding how humans and technology affect one another to these ends.
Dialectical Materialism and Cryptocurrencies
Dialectical materialism, which is the method of understanding processes of motion, change, and
transformation formulated around relations (Harvey, 2010), is a valuable framework for understanding
how wide-ranging social, political, and economic processes influence the modes of spatial production in
the realm of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. Most of the work in the field of dialectical
materialism has focused on capitalism and its modes of production (Marx, 1976). However, since the
1970s, this method has been applied and critiqued in numerous ways making a rich and complex
methodology for this initial research path.
There were those, such as Jean Baudrillard (Zander, 2014), who fell away from this school of
thinking in terms of symbolic exchange value theory (adding sign value and symbolic value) and later
productivism, but the diachronic shift in post-structuralist tones are still heavily dependent on Karl Marx's
(1976) methods. Works such as Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis' From Economics Imperialism to
Freakanomics point to the strengths of dialectical social methods in explaining the place of labor value
theory in a new, interdisciplinary political economy (McNally, 2012). However, both Par-Ola Zander (2014)
and David McNally (2012) point to the historical origins of the dialectical method in consideration of its
modern iterations. David Harvey (2012) expounds upon the methodological restrictions of Marx's political
economy in terms of relations to nature, motions of capital, distribution/exchange, and consumption;
exposing its ultimate inability to constitute a total theory of capitalist modes of production. Moreover,
Moore (2001) frames labor theory of value within the relations between society and nature resulting in
metabolic rifts as a consequence of the inherent contradictions of the capital/labor dialectic. Lefebvre was
aware of such issues in his assertions (though Eurocentric as they were) on alienation, dialectical humanist
Marxism, and transcendent political economy (Kipfer & Goonewardena, 2013).
Similar points of issue with the dialectical approach have been raised by J.K. Gibson-Graham (1996) and
Doreen Massey (1994) within gender studies. These critiques may further stem from the Hegelian origins
of Marx's dialectic in that Hegel strove toward meta-understandings of history. G. W. F. Hegel, in addition
to Marx's trans-historical class, were later attacked by Foucault who proposed a regime of historical truth
focused on power/knowledge relations (Dorfman, 2005). However, Ben Dorfman (2005) pointed out that
Foucault's post-structuralist and post-modernist approaches, among many other thinkers of that era, may
be giving way in the recent rise of globalization studies. Pursuant to my research foci, these debates must
be taken into account when applying the various forms of dialectical materialism to the study of
cryptocurrencies and their associated cyberspace economies.
At the turn of the 21st century, the dialectical materialism of Marx has a new paradigm to consider:
digital capitalism and cryptocurrencies. This goes beyond the digitization of existing fiat and credit
currencies into the realm of community regulated, decentralized consensus-based currency systems that
challenge existing economic institutions (Bek-Thomsen, Jacobsen, Christiansen, Thorup, 2014). Previous
to this advent, studies of cryptocurrencies and goods were considered and conducted via virtual world
economies such as Second Life (Ke, Ba, Stallaert, Zhang, 2012; Thompson, 2009). Aside from the modes of
production within these virtual worlds, the more salient points of conjecture surrounded their impacts
and intrusions into real-world economies such as regulatory issues of virtual world commodities
(Thompson, 2009). Once Bitcoin established itself as a “reliable” currency (a digital currency that could
sustain and/or exceed parity with the US dollar first achieved by Bitcoin in February of 2011), the same
regulatory issues were compounded as they were used for any number of purposes, including purchase
and trade of illicit commodities as listed by numerous governments and various international
organizations. Even after the genesis of Bitcoin in 2009, US regulators still have no solid plan for
cryptocurrencies. This is an extension of neo-class struggles between the vectoralist capitalist class who
wish to control the new means of abstract intellectual production and the hacker working class whose
labor, works, and information are commodified, capitalized, and ultimately controlled via state regulation
(e.g., intellectual property and copyright laws) (Wark, 2004). Hayles (2005) explores these dialectical
interactions in rethinking the relations between computation and embodiment as crucial to how the
human world is and will be moving forward.
One way to understand these emerging technologies is through the work of Ash Amin and Nigel
Thrift (2007). Their proposition of “cultural-economy” not only makes key points about the spatial
problematics of socio-economic geographies (e.g., passion, morals, soft knowledge, power, trust), they
present these problematics as parts of a larger multiplicity of hybrid entanglements (Amin & Thrift, 2007).
Though their goal was to implicate the transforming, urban perspective of this hybrid approach, they
touched on the role of participant positionality in these cultural-economic systems. In terms of
globalization, space/time still matters as to the position of the individual to the global economy (Shepard,
2002) that in many ways spurred the development of numerous cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based
systems. Vili Lehdonvirta (2010) suggests that the social aspects of ICTs are driving new forms of material
culture in which post-material ethics manifest themselves in virtual spaces. However, he points out that
these propositions ignore the potential for new forms of inequality and exclusion, dependency on offline
identity and institutions, and the perception of cyberspace as open (Lehdonvirta, 2010). This can be best
understood through Galloway’s (2004) exploration of the real, yet abstract, nature of the Internet through
its protocols and political economy; decentralization within centralized hierarchies of control systems.
These potential aspects of cryptocurrencies are as promising as they are troubling. Even before
the advent of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies, the concerns surrounding digitization of material
currencies and properties were plagued by the issue of geographic ignorance of these spaces and the
implications of their productions (Kobrin, 1997). This may have had something to do with delineating
geographic space and cyberspace as if they were completely different entities. The lack of understanding
and defining the “where” of these spaces ultimately led to the assumption that these digitizing systems
are space-less and reinforces the perception that classical forms of regulation and territorialization will
shape these digital spaces as was done in human geographies.
Therefore, the application of dialectical materialism is critical to exploring how cryptocurrencies,
decentralized applications, and DAOs actually function and produce space. Christian Fuchs and Nick
Dyer-Witheford (2013) outline several ways in which Marx's works are relevant in the study of the Internet
and to which I would add, cyberspace writ-large. They make mention of Marx's dialectic being used to
explore the connections between Internet and society, processes of technologies, and the transition from
a structuralist-functionalist dialectic to a humanistic dialectic as set in the antagonism between productive
forces and relations of production (Fuchs & Dyer-Witheford, 2013). To this end, we must expand the scope
of dialectics to blockchain technologies in order to assure their development is pursued keeping in mind
the external, systematic influences that neoliberal globalization places upon them.
Systems Theory, Code/Space, and Network Societies
For the purpose of this study, the notion of “systems” is a key focal point in examination of the
relational and representational spaces of DAOs and blockchain technologies. In doing so, we must be
careful to understand the humanistic origins and uses of these systems for two initial reasons. Firstly, we
must understand how human agency co-evolves with these systems and their actants. Secondly, through
the understanding of the human/system coeval, we will gain a better understanding of the modes of spatial
production that exists between and within each facet of these blockchain systems.
One initial consideration is the concept of knowledge/power in cyberspace (Rowland, Rice, Shenoi,
2014). Unfortunately, there is not a large corpus of literature that is truly applicable to my study and the
literature that is available fails to represent a balanced or complete picture of power dynamics within the
spaces of human/ICT relations. Jill Rowland's thoughts on cyberspace centered around the common and
largely false dichotomy of nation-state and non-state actors' usage of cyberspace are relevant, but they
fail to fully demonstrate what the systems' spaces actually are in terms of knowledge/power dynamics
while projecting non-state actors in a mostly negative light (keeping in mind that the vast majority of actors
and actants in cyberspace are non-state). Similar tones and assertions can be found in the context of
'cyber-crime' (Keene, 2012), as if these activities were unique to digital spaces and that legislation would
have any more effect on them than in the 'real world'. However, points made by Rowland et al. (2014) on
the growing dominance of multinational corporations and the opportunity for improved geo-economic
equality are points that can be agreed upon. Inclusion of human geographic understandings would have
made the above argument much more applicable to this study in terms of understanding a more
heterogeneous, multi-scalar paradigm of spatial relations (Mauro, 2009). Moreover, such understandings
must not be oversimplified via systematization within agent-based models that seek to solidify the nature
between humans and systems (An, 2012). Smith and Kollock (1999) are quick to point out that economies
of interaction and communication in cyberspace are far different than their inperson equivalents,
suggesting strong implications for new forms of knowledge/power dynamics.
Systems theory has been used as a point of discussion and contention between physical and
human geographers and has largely failed to establish a bridging effect on points of system definition,
process understanding, borders, 'environmental' understanding, and the resulting epistemology (Egner &
von Elverfeldt). Heike Egner and Kirsten von Elverfeldt (2009) recommend a resolution of this through
abandoning determinism, observing system self-delineation, and pursuing genuine dialogue for a common
vocabulary. Trevor Barnes (2009) also proposed a commensurate stance between quantitative and critical
geographies, calling on mathematical affinities in Marx's work and resolution through trading zones of
seemingly incongruous societal exchanges of value, meaning, objects, and language. Ron Buliung (2011)
asserts the utility of ICT systems facilitates a hypermobility of exchanges, such as those Barnes pointed to,
for people and place (yet his point on 'extinction of experience' counters his assertion on digital,
metageographic production).
The above points draw out the still on-going struggle within all disciplines' understandings of
cyberspace as that which is 'cyber' and that which is simultaneously spatial. In many ways, the discourses
seeking resolution between human and physical geographers are much the same arguments I will explore
in my discourse between human and cyber geographies. The physical, human, and cyber are all inextricably
linked and through a deeper understanding of their inter- and intra-relations, their symmetries and supra-
structures will dynamically emerge through continued engagement.
Code/Space
Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge (2014) examine the relationships between code in its many forms
and social spaces. Code/space is the condition in which software and spaces of everyday life produce one
another; code/space is neither deterministic nor universal and therefore is inconsistently transduced
(Kitchin & Dodge, 2014). Kitchin and Dodge (2014) define four levels at which code is part of everyday life
(coded objects, coded infrastructures, coded processes, code assemblages) in order to explore software's
modulation of space via transductive processes (these coded parts have the potential to produce collective
life with significant and growing levels of autonomy). Software analysis for this course of research would
ultimately focus on the origins of code within blockchain technologies, how they effect DAOs, and how
these technologies and software affect the social spaces of everyday life (this is in line with Kitchin &
Dodge's proposed software studies).
Software, though lacking materiality, functions as an actant within produced economic, political,
and cultural spaces (Kitchin & Dodge, 2014). I will argue that software does meet Lefebvre's (1991)
definition of matériel. Code as a language bridges the divide in communication between humans and
machines within spaces difficult for humans to comprehend as it constructs a way of perceiving,
conceiving, and acting in the world while shaping those spaces through use of its logical structures (Kitchin
& Dodge, 2014). Code as a product is a social object within a collaborative effort and, though inherently
unpredictable in its conception, manifests as a complex, layered abstraction of numerous discursive
relations (Kitchin & Dodge, 2014). Most interestingly for the purpose of this study, code as a process sees
software abstracting the humans spaces of the world which in turn starts to follow the regimes embedded
in those very abstractions. This aspect of technicity (Kitchin & Dodge, 2014) mediates, augments, and
expands everyday life as humans further implement these technologies as coeval in their lives.
Much like Doreen Massey (2005), Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge (2014) argue these
softwareeffected social relations are inherently spatial and temporal. In this exploration of the history of
space, they draw out Thrift's nonrepresentational theory (2008) in which humans' spatial practices are
largely instinctive and subconscious, being aided by other actants (such as machines and/or software); this
is with the ultimate goal of understanding how software produces space automatically as part of a partial
solution to a persistent relational problem (Kitchin & Dodge, 2014). The form, function, structure, and
purpose of code/spaces are shaped through software-based activity in which the code is the essential
actant, realizing its technicity through the transduction of humans via technologies (Kitchin & Dodge,
2014). In turn, relational problems in these spaces are resolved through software's' condition as a catalyst
in the process of modulation between humans and technology (Kitchin & Dodge, 2014).
The above concepts are elaborated in Kitchin and Dodge's (2014) examination of automated
management as software has become a primary means by which society and individuals are surveyed,
disciplined, and ultimately controlled via technological means. Despite these seemingly insurmountable
conditions, there are still those who use software and technologies to create and empower themselves;
this is a key aspect in my study of DAOs/DACs. Their sense of everywhere, the concept that code will affect
almost all facets of our lives through the availability of computational resources, is examined through the
developmental regimes of empowerment, securitization, and sousveillance (the recording of logs for all
surveillance in everyday life) (Kitchin & Dodge, 2014).
Kitchin and Dodge (2014) focus on the software's transduction of space/time via its ability to
transfer the means of labor and functionality within human geographies into coded spaces. Though
extremely relevant in terms of establishing software studies as a critical focus area within geography, they
fail to fully explore how this fits in to a much larger, multi-scalar, conceptualization of cyber geography
(only brief mentions are made to Manuel Castells or communication infrastructure as the ecosystem
within which ICTs produce their own particular geographies, which in turn reproduce themselves). Their
proposed taxonomies, and ontologies, of software are extremely useful as a starting point from which to
understand more advanced cyber actants, such as the narrow (or weak) artificial intelligence found in
Ethereum. I depart from their assumptions that code is unlike spoken language as this is an unnecessary
restriction in understanding how new spatial productions can come into existence and persist past
human/code transduction. From my perspective, and as I will explore, communicating to a machine is
similar in many ways to talking to a young child or in the case of Don Knuth (1974), an art of poetry or
prose. Their mention of collective life via their taxonomy of coded objects could be a starting point for this
exploration as could their dialectics regarding the embodied relationship between people, other people,
and code, drawing out the nature of these spaces' inconsistent productions.
In this, coded assemblage transitions, the negotiation of spatial production within these coded
spaces, the positional states of code/space experience, the human/code scalar contexts, temporal aspects,
and the exploitable flaws in these systems are means by which to explore not just how new spaces are
produced, but how new geographies derived from this exploration can lead to deeper insights about the
spaces in which the code lives. More specifically, Kitchin and Dodge's (2014) dialogue on code and money
is applicable to how DAOs are extensions to their ideas. However, DAOs demonstrate an evolution beyond
their contextual discourse in that their points regarding virtual abstraction of money and its anonymity are
countered through this new means of decentralized market and cryptographic currency, begging the
question as to which systems are actually more secure. In all, Kitchin and Dodge's approach should serve
as an invaluable starting point in my examination of the underlying systems constituting DAOs/DACs and
the broader blockchain technologies.
Network society
There has been extensive literature generated on numerous aspects of network society. According
to Manuel Castells (2004), network society is the arrangement of humans and their social structures within
ICT networks, affecting their numerous relations through culturally coded communication systems and
structures. The networks are composed of interconnected nodes, representative of various intersections,
in which their value varies based on the volume of significant intersections it can efficiently process
(Castells, 2004). These nodes must be necessary for the networks functionality (must aid in the network's
primary purpose) and if they become redundant or useless, the non-centralized network will shed the
node during its processes of reconfiguration (Castells, 2004). In looking at communications networks,
nodes act as points of confluence for flows of messages and in doing so, forms patterns in space and time
(Castells, 2004). Networks process these flows based on their defined programs (code that assigns criteria
for function, valuation, and success/failure) which ultimately affects their outcomes as well as how they
compete with other networks through increased efficiency in cooperative capacity with other networks
(the more connected a network is with other networks combines with its ability to efficiently process flows
increases its overall value) (Castells, 2004).
Networks operate based on the logic of inclusion/exclusion (binary in its basic nature) and within
the networks, distances between nodes are considered close to zero as their ability to share flows
intranetwork are facilitated at high efficiencies (distances are essentially considered infinite unless there
is external access and/or the network's program is changed) (Castells, 2004). These networks
selfreconfigure numerous complexities to ensure flexibility, sustained relevant purpose, and efficient
execution within the operating environment (Castells, 2004).
Castells (2004) then introduces his concepts of “informationalism” (technological paradigm as the
material basis for societies in the 21st century) through his exploration of its two aspects; one of which is
society as built around and embedded in ICTs. The modern ICT infrastructure allows for selfexpanding
processes and communication, restructuring within digitization and communications, and distributed
flexibility through interactive networks (Castells, 2004). This leads Castells (2004) to purport that all digital
networks are global; lacking boundaries as they reconfigure themselves and the affected social structures
within a global society. However, hierarchy still exists between networks across the planet and will exhibit
domination within that grid of multidimensional, societal networks (Castells, 2004). This begs the question
as to how power is known and experienced in these networks via control which ultimately depends on
how one interacts with the network (programmers and switchers based on their position in the networks
exercise power within network society) (Castells, 2004). However, Castells (2001) must now answer as to
how space of flows and timeless time function in terms of his network society. Space of flows refers to the
possibility of simultaneity via time sharing sans contiguity, inhabiting the place of nodes and networks
through their electronic ICT infrastructures and the flows of information while dissolving time and resulting
in an ephemeral structure in which being cancels becoming (these spaces of places are interrelated
through their practices, purposes, localities) (Castells, 2004).
Initially, Castells' conceptions might help to explore the means by which Doreen Massey's (2005)
constant construction of space occurs within the geographies of DAOs/DACs. However, Castells promotes
the idea of human abstraction solely as a means by which to facilitate communication, social organization,
and to overcome the friction of distance from within the infrastructural barriers and dependencies of ICTs.
Where Castells abstracts humans and other actants to nodes within his terms of social space (to which I
would partially agree), I also see this process as a way to utilize networks and actant abstraction to create
cyberspaces that are also uniquely social within their own political economies via a multiplicity of their
perceived 'natural' states. This is facilitated both through aggregate reconstitution of personal space/time
conceptualizations of self-propagated abstractions using programs, both autonomous and human
dependent, in an effort to establish social space via the transduction of place.
The flows become important when considering how these different abstractions interact with and
within the spaces of the DAOs/DACs and how value production via labor time is constituted within human
and cyber geographies via these network societies. Nigel Thrift’s (2008) views on flows is divergent from
Castells (2004) as his flows of subjectivity, with increasing numbers of actants and their activities, cannot
be seen as merely transactions between nodes as these acts in and of themselves exhibit manifestations
of empowerment. These hybrid assemblages (collections of puddles and flows) give all components of the
network equal consideration as these interactions, through their mutual consideration, generate new
forms of power (Thrift, 2008). Thrift (2004) sees how these technologies are changing everyday life
through the re-conceptualization of global models, inscribed in code, but does so through biological terms
(viewing of code and technologies as companion animals) and through those entities' potential agency
while drawing out the question of ethics in the process.
However, I find the use of social and spatial network analysis, and by extension graph theory,
restrictive in its effectiveness to expose the totality of network activity and social exchanges, human or
not, as it limits the extent to which the qualitative context of social space is presented and explored
through the concepts of Henri Lefebvre (1991) and how it truly manifests itself within experienced
space/time as presented by David Harvey (1990). To that extent, looking at nodal structures as indicators
of true spatial conditions is questionable outside a very explicit set of environmental definitions. It is
probably more appropriate to see nodes as metaphors for understanding how the processes of spatial
production takes hold as in the case of the decentralized nature of DAOs/DACs. Castells’ (2004, p. 39)
mention of a “culture of protocols of communication” does lend itself to the possibility of extending the
above ideas to a more dynamic perspective of DAOs and its actants. This still leaves much to be expanded
upon in regards to the true dialectic of spatial production in human geographies and the complimentary
spatial production within cyberspace.
Stephen Graham (1998; 1999; 2002a; 2002b) is quick to point out that the above processes of
Castells' “network society” are occurring in very uneven ways. In fact, his critique is an indictment of the
“geography erasing” network infrastructures as their true implementation is yet another means by which
to create new borders in cyberspace; the very ones they purport to be erasing between nation-states and
cultures while simultaneously exploiting both their distinctions and similarities. This unevenness, both in
space and place, is seconded by Gustavo Buzai (2013) in his examination of the exclusionary and restrictive
geographies of cyberspace in Latin America. Despite the aim to produce a decentralized space by which to
share research and knowledge via the Internet (and other cyberspaces), the structures and institutes
constituting the Internet have become very centralized both in terms of infrastructure and control
mechanisms (Buzai, 2013; Froomkin, 2000) (e.g., ICANN). Borders can also be seen in the work of Michael
Collyer (2003) on the effects of online websites on offline national and migrant identities and the
superimposition of those borders onto cyberspace as well as the work of Dean Riddlesden and Alex
Singleton (2014) on the disparities in access and performance of broadband access and connectivity.
Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift (2007) proposed further examination of the underlying 'invisible'
mechanisms driving and defining societies (cyberspaces' materially embedded and constantly evolving
condition as one of the key aspects of this analysis). However, Thrift (1996) was keenly aware of the
historical precedent of technological determinism and what that might mean for cyberspace in the 21st
century. Emmanouil Tranos and Peter Nijkamp (2013) posited that physical distances and relational
proximity guided the formation of cyberspaces infrastructure and this dynamic can be observed in terms
of understanding data and information storage within the larger cyberspace (Gorman & Malecki, 2002).
Reactions to this understanding, both technically and socio-spatially, have been questionable legislation
regarding cyberspace as property via metaphorical 'place' (Lemley, 2003) and further concerns over
individual data privacy (Curry, 1997) within the software/hardware layers of the underlying networks.
Researchers and academics have attempted to situate how these technologies affect individuals and
societies through studies of ICT dependencies in scientific research (Barjak, Eccles, Meyer, Schroeder,
Robinson, 2013) and geographic information technologies as conditioned for practical applications for
society (Sheppard, Couclelis, Graham, Harrington, Onsrud, 1999). Marshall Van Alstyne and Nathaniel
Bulkley (2004) suggest that the resultant information generated through such observable changes would
actually aid more than just research efforts, but shift productivity in society as a whole. Given the rapid
development of ICT infrastructure and the more recent formulation of cyberspace as a concept (Adams &
Warf, 1997), it is of the utmost importance to understand key aspects of cyberspace, both from its internal
functionality and external influences, so that DAOs and their blockchain technologies are fully
comprehended as unique, evolving systems within larger, dynamic architectures. The ideas and conjecture
surrounding Castells' network society will guide the considerations of how those systems are
contextualized in this research.
Lefebvre (1991) suggests these spatial relations can be exposed through examination of form,
function, and structure within these unique spaces. In looking at the production of space and DAOs, these
points must be addressed and resolved in order to move forward. It is true that the world is becoming
more connected through cyberspaces, and in turn cyber geographies, which facilitate amazing leaps in
space/time compression for those with no previous access to the “network society”. However, this
“society”, its infrastructures, concentrations, and the ultimate utility through spatial penetration is called
into question when it is controlled by those with the money to invest in them which is driven by much
more than erasing the friction of distance for human interactions or providing open access to what is now
becoming the global store for all human knowledge. These networks and cyberspaces are in many ways
still dominated by geopolitics and geo-economics that have existed long before their conceptions and in
this lies the call for alternatives through alternative cyberspaces. Forms of these struggles, as framed by
McKenzie Wark (2004), can be seen in the persistent net neutrality contestations between those who own
the infrastructure and those who use it in the dynamic complexities of everyday life (reminiscent of the
dynamics between Marx's means of production and the productive forces) (Harvey, 2010; Marx, 1976).
The question then becomes how to develop a plethora of alternatives within these 'alternative' spaces
that present viable options to existing and persistent regimes of control and power while resisting the
tendency to manifest territoriality within cyberspace. Perhaps part of the solution lies in the egalitarian
forms, functions, and structures of blockchain technologies.
CHAPTER THREE:
RESULTS
Open Conversations and Interviews
The period of data collection for interviews and open conversations began 1 June, 2016 and ended
23 September, 2016. The proposed goal of conducting 20 semi-structured interviews and 30 open
conversations fell short, resulting in five semi-structured interviews and 16 open conversations.
Throughout this period, introductory and follow-up emails were sent to desired interviewees. Of the 20,
four responded to opt-out of the study and one quit responding to my requests for an interview. The five
participants who volunteered for the interviews were quite responsive and extremely forthcoming with
their time. In the course of the interviews, responses stayed within the core intent of the IRB approved
questions, though I did allow them to interpret some of the language within the questions as their situated
perceptions as developers, investors, and/or users would lead to responses that were contextually relevant
to the intent and rationale for this study. There were some early technical issues with the audio/video
hardware used in the video chat medium, but these were resolved by the third interview through the use
of a better microphone. Additionally for participants who were outside of the USA and in locations with
ICT connectivity issues, quality of the interview sessions did vary resulting in repetition of questions and
answers to ensure the correct understanding was established. These technical issues had no noticeable
effects on the participants or their responses.
The response to requests for open conversations was much better throughout the collection
process in terms of willingness to participate. These requests were posted in the Ethereum and Bitcoin
subreddits and was promoted weekly in IRC, Skype, Slack, and Gitter channels frequented by these
respective communities. Ultimately, 16 participants completed the open conversation process out of the
23 people who confirmed that they would like to participate. The abbreviated format of the conversations
followed the submitted questions for this study, but were presented in a fashion that expedited their
responses to a much smaller time frame. Though the requested time of 10-15 minutes was stated as being
more preferable to the 30-45 minutes requested for the semi-structured interviews, both semi-structured
interviews and open conversations ended up lasting approximately 45-60 minutes from beginning to end
of the call (this included reading, obtaining, and clarifying the verbal consent required for the study).
From the 21 participants in this study, 17 were from various locations in the USA, 2 were from
Canada, 1 was from Southeast Asia, and 1 was from Europe. This distribution may be related to the
materials and notices for the open conversations being only in English as well as how Reddit provides
content regionally based on the IP address of the person accessing the website. Within both the Bitcoin
and Ethereum spaces, 13 identified as developers (2 of whom also saw themselves as investors) and 8
identified as investors (only one of whom stated s/he actively attempted to use a cryptocurrency (e.g.,
Bitcoin)). 3 of the 21 participants stated they tried to use Bitcoin and Ethereum, but only as a secondary
consideration to their initial developer and/or investor status. Additionally, only 1 of the 21 participants
was a women.
LibreQDA (Muñoz Justicia, Bria, Alonzo Fulchi, Freitas, 2013) was used in the course of coding the
interview and open conversation data which is a free, open-source, qualitative data analysis (QDA)
program developed in Python. In the course of selecting QDA software, I wanted to ensure anyone who
wished to validate my research could do so using the same tools at the lowest cost possible. This software
was free to download and build from source; the developers of this project were easy to get a hold of and
were very eager to assist me in setting up, using, and contributing to the project. There were some issues
related to older Python libraries when building this program from its source code, but the process did not
take more than an hour. Once LibreQDA was built and functional within a virtual Python 2.7 environment,
I proceeded to code and annotate the semi-structured interviews and open conversations with 28 unique
thematic codes which I then analyzed through 9 complex Boolean queries related to the topics and
question with the interview questions (see Appendix A).
History with Blockchain Technologies
Current employment & education background
Of the 21 participants, employment backgrounds varied greatly. Investors generally had business
backgrounds or business mixed with some technical education. Developers generally had some sort of
technical training related to ICTs. Thirty eight percent of the people interviewed were currently involved
with Bitcoin, Ethereum, or some variant blockchain technology as their primary source of income. Their
educational backgrounds also varied from high school diplomas to graduate degrees. Due to the relatively
new and rapidly diversifying nature of variant blockchain technologies, many people learned about them
while directly or indirectly involved with a blockchain project. Education and employment were stated as
a minor part of the reason participants decided to consider blockchain technologies in terms of
investment, development, or other utility.
Path to Bitcoin/Ethereum and initial goals
Amongst all participants was a mix, to varying degrees, of financial and social reasons for being
involved with blockchain technologies. Some were more motivated by the social justice implication of
using these technologies while some saw it as a framework by which to build other systems. The
participants who saw themselves more as investors were more prone to use blockchain technologies, via
their cryptocurrencies, as a way to diversify their investment portfolios. Though the developer and user
sentiments also reflected this, it was to a far lesser degree then those pursuing these technologies solely
for investment. Developers saw these technologies as a new form of more egalitarian infrastructure, but
were mixed in terms of approaching these systems as revolutionary while also seeing them as merely
another form of technology they have to master for future employment.
Some participants mentioned issues related to technological divides when getting started in these
spaces. This entailed access to blockchain and cryptocurrency-based systems both technologically and
geographically. It also related to cultural acceptance of such technologies as viable concepts for both
investment and everyday use. Many saw the applications being developed in these spaces as immature
and not to the point where the general public could easily use them which added to their interests in and
involvement with these technologies. Others were interested in issues of regulation potentially associated
with these technologies and cryptocurrencies. One participant saw drastic differences in how US and
EUbased entities regulated these technologies from both a business and currency-based perspective.
Other participants were more broadly concerned about the potential abstraction and legal restriction of
proliferating these technologies via their currency-based functionalities. Some participants pointed to
historical precedents of fiat currency manipulation by governments as reason for advancing a libertarian
approach to these blockchain systems. This wariness towards potentially impending regulatory measures
was related to perceived restrictions on individual economic freedoms, the security of economics assets,
and the larger security of social freedoms related to these ICT-based systems.
For participants more focused on blockchain 2.0 technologies, the smart contract and DAO are
largely still a developmental goal instead of a distinctive reality as promoted by many blockchain
specialists. Investors saw smart contracts and DAOs as critical pieces of infrastructure in the evolution of
the markets related to earlier cryptocurrencies as they move beyond their initial economic applications;
they were more than willing to invest in related projects as these were seen as inevitable trajectories for
these technologies. In terms of those trajectories related to smart contracts and DAOs, developers were
in agreement. The expanded functionality of smart contracts and DAOs were stated as providing numerous
use cases previously impossible, allowing for increase in user opportunity and utilization. However, many
participants agree that much of the continued success of DAOs, smart contracts and blockchain
technologies also depends heavily on solving long-standing issues of scalability for various aspects of
systems’ infrastructures (this is in terms of the software, hardware, and human dynamics of these
systems).
Within the many paths participants took towards their current blockchain-based projects are the
underlying and dominant social spaces. For investors, a number of meetings and conferences were
credited for their historical path within blockchain spaces. Every participant found out about
blockchainrelated technologies through another human being that they knew or had talked to at a social
event. They also often credit these social spaces for the massive growth of both Bitcoin and Ethereum.
These social spaces are tied to political and/or economic goals. For developers, social spaces, whether in-
person or digitally facilitated, are part of the trade. Collaboration in these spaces is expected in order to
ensure development is coordinated based on the use cases for a given project. These are largely also
connected to the same spaces attended by both investors and potential users interested in these
technologies.
These interactions also led to many of the participants’ involvement in activities centered on
code/space related issues. Many participants saw political, economic, and social spaces being effected by
these technologies (the context for changing the political and economic were grounded in the dialogues
established in social spaces). They saw augmentation of political spaces being forwarded through issues
centered on governance, decentralization, immutability, and censorship-resistance which ultimately
related to issues of freedom (both economically and socially), security, and deregulation (economically via
politics). Due to the proofs-of-process that had been established in the development of blockchain 1.0 into
the era of blockchain 2.0, participants largely saw the realm of blockchain 3.0 being the phase of
movement beyond the economic decentralized application into the political and social realms.
Current Involvement with Blockchain Technologies
Current involvements, relations, and considerations
Many of the participants’ primary means of income was through labor on or for blockchain
technologies. While some people trade on the currencies, most are developing various systems, either in
terms of businesses or software frameworks. They are paid with a varying amounts of equity, digital
currency, and cryptocurrency depending on the particular relationship or project. Though some are
developing and consulting on these technologies by themselves, most are working with groups that assist
in supporting the development of the software/hardware/business in addition to promoting the concepts
and systems' growth. In the course of the interviews, participants would often mention or recommend
talking to other key figures in related communities of developers and investors that they knew personally
or through conferences/business networking. These relations would often be those that supported a
certain type of development or investment to which they themselves adhered.
Their ethical considerations also varied broadly. Investors would not consider engaging with
activities that were traditionally seen as illegal within the context of national and international laws. The
developers and users were a bit more open in discussing how these technologies should be used to
challenge current paradigms of control and access even if that disruption was perceived to be illegal by
their respective legal systems. In terms of regulation, some participants did see a need to have reputation
systems and legal integration in place to some extent for these systems in order to ensure some form of
recourse for people with significant holding in these systems. However, this often comes into conflict with
their liberal economic sentiments that are often regulatory-adverse. In terms of security, most participants
saw the liquid nature of cryptocurrencies as a plus, especially in terms of regulations surrounding taxes,
tariffs, and international portability/fungibility. However, most people with cryptocurrency assets also
have them as part of a diversified portfolio of other investments (such as gold, land, and other properties).
A few participants pointed to the proliferation of exchanges for cryptocurrencies as symptomatic of this
tendency to play cryptocurrency markets like other markets (e.g, speculation, flash trading, etc.).
Participants did see varying degrees of the technical divide. Those who had more exposure to
development of these technologies saw these systems as easier to use and to expand, but all agreed that
these systems are largely not user friendly despite the large leaps made in accessibility and user interfaces.
Both investors and developers are focused on promoting these technologies to non-technical audiences;
this extends to those who cannot run or access physical infrastructures (e.g., mining hardware,
computational resources). Bridging this divide largely depends on solving issues of scalability, which all
participants agreed was the primary requirement for all developers and were optimistic that this could be
accomplished. It was also stated that many developers and investors are coming into these spaces with a
focus on blockchain 2.0 and 3.0 applications. These participants and others are being compensated to
build the requisite infrastructure that boosts the utility and ultimate productivity of a given blockchain
framework (e.g., development of key software, investment towards development, maintenance of existing
infrastructure). However, there is still the persistent concern regarding the implications surrounding proof-
of-work for people entering blockchain spaces.
All participants are heavily engaged in persistent contact with their social circles. Developers
collaborate and socialize largely through the use of chat rooms and forums. Investors are largely the same
way with an increased emphasis to meet in person, often at conferences or periodic community meetings.
Within these spaces, participants often suggested that these provide a forum for persistent project
funding. There is often a pressure for developers to not only develop towards a use case, but to also
develop towards a viable product that could be commodified for sale (e.g., a proprietary derivative product
from an appropriately licensed open-source project, enterprise service contract for an open-source
projects, supporting applications for an open-source project). The fervor for this kind of social space is
often compared to the early days of the modern Internet. However, in terms of these code/spaces,
developers are still perceived as the dominant party in guiding the technologies’ evolutions and the
resultant relations to infrastructure and varying scales of social space.
Politically, there is still a large focus on how government regulation could affect the development
and evolution of these technologies. Overall, the concern is directed at the currency aspect of the system
as investment. Additionally, there is the related concern of business development via compensation for
developers and users and return on investment for investors. All participants suggested that user-focused
applications are becoming more common and as true users of these systems increase, so will the
applications accompanying political force. However, all participants have stated that there are no great or
revolutionary user applications currently available; applications are still largely developer and
investorcentric. The overarching sentiment across all participants is that these systems should be used to
help people. However, the definitions and context of help varied from case to case, largely depending on
their position as a developer or investor and their political, economic, and/or social perspectives.
Exposure to smart contract and DAO concepts
All participants were aware of smart contract and DAO/DAC concepts and were eager to see where
they would go in the near future. Developers were far more optimistic about the implication whereas the
investors were a bit more apprehensive about such systems where loopholes could be found and
exploited, ultimately draining their assets and collapsing the system (Mt. Gox and theDAO hackwere
mentioned in reference to these security concerns). All agreed that this specific form of the blockchain
implementation needed to be researched and developed much more before it actually meets the current
expectations and market hype. There are an increasing number of social spaces that are emerging to
support both the development and investment aspect of smart contracts and DAOs. However, there are
still concerns about the viability of these frameworks as they currently stand and their legality within
current jurisdictions around the world. A few of the participants are actively involved in developing a DAO
at this time and agreed with the above considerations in the course of their work. As mentioned before,
many of these projects are key infrastructural pieces related to larger blockchain frameworks, but
participants did point to a few user-level projects currently under development. In both cases, investors
are extremely eager to support and invest in these projects (often opting for smart contract and DAO-
based projects over more traditional alt-coin, cryptocurrency-based investments).
Future Plans and Predictions
Areas of impact
Many of the participants saw these technologies and their related cryptocurrencies as a disruption
of existing economic systems. Investment and development of these technologies and the people who use
them are essential to their aim of moving away from existing fiat- and credit-based systems of digital
currency/finance towards a means of peer-to-peer exchange based on their sentiments of value. Some
participants were convinced that current national and regional fiat currencies and the current economics
systems were going to fail and in turn they stated that this was a way to ensure their net worth was
somewhat hedged (even if it is only within their communities related to these technologies). There are
great concerns around exactly how value is defined and eventually traded between other forms of value.
Participants pointed to development tooling and user interfaces being keys to solving these issues from
present into the future. However, these have to be related to applications that expand decentralization
beyond the economic into areas of data storage, different forms of consensus, and other blockchain 3.0
applications.
Participants also saw the use of these technologies being critical in forwarding certain types of
social change, such as increasing democracy via voting and making access to these blockchain systems
more simple through consultancies and tailored solutions based on the blockchain. It was pointed out that
these technologies will continue to be increasingly disruptive in many economic and political arenas
without signs of slowing; many see these technologies becoming increasingly important in
grassrootsbased efforts.
Guiding forces
Geopolitical and geo-economic instability drove most participants towards these alternative
economic/political/social solutions. Because of the distributed nature of these architectures, they were
concerned with keeping the power in the hands of the people writ large via their direct involvement with
these technologies. However, they were unclear and/or unsure as to whether knowledge could easily
foster trust in these systems as an alternative to fiat- and credit-based systems despite the implicit need
for public trust and public access to these systems. Many saw these technologies as a new field of
development and investment based on business models that form around them for various customer
bases (many of which are still emerging in areas of finance, government, and Department of Defense
applications). They were also unsure of what other forces were ultimately going to guide these
technologies and what direction those forces might be headed in. Many saw the people (whether directly
or indirectly involved with the systems) as the primary force driving the forms and paths for these
technologies via their use cases. However, looming uncertainty surrounding regulatory frameworks from
governments around the world was stated as being a key concern for how business and development
efforts would evolve moving forward globally.
Technologically, the biggest guiding forces are the issues of scalability and consensus. Due to the
manner in which blockchain frameworks are constructed, participants felt there may be issues related to
the current proof-of-work paradigm and the related hardware/software issues developers are currently
working to solve. Some developers have started to move towards private/permissioned blockchain
projects due to these issues. Regardless, immutability and trust of data on the blockchain is one of the
most attractive features mentioned by participants; economic rationale was the most dominant guiding
force mentioned during the interview process. The goal of many investors toward development projects
is reduction of volatility, such as that seen in Bitcoin (despite it being the most demanded cryptocurrency).
There was a sentiment that over time, frameworks were geared towards applications that were
increasingly stable in their processes and that would be more appealing to invest in/utilize. Everything
from notary applications to data storage, proven functions that are made vastly better by blockchains, are
seen as far more appealing than the creation of a cryptocurrency. A few participants pointed out that there
is possibly an internal contradiction in that proof-of-work requires some sort of token to function and
therefore the blockchain as currently conceived in any form cannot be separated from some form of
cryptocurrency. I also observed investors reference the volatility of these systems, along with their
inherent risks, in terms of fiat currencies (even in terms of future economic considerations). Overall,
developers were focused on providing solutions to current use-case challenges while investors were
focused on finding places within current economic and political paradigms for which blockchains would
provide a solution to a customer (even if the customer was them).
Accessibility
Almost all participants stated that access and involvement in any number of blockchain systems
has become much easier over time (this was considered by all to be a very rapid shift from 2009 to the
present). This was thought to be due to increasing participation and investment in these systems by a vast
array of people. Everything from simplified wallets to online exchanges have made access much easier for
the newcomers which helps new developers and investors see these technologies as an increasingly solid
investment of digital monies and time. They all stated that there is still no good answer for how to get
these technologies in the hands of existing disadvantaged communities, but they were also equally
confident that these technologies held the potential to solve existing inequalities found in current
economic and political systems. There is still a wide divide in understanding of what these technologies
are, even amongst some developer and investor communities around the world. This makes even the use
of established cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin difficult (these are related to persistent considerations of
volatility in these spaces). User interfaces are seen as the primary deterrent for new users of these
technologies as these spaces are still seen as developer-dominant.
Ethics
This was by far the most difficult concept for the participants to define in terms of how these
technologies should be used, invested in, and developed. Regardless of where the participants fell in terms
of categorization as a user, developer, and/or investor, they had varying thoughts and pauses regarding
ethics in the realm of blockchain technology. Most ideas congealed around two main areas: how one
defines value; how one views people and their time. The overarching, yet fairly nebulous idea, is that
current economic systems do not preserve people’s value or their time, yet they had a difficult time
explaining how these new systems would do any better. There was hope that DAOs, once beyond their
current problematics, would foster new forms of trust in economic systems that would be geared towards
people helping people, but the near term path for that has yet to be found.
Due to the developer dominance in these spaces, ethics will largely manifest in the code they write
per use case. The complication of user interfaces per these use cases will complicate that paradigm as it
touches back on previous points related to a technical divide and the scale of the systems. Some
participants focused on their social spaces to ground an ethic; whether that was for their family’s welfare,
a particular agenda of activism, or an economic/political paradigm. However, these same people also
depend on other people/organizations with money to pay them for a service they are willing to buy. Some
participants identified numerous balances in this socio-economic bifurcation between investment and
development within several aspects of these systems given a particular implementation. Many
participants relegated their ethical consideration to staying within their respective regional legal
frameworks. Others stated they had no real ethical consideration as it is people using the systems that
decide the ethics; the frameworks in these cases are seen as having no implicit politics. However, it was
also stated this becomes harder to say when applied to smart contracts and DAOs. Participants pointed to
automation, democratic DAOs, personal freedoms, intellectual property, patents, trust, transparency,
anonymity, whitelisting, blacklisting, libertarian sentiment, corruption, privacy, malicious hacking,
censorship, technological limitations, and weaponization as current and future ethical considerations, but
few had any answers as to how these could be avoided via actions on the part of developers, investors, or
users.
Gray Literature and Other Sources
Initially, this process proved challenging as the Reddit EULA had numerous stipulations regarding
scraping and use of published data. Attempts to use the Python Reddit API Wrapper (PRAW) library with
the Beautiful Soup library produced retrieval of the records structured as desired for analysis, but these
records were often random and the subreddit would have to be queried numerous times, returning no
more than 100 records per request and possibly exceeding the limitations of Reddit’s user agreement. This
process of requesting and de-duplication of the chronological publication history for each subreddit
proved difficult and never yielded more than 1000 unique records. Due to restrictions on the number of
records that can be pulled from Reddit, I opted to analyze the top 1000 posts over the lifetime of three
subreddits (3000 total records): /r/ethereum; /r/Bitcoin, and /r/EthereumClassic. This data was gathered
for the last time on 26 December, 2016 using the Scrapy Python library. The web scraper was setup in
compliance with the Reddit EULA and robot.txt file, pulling the public-facing data from each subreddit.
This data set contained the following initial schema per subreddit: title; author; relative time of publication
to date (26 December, 2016); date-time group of the subreddit post; tagline; and number of comments.
All figures in the results section were created by the author with the exception of Bob Summerwill’s
dependency diagram (Figure 16b).
Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Ethereum Classic Subreddits
Once the data was obtained from the scraping process in the aforementioned format, I needed to
parse out the expanded date-time group into its individual components and convert the comments column
into an integer value. The schema following the competed ETL (extract-transform-load) process is: author;
tagline; time_rel (relative time of post from date of viewing); comments (' comments' removed; now an
integer value); title; dow (day of the week 3-letter); mon (month 3-letter); day (1-31); time (24 hour clock);
year; tz (timezone); dtg (date/time group as ‘yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss+hh:mm’ with the final +hh:mm as
time zone from UTC). Since this was a data set of 3000 records from all three subreddits, it was easier to
parse the date-time information pre-analysis. However, in larger data sets, date-time functionality within
the Pandas library would be used on the sample data within the ETL process. To perform the analysis, I
used Jupyter Notebooks with a Python 3 kernel and all of the following graphics were produced using the
matplotlib Python library. All software projects used for data collection and analysis are open-source which
are free to download for validation of my methodology and results; the Jupyter Notebook and other
documents can be viewed directly on GitHub.
I began my data exploration with a focus on the authors. I graphed a count of posts per unique
author in each subreddit (Figure 1a, 1b, 1c). This was done in order to establish which online entities had
published the most top-rated threads in the subreddits history. I then proceeded to explore and plot the
number of comments received per author post from the top 1000 posts. These were sorted from most to
lease comments received for a single post along with the author’s name and the title of the post (Figure
2a, 2b, 2c). I then added the total number of comments received per unique author in each subreddit
(Figure 3a, 3b, 3c). The above methods were performed to assess if one or more entities in these subreddit
communities could be seen as ‘leaders’ in the sense that they persistently post and have the ability with
those posts to draw participation (via the number of comments) amongst people in that community. We
can then look at the titles of these posts to see if they are addressing or participating in key discussions in
the history of their respective communities.
I also want to examine if authors from one subreddit community are involved in discussions from
another subreddit. I first obtained a count of unique authors from each subreddit (Figure 4). The Bitcoin
community had, as expected based on the length of time since the community’s conception, the most
diverse number of contributors, followed by Ethereum, and finally Ethereum Classic. I then compared
Figure 1a: Author posts for Ethereum
Figure 1b: Author posts for Bitcoin
Figure 1c: Author posts for Ethereum Classic
Figure 2a: Highest number of comments on unique post by author – Ethereum
Figure 2b: Highest number of comments on unique post by author – Bitcoin
Figure 2c: Highest number of comments on unique post by author – Ethereum Classic
Figure 3a: Total number of comments per author for all author’s
posts – Ethereum
Figure 3b: Total number of comments per author for all author’s
posts – Bitcoin
Figure 3c: Total number of comments per author for all author’s posts –
Ethereum Classic
Figure 4: Count of unique authors per subreddit
Figure 5a: Count of unique authors between subreddit top posts
Figure 5b: Table - Count of unique authors between subreddit top posts
Figure 6: Table of authors found in one subreddit
who have published in another subreddit
unique authors in one subreddit to those in the other, generating a graph of comparison between the
three communities (Figure 5a, 5b). The most inter-community exchange was found between Ethereum
and Ethereum Classic which is to be expected due to the recent Ethereum hard fork. There is a slight trend
in that authors from newer communities are not seen in the top posts of older communities. This does not
mean that authors from one subreddit are not involved in another; this is only in terms of an author
producing top posts in each of the subreddit communities. I then produced a table to view all authors who
were seen between one or more subreddit’s top posts (Figure 6). There was only one unique author that
was seen across all three as receiving one or more top 1000 posts.
I then proceeded to explore the temporal aspect of the data through a time series analysis of the
date-time information in relation to the other data types from the subreddit data sets. I started with an
examination of general time frames as referenced from the date of the final webscrape for the three
subreddits’ information (26 December, 2016 which from this point will be reference as the date of
information or DOI). For Ethereum: the bulk of top posts made in the Ethereum subreddit were made in
the last year from the DOI (Figure 7a); this is confirmed by the vast amount of all top posts in 2016 as
shown in the visualization of top post per year for Ethereum (Figure 8a); the bulk of all their top 1000 posts
have occurred between Jun and August with a significant amount concentrated at the end of the calendar
year (Figure 9a); the bulk of top posts occurred during the work week (Monday through Friday) (Figure
10a); in terms of day of the month, there are more top posts that occur towards the end of the month
than in the beginning (e.g., after the 15th) (Figure 11a). For Bitcoin: the bulk of Bitcoin’s top posts were
made over the last three years, but with very few originating in the last year from DOI (Figure 7b); this is
confirmed by the vast amount of all top posts occurring in 2014 followed by 2015 and 2013 in the
visualization of top posts per year for Bitcoin (Figure 8b); the bulk of all top posts have occurred between
November through April of the following year with May through October being noticeably lower (Figure
9b); like Ethereum, most top posts have occurred during the work week (Figure 10b); there is no noticeable
pattern for the times of the month for top posts in the Bitcoin subreddit, but the beginning of the month
does appear to be slightly more active with a spike occurring on the 9th (Figure 11b). For Ethereum Classic:
Ethereum Classic has only existed since August of 2016, but the bulk of top posts are from around the
August-October time frame from DOI which is also reflected in the year visualization
(which is only 2016) (Figure 7c, 8c); July and August were the peak top post months for Ethereum Classic
(Figure 9c); the work week is also when the bulk of posts are made (Figure 10c); in terms of time of the
month, the final week for all the months that Ethereum Classic has existed has produced the largest
number of top posts (with a spike on the 26th) (Figure 11c).
The date-time information was analyzed as such to first examine patterns and trends within and
between the subreddits top post activity. Secondly, it was done in preparation to explore how temporal
effects may influence intra-community dialogues or how these may interact with the other subreddit
communities in terms of the authors’ posts or community issues that may be shared between these three
subreddits in or around the same times. I programmed a tool to examine specific authors within a
subreddit given a particular time frame. I was then able to examine the top authors (top author being
defined via the number of posts made and the number of comments received for specific posts within the
collection of top posts per subreddit) during the different peaks in activity for the each of the date-time
categories available for the data.
Following the brief examination of the authors, comments related to the authors, and the
temporal activity within each of the subreddits, I moved on to examine the title content within and
between these subreddits’ top 1000 posts. For this purpose, I programmed and used two primary tools:
word clouds and word frequency tables. I first created functions that parsed all the title text information
into a file, removed non-essential punctuation, converted all text to lower case, and then generated word
clouds for each subreddit. These word clouds essentially visualize the word frequency found within each
subreddit corpus and graduates the word’s size in accordance with its count within that corpus. I then
programmed functions that would produce word frequency tables and summaries of those tables to
compare to the word clouds (a custom stop word list was used). The word clouds and word frequency
tables were
Figure 7a: Count of posts for relative time frames – Ethereum
Figure 7b: Count of posts for relative time frames – Bitcoin
Figure 7c: Count of posts for relative time frames – Ethereum Classic
Figure 8a: Count of posts per year – Ethereum Figure 8b: Count of posts per year – Bitcoin
Figure 8c: Count of posts per year – Ethereum
Classic
Figure 9a: Count of posts per month – Ethereum
Figure 9b: Count of posts per month – Bitcoin
Figure 9c: Count of posts per month – Ethereum Classic
Figure 10a: Count of posts per day of the week –
Ethereum
Figure 10b: Count of posts per day of the week – Bitcoin
Figure 10c: Count of posts per day of the week –
Ethereum Classic
Figure 11a: Count of posts per day of the month –
Ethereum
Figure 11b: Count of posts per day of the month – Bitcoin
Figure 11c: Count of posts per day of the month –
Ethereum Classic
generated in order to gather an overall sentiment of the content and discourses within the collection of
top posts within each subreddit community. This allows for a preliminary examination of trends and
patterns found in the collection of titles for the most popular topics of discussion between all three
subreddits.
To further the interrogation of the subreddits’ content, I developed additional tools for their
analysis. Using the already generated word frequency tables, I made it possible to remove a selected
number of top terms found in each subreddit and then generated a new word cloud to more easily
examine the changes in word graduation and potential relations. This was followed by creation of another
function that would generate word clouds for a specific author in a specific subreddit with the added
option to remove a selected number of their most used words. These were developed in order to ask more
direct questions related to the authors, time frames, and the larger communities as they develop intra-
and inter-community dialogues on blockchain-related topics. Functions were also developed to examine
the top titles for an author in a specific subreddit as well as a word cloud generator for a subreddit’s specific
element within a specific time frame. Used together, these functions can assist in understanding how a
leading author’s post may influence other conversations within and between subreddits as well as how
the influence may relate to other events surrounding the author’s post. At this point, I also thought it
essential to develop an interface for comparison of my interview data to the content found in the three
subreddits’ top 1000 posts. As a result, word cloud and word frequency functions were developed for the
interview and open conversation data.
Preliminary results from the above analytic tool outputs and a deep reading of the actual title
content for the total corpus of 1000 top posts from the Ethereum subreddit revealed that most posts
focused on the hard fork which was performed in August of 2016 to recover the funds lost during the DAO
hack which inadvertently created Ethereum Classic (Figure 12a, 12b). There is also a focus on the
blockchains application for smart contracts with specific attention on the Geth implementation of the
Ethereum framework (and to a lesser extent the Parity implementation). Vitalik Buterin is mentioned
frequently (he is also a persistent contributor and has many top posts within the data set). There is also
Figure 12a: Word cloud for all words in subreddit – Ethereum
Figure 12b: Word
frequency table for all
words in subreddit –
Ethereum
attention paid to the relationship between Bitcoin and Ethereum as issues related to wallet functionality
and various forms of system support, intra- and inter-cryptocurrency community, are of persistent interest
to many community members. Removing the top 30 most mentioned words from the Ethereum corpus
during generation of word clouds via the word frequency table also exposed frequent mention of concerns
related to system attacks/security, the Ethereum foundation, and the larger ecosystem of decentralized
applications and developer/investor involvement (developer involvement is indicated through mention of
software releases, solidity, developer conferences, and other developer terminology common to the
developer documentation expanded on in the following code review section; investor involvement is
indicated via mention of exchanges such as Coinbase and companies such as Slock.it, Auger, and Microsoft)
(Figure 12c). There is also a less frequent, but present, tone for general users in the topics related to the
Mist Browser and various general wallet/contract usage issues (these could equally apply to developer and
investor dialogues as well given various contexts).
Examination of the Bitcoin data set reveals an overall focus on the currency aspect of the Bitcoin
framework. It was expected that the top 1000 posts for the Bitcoin subreddit would be more generalized
as it has existed for much longer (as a blockchain protocol and cryptocurrency) than Ethereum and
Ethereum Classic (Figure 13a, 13b). Bitcoin is most frequently mentioned in terms of its relationship to
money, where it is accepted, and where one can exchange both Bitcoin and other monies (Coinbase and
PayPal were mentioned most often). These are followed by concerns related to banking or banks and
currencies. There is also topical mention of OverStock, likely related to their adoption of Bitcoin as
payment option, and Bitcoin’s relationship to the Silk Road website. Removing the top 30 most mentioned
words from the Bitcoin corpus during the generation of word clouds via the word frequency table also
exposed frequent mention of concerns regarding wallets, exchange, governments, worth, and the ever
present mention of Satoshi (both the identity and the Bitcoin monetary denomination) (Figure 13c). To a
lesser frequency, there is a lingering mention of attacks on Mt. Gox and other exchanges. The user and
investor language is much more persistent in this community than the Ethereum and Ethereum
Figure 13a: Word cloud for all words in subreddit – Bitcoin
Figure 13b: Word
frequency table for all
words in subreddit –
Bitcoin
Classic communities. This is due to the overall frequency of words centered around corporate language
(such as CEO, customers, business, market, and support) as well as a more general language common in
the Bitcoin and Ethereum subreddits for users (such as social media sites, wallets, fees, and where the
cryptocurrency is accepted). Ethereum Classic is a fairly new community that emerged from the hard fork
of the Ethereum blockchain in late 2016. Initial examination of the corpus of its top 1000 posts for the
limited existence of the community reveals a focus on the transition from Ethereum to now
pseudoindependent Ethereum Classic (Figure 14a, 14b). This includes persistent mention of the hard fork
and the DAO hack that spurred it. There was frequent mention of support for this new community and its
blockchain framework as well as its relationship to Bitcoin and the wallet functionality in general. Following
this, there were concerns regarding who would support development of this blockchain framework,
mining, connected markets, trading, exchanges. These top mentions are topics that are essential to
maintaining a functioning blockchain system as a lack of participants and interconnections to other
blockchain communities can often be seen as lacking viability, both in terms of attracting new developers
and new investment into the cryptocurrency system. Removing the top 30 most mentioned words from
the Ethereum Classic corpus during generation of word clouds and tables also exposed frequent mention
of concerns regarding various forms of attack and hacking (connected to the number of miners
participating in a system that still requires proof-of-work and the resulting consensus mechanisms),
contracts, funds, mining pools and block generation (Figure 14c). There was also frequent mention of the
Chinese in contexts of mining and system investment as well as mention of Vitalik Buterin and Charles
Hoskinson (previously of the Ethereum Project who left and is now involved in the Ethereum Classic
project). Because of the relatively new status of this community, word frequencies indicate a large swath
of interests with main topical areas for that community still emerging as development, investment , and
user issues are worked out. There are more mentions of various exchanges, such as ShapeShift and
Poloniex, as visibility and trading of Ethereum Classic on this reflects legitimacy within the larger
cryptocurrency community. However, the main themes that emerge from this new subreddit are growth
Figure 14a: Word cloud for all words in subreddit – Ethereum Classic
Figure 14b: Word
frequency tables for all
words in subreddit –
Ethereum Classic
and survival in relation to key features that help get investment into the framework and projects that help
sustain that investment (both in terms of full-time developers, traders, and decentralized application
investors).
Following this overarching assessment of the discourse found in each subreddit, I then focused on
the title content for: the top five authors with the highest number of total comments over all their posts;
the top five authors with the most comments for a single post; and the top five authors with the most
posts to a single subreddit. For Ethereum, these three groups saw many of the same unique authors. The
top concerns amongst these authors primarily focused on developer-centric issues related to the
functionality of the Ethereum framework and protocol. There is a heavy emphasis on the hard fork for
Ethereum and security issues such as malicious attacks in varying forms common to blockchain systems
(such as that performed on theDAO which was featured prominently in many of the top discussions). Much
of the more user and investor related posts were directed at clarification on how the hard fork following
the DAO hack would affect them in efforts to quell unrest from those who were liquidating their Ethereum
assets due to the event. There were also numerous posts of recent social events for the Ethereum
community such as developer conferences which frequently mentioned Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin
(almost all top authors and authors in general have made mention of Vitalik Buterin in their post titles).
From the above three focus areas, there is a noticeable trend in two directions: developers sharing their
work with additional personal commentary; users discussing general topics related to the larger Ethereum
community. Moreover, the topics presented and addressed by the developer-centric posts tend to drive
the general discussions within the total collection of posts. In many cases, top authors literally posted news
headlines from various news outlets for discussion. Whether titles were published through the unique
author by an automated spam bot or manual process is difficult to determine in many cases, though the
human interactions within the related discussion threads often hinted as to whether posts by an author
were redundant or were more specific to a subjective or personal experience. An author who focuses on
developer related issues (who are often Ethereum-related developers) frequently have a number of
champions who promote the author’s concepts, ideas, and headlines for a number of reasons ranging
from encouragement of other developers to become involved with any number of projects (e.g., learning
Solidity, other system and Dapp tutorials, Geth client updates), marketing the larger concepts to potential
investors (e.g., simplification of the Ethereum blockchain concepts geared towards business applications),
or encouraging general awareness to spur user involvement (e.g., downloading a wallet, buying ether,
building community).
For Bitcoin, the discourse is far different than Ethereum. Unlike Ethereum, Bitcoin’s top 1000 posts
are distributed amongst a much larger group of unique authors. However, each top author in Bitcoin had
fewer top posts from the collection of 1000, but with much larger numbers of cumulative and single post
comments. There was also a noticeable shift in the tone and overall discourse found in the Bitcoin
subreddit. The top five authors overall focused their discussions on topics related to Bitcoin’s economic
processes. These range from what companies are accepting Bitcoin for payment, who is planning to accept
Bitcoin for payment, how to purchase and exchange Bitcoin, and how Bitcoin is going to change any
number of business models or industries. There were often discussions centered around mention of
Bitcoin in the news or other social media. This led to larger discussions that seemed to foster a larger sense
of community for Bitcoin users and investors (often referred to as ‘bitcoineers’). Very rarely was there
mention of any developer related topics within the Bitcoin data set even if the author is a known Bitcoin
developer (a time series analysis of the entire history of Bitcoin posts may reveal if this has always been
the case or perhaps how Bitcoin transitioned from a period similar to what Ethereum is experiencing now
to its current state today). There were still mentions of Silk Road and Satoshi Nakamoto from these
authors, but the focus was centered on the utility, legitimacy, and growth of the cryptocurrency as a
currency. Block size and mining have shifted in tone from that of a developer concern (as seen in Ethereum)
to one of investors maintaining a business infrastructure for the community of users and investors based
on the frameworks sustained stability and legitimacy.
Ethereum Classic is such a new subreddit and community that posts vary extremely in their
discourse even within the same author’s posts. The most prolific author was approximately three times
more active than the second most prolific author. However, this author was not one of the top five authors
with most comments for a single post (Ethereum and Bitcoin often had many of the same top authors
within all three categories). The top five authors overall for the three categories demonstrated a mix of
developer, economic, and community related issues that sound very similar to the discourses found in the
Ethereum subreddit. Since this community was born of the hard fork of Ethereum predicated on the DAO
hack event in June of 2016, there is often reference to that event, the people involved with the hard fork,
and the concerns that surrounded the hack and hard fork events. However, the larger discussion centered
on the politics that underlined the system’s existence. Aside the mentions of funding, mining, and software
development of the system, there were larger discussions on governance, consensus, immutability, and
communities that support these ideas. We also see more Bitcoin-esque dialogues emerging in the
Ethereum Classic subreddit such as who will accept this new system, how will it be used, who is
investing/developing this system, and why one would choose Ethereum Classic over Ethereum. This may
be due to the variety of conversations that were happening over the short existence of this subreddit and
is not to say that these do not occur in the Ethereum subreddit, they were just more prominent in the
Ethereum Classic subreddit data set (as illustrated in previous results on authors between subreddits,
there were more Bitcoin to Ethereum Classic authors than Bitcoin to Ethereum authors (these authors
were often completely different within the top 1000 post)). The discourse in this subreddit was geared
towards mobilizing action in terms of maintaining the decentralized network of miners and their related
software framework as well as building and sustaining a community to keep this project growing within its
established politic via investment and user involvement. Many of the most commented discussions also
centered on concentration of wealth based on who holds the most Ether (ETH) or Ether Classic (ETC) in
these systems as Ethereum works towards implementation of proof-of-stake and people wait to see
whether Ethereum Classic will maintain the proof-of-work model currently in place for both (this is also in
part related to the DAO hacker, the WhiteHat hackers or Robin Hood group, and their current Ether Classic
holdings). The authors with the most posts overall are definitely focused on investor and user concerns as
topics focus on the relationship between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic while connecting both to current
issues facing the larger cryptocurrency community (i.e., why companies and countries would want to use
blockchain and would Ethereum or Ethereum Classic work in those use cases). There is certainly the
sentiment being promoted that Ethereum Classic is the “people’s Ethereum blockchain” often mentioning
various economic and political influences which were seen as negative within the Ethereum project (e.g.,
key developers leaving Ethereum following acquisition of millions from various investors and now rejoining
the Ethereum Classic project, discussion of Ethereum Classic’s legitimacy and immutability over
Ethereum).
To complete my analysis of the three subreddits, I compared the content of my interview data to
that of the three subreddit data sets. I processed all of my interview and open conversation data into a
format suitable for deriving word clouds and word frequency tables. I then produced a word cloud and
word frequency table for the entire corpus (Figure 15a, 15b). As expected, this word cloud and table
reflected sentiments found in the subreddits (the text used combined participants’ responses who were
experienced with Bitcoin and/or Ethereum). There were many common words cluttering up the initial view,
but there were many terms related to developer, user, and investor focus areas in the background. A
second word cloud was produced removing the 30 most frequent words (Figure 15c). Here we start to see
familiarity in our comparative discourse as developer terms and focus areas emerge from the collected
interview and open conversation content. Many terms, such as cryptocurrency, decentralization,
application, and project, are prominent above terms common in use among investors and users, such as
general blockchain technology common to most blockchain projects, with a focus on the user. A third word
cloud was produced removing the 60 most frequent words (Figure 15d). Here we start to see emphasis on
terms common in discussion on the larger blockchain 2.0 and blockchain 3.0 projects. We also now start
to see DAO mentioned in this third layer along with an emerging topics of economics and community
building. Through all the interview and open conversation clouds so far, the term ‘idea’ drew my attention.
During the interview and open conversation process, the participants always came back and mentioned in
passing ‘having the idea’ or ‘getting the idea’ (sometimes also related to the mention of varying scales of
‘concept’ which I will expand upon in my analysis). I finished with a word cloud derived from removing the
90 most frequent words found in my interview and open conversation data (Figure 15e). Here we start to
see politics emerging in relation to the economic and development aspects of these data sets. Here we
see concepts related to token and exchange in relative close frequency with mentions of government
topics.
The above methodology was developed to explore and expand an understanding of the overt and
underlying concepts and relations found between the semi-structured interview and open conversation
content collected for this study and the Reddit content from the larger communities of which the
participants belong. The content analysis of both data sets individually and then together revealed
interesting patterns and trends found between the participants answers and the common strands of
thought within the blockchain-based subreddits. This helped to validate assumptions made during a deep
reading and coding of the semi-structured interview and open conversation data regarding the larger
communities’ economic, political, and social dynamics that are indicative of processes driving particular
modes of spatial production and political economy within these blockchain ecosystems. The automation
of the data exploration tools I developed and implemented are no substitute for a deep reading of the
material discussed above, but it does assist in developing a more robust set of inferences through which a
more directed and effective analysis can be pursued.
A key advantage that emerges from the content analysis of these three subreddit data sets is an
awareness that we are looking at three communities that are co-evolving along similar paths. Bitcoin has
been where Ethereum and Ethereum Classic are today in terms of establishing its legitimacy as a
development project, a secure investment, and a customer friendly product (in terms of its state as the
leading cryptocurrency today). Ethereum has just reached a level of legitimacy and has a level of
Figure 15a: Word cloud for all words in interviews and open
conversations
Figure 15b: Word
frequency table for all
words in interviews
and open
conversations
Figure 15c: Word cloud for interviews and open conversations
without top 30 words
Figure 15d: Word cloud for interviews and open conversations
without top 60 words
Figure 15e: Word cloud for interviews and open conversations
without top 90 words
sustained involvement from developers and investors, but is still struggling to find key customers and use-
cases that make it a viable entity for use in the everyday lives of users (such as the increasing number of
common use cases for Bitcoin). Ethereum Classic, given a massive leap as it split from Ethereum after a
considerable amount of development and investment was put into the ecosystem, has to start from square
one in terms of the developer/investor/user dynamics mentioned above. Examining the content and the
resulting discourse of the three independently and then together from the perspective and categories
used exposes the unifying forces as well and the departures found within each community and larger
blockchain phenomena.
Ethereum Wallet and Browser
Ethereum makes installation of their wallet and browser for users extremely simple as compared
to the more developer-oriented activities. This is largely a desktop/laptop based activity, though mobile
applications for both Android and iOS continue to be released with increasing functionality and utility.
From the Ethereum homepage (https://ethereum.org/), the organization gives the reader a description of
what the system is, its functionality and intent (e.g., no downtime, no censorship, no fraud, no third party
interference, etc.), and how it received its initial funding via crowdfunding. However, the introduction,
menu items, and language are geared towards attracting developers to their projects and investors to put
forms of capital into the system and/or the Ethereum non-profit.
The user is initially offered a wallet through the homepage. When the user selects this option, s/he
is warned of the risks involved with using this technology. The user is then brought to the software
versioning website GitHub to download the wallet software for her/his respective operating system (i.e.,
Linux, MacOS, Windows). At this point, the user must know how to download the correct software per the
hardware specifications of her/his personal computer, install the software using the appropriate tools
while ensuring the safety of the downloaded wallet software (this involves validating the download with
a SHA-256 checksum), and then start using the wallet post-installation. The GitHub repository is heavy
with developer-based language, making the understanding of how versions of the software differ from
one another difficult for non-technical users. It is also not immediately clear to the non-technical person
how
Mist (a decentralized application browser for the Ethereum smart contract network) varies from the
Wallet (an application which stores one’s cryptographic keys, tokens, and contracts that is now built into
Mist).
Once the Wallet application is downloaded, extracted, and installed, one must select the correct
executable file for one’s respective operating system. The application will launch, asking the user to select
which network (the main network blockchain or a test network blockchain) s/he wish to use (the test
network is mainly intended for developers of decentralized applications) and to then create an account.
The user must then wait for the blockchain to download, but is given reading materials for how tokens,
smart contracts, and DAOs of varying types are created while this process is underway. The process of
downloading the main network blockchain can take hours or days to version on one’s computer system
(which is now a node in the decentralized, smart contract network of Ethereum) depending on the
specifications of the user’s system and her/his ICT connectivity to the Internet and World Wide Web. Once
the blockchain for either the test network or main network is versioned locally to the user’s computer
system, s/he can open the Ethereum wallet application, via Mist, to examine her/his account balance, buy
and sell Ether, and create/interact with smart contracts, DAOs, tokens, and other decentralized
applications (using the Mist browser) available on the larger Ethereum network (e.g., depending on their
selection of test network or main network).
From both the homepage and the Mist browser, the user is then directed towards learning Solidity,
Ethereum’s primary smart contract language. Ethereum provides the user with Solidity tutorials that
include examples of how one would create one’s own cryptocurrency token, create a crowd sale for tokens,
and how to build a DAO (these are the same examples provided as reading material during the installation
process). For each of these, the walk-throughs are well written, but still require the reader to understand
the syntax and semantics of Solidity and how that connects to the written explanations and visual aids in
the tutorials. The user is given additional developer resources throughout these tutorials. From the
homepage, the user is then directed towards command line tools which are almost explicitly for
developers of the underlying Ethereum framework and protocol. I will expand on the more
developeroriented content below. Finally, the user is given community resources such as additional
information on how the system functions, system-oriented programming language resources, social
networks, and points of contact for the Ethereum organization.
For the non-technical user, the Ethereum organization, via its homepage, ensures s/he can open
her/his wallet, purchase Ether, and interact with the larger network of decentralized applications relatively
easily given the open-source and distributed nature of the efforts supporting the Ethereum project’s
development. This means that “everyday” users can buy and sell Ether using Bitcoin or as of recently credit
card (via Coinbase and only in the US), but would have trouble with any additional functionality built into
the system. This is the same for investors. For any rapid involvement beyond the basic exchange of the
cryptocurrency, a developer would have to facilitate the creation of Solidity-based smart contracts for the
user and/or investor. This gap is decreased through a fairly large community of connected social networks
used by people depending on their situated condition as user, developer, and/or investor. Over the
relatively short lifetime of the Ethereum project, people have created many different points of access for
inclusion in these social networks, most of which are geared towards the development of software for the
core Ethereum project or to a lesser extent, but no less important, funding of the decentralized application
software development and its expanded adoption by different consumers. Much of this interaction is
sustained in online communities as all three groups of people (i.e., users, investors, developers) are
geographically distributed all around the world. However, there are also large gatherings of people via in-
person meetups through where more traditional forms of communication and exchange can occur (both
in terms of socio-intellectual exchanges and peer-to-peer token value exchanges for Bitcoin and
Ethereum). On the point of peer-to-peer token value exchanges, individuals are largely sensitive towards
the legal restraints on these types of economic activities within the jurisdictions in which they are
physically located.
I have found these online communities and in-person meetings to be open and inclusive to all
people who are curious about these technologies and their political economy or are eager to become
involved in their use, investment, and/or development. I have observed that the above pattern of
involvement eventually results in a focus on investment and/or development. This means developers and
investors are in close communication and collaboration in any number of discussions regarding what these
technologies are, what they represent, and how their utility can be leveraged. Leveraging in many cases is
connected towards an investor position supporting a business model that would be competitive given the
inclusion of blockchain technologies. However, leveraging these technologies from a position of
development is largely centered around a set of use cases which may or may not be incentivised
monetarily for and by a customer willing to compensate the development efforts.
In order to participate, a user or investor would have to be given Ether via peer-to-peer exchange.
This would involve an initial coin offering (ICO), use of an exchange (e.g., Coinbase, Poloniex, etc.), or direct
interaction with a holder of the Ether cryptocurrency. While setting up an initial user account or wallet,
the user is offered the chance to exchange Bitcoin for ether which is facilitated through the ShapeShift
digital currency exchange. Users and investors entering the Ethereum system through exchanges will have
to purchase Ether with digital fiat or credit currency which often includes a number of fees. This is a
common practice for people new to these economic spaces as mining systems that require proof-of-work
are extremely difficult to enter with the expectation to earn rewards without first investing large amounts
of money into the infrastructure required to be competitive. This is a perpetual process for the Ethereum
system (and many other cryptocurrency-based blockchain protocols) as any action taken with a
decentralized application often requires an expenditure of the internal cryptocurrency to perform through
to completion.
I will now elaborate on my experience with expanding beyond the user and/or investor experience
as described above via examination of the Ethereum Pyethapp code/space.
Experience with Pyethapp
Pyethapp (2014) is the Pythonic Ethereum client implementation of the larger Ethereum state
machine (or plainly put, it keeps track of the state of the larger blockchain network and adjusts itself based
on inputs from that network as there can only be one true blockchain). The more common
implementations of this state machine are the C++ and Go versions of the core software. Pyethapp
depends on two major libraries to function: Pyethereum (2013) which is the core library that covers the
essential blockchain functionality of proof-of-work and running the Ethereum virtual machine; and
Pydevp2p (2015) which is a peer-to-peer networking library for node discovery and movement of services
within a multiplexed and encrypted system. There is also use of Pyrlp (2015) which is a Python
implementation of the recursive length prefix (RLP) encoding library that Ethereum uses for encryption
(this is not immediately apparent until digging through the Pyethapp and Pydevp2p library
documentation). Pyethapp interacts with two official Ethereum networks: a live primary network in which
real transactions and functionality are occurring; and a test network in which new code is tested without
risking one’s Ether (i.e., Ethereum’s digital cryptocurrency). I will focus my analysis on Pyethapp and its
interaction to the core and peer-to-peer libraries within the Ethereum blockchain system.
Initially, Pyethapp assumes that you have installed and configured the software correctly on a
hardware client of your choice and that this software then registers with the larger network. This includes
the successful installation of the Pyethereum and Pydevp2p core Ethereum system components (along
with a number of supporting libraries from the Python 2.7 core libraries essential to the Ethereum libraries’
functionality). The software must then be able to connect to the larger system; finding and connecting to
mining nodes within the network. Once these connections occur, it must then be able to establish a secure,
multiplexed session in order to create an instance that uses the designated Ethereum protocol. This allows
the node to receive data from the network. Once this system of relations is established, the node can then
begin to interact with the larger Ethereum ecosystem in its processes of block generation.
For the non-technical user, this is challenging. One must be able to understand how to obtain the
software in order to install it and examine it. From the homepage for Ethereum, one can access the
Pyethapp software via the command line tools installation link (which contains the only mention of Python
near the end of the page) where one is first warned of the security and legal risks one takes in using and
interacting with this system. The Ethereum team makes clear on its command line tools site
(https://ethereum.org/cli) that Pyethapp is the library to use for academic research and directs one to
their
GitHub repository for the project. At this point, the ReadMe file presents an overview of how the Pyethapp
client functions as described above. The user must have a knowledge of their specific operating systems
(i.e., Windows, MacOS, Linux), Python version 2.7 virtual environments, and the GitHub website. MacOS
and Linux users must know how to use the command line interface for their systems; Windows users must
run one of these operating systems on a virtual machine.
The first time I attempted building Pyethapp from source was in July, 2015. Despite my previous
builds of the Geth (the Go Ethereum client) and Eth (the C++ Ethereum client), this initial setup took a full
8 hours. This included reading documentation and fixing dependency issues between my operating system
and Pyethapp requirements. Even at that point, I still received spurious errors and numerous failures when
attempting to interact with the blockchain. The developer communities on Stack Overflow were incredibly
helpful in resolving issues. It took an additional week of fixing errors to arrive at the point of usage outlined
in the Pyethapp, JSONRPC API, and console documentation. My most recent build of this software in
December of 2016 was completed in 3.5 hours from source. I spent another 2 hours fixing dependency
issues native to my system before functionality reflected that which is in the Pyethapp, JSONRPC API, and
console documentation.
Code Walk-through
As mentioned above, developers of the Pyethapp project were very forthcoming with their
guidance for pursuing this form of code review. Through my posts on Ethereum’s social media, a developer
suggested I start with the Pyethapp wiki (2015) for assistance with this part of the study. From the
Ethereum repository for Pyethapp, I proceeded to the wiki where you are initially guided to the wiki page
that outlines proper use of the embedded iPython console for the Pyethapp client. For those wishing to
examine the Ethereum blockchain, this is an extremely useful tutorial for querying various facets of the
systems operation. Additionally, Python developers can perform basic and sophisticated analysis of the
Ethereum blockchain via the console (e.g., inspecting the blockchain, creating transactions and contracts,
automation, blockchain network analysis).
Once Pyethapp is installed and running correctly with a complete copy of the blockchain (there is
an option to download a partial blockchain, but the complete chain is the default upon setup of the
Ethereum clients) as outlined in the previous section, we are ready to proceed with the code walk-through
as provided through the wiki. At this point, Pyethapp goes through its functional processes: receiving and
decoding network data; message handling; and processing blocks within the blockchain ecosystem. The
wiki has been left open for additional explanation as to the extended functionality of the Pyethapp client,
but this wiki currently covers only the process of a block from the network socket (a point in a computer
system for sending and receiving data in a network) to one’s hard drive. In the process of receiving and
decoding network data, Pyethapp looks to peer.py in the pydevp2p library to wait for incoming data and
if it sees a message (Ethereum Glossary, 2014) (from on account to another within the Ethereum state
machine; not a human or machine transaction), it is added to the session for that node. The Pyethapp
node (the computer system that is running the Pyethapp) then looks to muxsession.py to attempt
decoding of packets following the nodes handshaking (communication between nodes) on the blockchain
network. Multiplexer.py then decodes the message if enough packets were collected from previous steps
using a cipher within the RLPx (cryptographic peer-to-peer network and protocol suite used by Ethereum)
session via rlpxcipher.py (in the Pydevp2p library using Pyrlp). Decoded packets are then put into a queue
and are processed through peer.py via a number of greenlets (small sequences of program instructions
that are managed within the processes as defined in peer.py). The packet is then handled by peer.py by
passing it to a handling protocol which determines if the packet can be passed along to the ‘eth’ protocol
via eth_protocol.py.
The eth protocol is linked to a chain service via eth_service.py which registers callbacks (code that
is passed to other code to be used at an assigned time) within the first stage of message handling. The
callbacks are called through protocol.py after the packet identity is resolved to a handling operation. Since
we are using the eth protocol, the new block we are creating will be passed the packets which will be
decoded through eth_protocol.py and callbacks will be handled following identification of the packets
through eth_service.py. New blocks are then handled and synchronized via synchronizer.py. The
synchronizer checks: if the block is unknown; if the proof-of-work is valid; if the chain difficulty is sufficient;
and if the parent exists for the new block. If all of these meet the thresholds of the synchronizer, the new
block is added to the queue by eth_service.py. This is once again handled via a greenlet which attempts to
push the new block onto the blockchain.
Before the new block can be added to the blockchain (so that it can access its ancestors on the
legitimate blockchain and to prove its state-of-value), it must first be stripped of its initial serialization
(acquired for the purpose of processing the packets into a block through the initial processes) through
eth_service.py and is passed along to become a legitimate block by eth_protocol.py. Pyethereum and
Pyrlp are then used to structure and validate the encoded block to prevent errors (blocks.py) before it is
passed along for serialization in accordance with the RLP standard established for the Ethereum blockchain
(sedes/lists.py) and the larger Ethereum protocol.
Once the block has been checked, the Pyethereum library is used to update the state of the block
through executed transaction (blocks.py; processblock.py). These transactions that are to become a part
of the block are validated through processblock.py which then updates the sender’s nonce (Ethereum
Glossary, 2014) (a meaningless value in a block which can be adjusted in order to satisfy the proof-ofwork
condition), gas (Ethereum Glossary, 2014) (a measurement roughly equivalent to computational steps
which every transaction is required to include a limit of and a fee that it is willing to pay per gas) is
processed, and an account message and call data are prepared. Processblock.py then applies the message
to the system and the value within the transaction is transferred. The Ethereum virtual machine is then
used via vm.py to establish reading and writing of transactions to the Ethereum state and to limit access.
Transactions being written to update the block state are cached and recorded as to revert them if they are
illegitimate. If a message processed through processblock.py is successfully applied to a state update, it is
identified as valid and is committed to the new block via blocks.py. Transactions continue to be applied
and validated until the new block is finalized at which point Pyethapp’s eth_service.py verifies the new
block.
If the new block passes the check via Pyethapp’s eth_service.py, we are now ready to add the
block to the blockchain. The Pyethereum library’s chain.py prepares to add the block by first checking the
block’s uncles (Ethereum Glossary, 2014) (or ommer: a child of an ancestor that is not an ancestor) and
verifying the block’s validity once again through checking it’s parent blocks. Chain.py then updates the
index after checking the blockchain length and work quantity so that the child (our new block) can be
loaded with the transaction that occurred during the time the block was being generated. The block is
then stored in preparation to be encoded and loaded to the blockchain where it is issued a temporary key
for holding its place (refcount_db.py) and shifted into a proper position for pre-entry into the blockchain
(leveldb_service.py). The blockchain head (newest blocks indexed on the legitimate blockchain) is then
updated via chain.py which then updates the new block for addition in sync with the head. Finally, chain.py
passes this information to refcount_db.py where the blockchain journal and death row are updated for
the commit (publication) of the new block.
As compared to many other blockchain projects, Ethereum provides an extensive amount of easily
accessible documentation. Though the Pyethapp walk-through ends following the block addition to the
blockchain located on one’s hard drive, it does guide the developer towards the next domain of knowledge
needed for review in the process of understanding the application’s scope of function. Developers can also
look to the Go and C++ client documentation, as well as the larger community of developers, for expansion
on the concepts and functions of Pyethapp and the Ethereum blockchain. Pyethapp also provided
information via their wiki on account management, Pyethapp configuration, version control, creating user
services, usage of the test network, and other developer-related activities. Related to this, Pyethereum
also provides some documentation on development and testing practices through its wiki (these function
more as cheat sheets for the developer than a guide for users). All other inquiries on development of this
system are directed at the Ethereum documentation (2016), Solidity documentation (2016), Ethereum’s
GitHub (2016), Ethereum on Stack Exchange (2016), and numerous other publications/blogs written by
developers based on their experiences (both by core developers of the framework as well as Dapp
developers). Though the official documentation for Ethereum and Solidity are written in an easy-to-
understand language by which a user, investor, or developer could read and comprehend the function and
intent of the system, the purpose is to assist a new developer in her/his path to creating new applications
and framework functionality.
The comments internal to Pyethapp, as well as the larger docstring, are almost explicitly for use
by developers and is written for immediate understanding of the following code structures. A user or
investor without some knowledge of programming would find it difficult to determine the function of the
system or its components from the docstring alone. This docstring is often, as shown in the Pyethapp code
walk-through, connected to an external text that further elaborates on the relations of functionality within
varying scales of the Ethereum blockchain code/space. This form of abstraction and layering of obfuscation
are effective for the purpose of development, but does potentially restrict those who wish to expose and
develop an understanding of the Ethereum state machine’s internal functionality. The above walk-through
is easily summed up for the user or investor by stating, “this is how you create a legitimate block and then
add it to the blockchain,” but would require a knowledgeable developer to make that assessment. Much
of the documentation I read in the course of this study was in English which could provide unintended
barriers to expanded adoption of this system by people already disadvantaged by lack of access to ICT
infrastructure and/or documentation in their native language. Much of the documentation mentioned
above can be translated into various other languages using software or other means, but outside of the
developer context, the user and/or investor could draw false conclusions on the capabilities or intent of
these systems. Even within the developer context, a language barrier could negatively effect the social
relations often required to collaborate on applications and framework projects; this especially applies in
the domain of open-source software. I did find in their glossary and in some parts of their documentation
an attempt to maintain a gender-neutral language such as the defining of ‘ommer’ in elaboration of block
inheritance.
In terms of scale in this code/space, the code walk-through and some of the more developed
documentation for the larger Ethereum framework subdues the actual immensity of these system’s true
functional nature. The code walk-through as given in the Pyethapp wiki gives a very overarching, but
effective view of how this software functions from transaction to block construction with the inclusion of
4 distinct libraries (Pyethapp, Pyethereum, Pydevp2p, Pyrlp) (Figure 16a). The code analysis of a more
experienced developer can produce a more complex set of relations within the software architecture
(Figure 16b) (Summerwill, 2017). However, these programs have many internal functions that are
generalized or assume by developers within both the primary Pyethereum project libraries used and the
underlying Python 2.7 core libraries (as well as any third-party libraries that are used or referenced).
Figure 16a: Code diagram – Pyethapp code walk-through
Figure 16b: Code diagram – Pyethapp extended dependencies
Figure 16c: Code diagram – Pyethapp call graph
via internal logic
When the totality of these code/space relations are mapped, they can result in a massive network of
interactions, making understandings of distance and space difficult (Figure 16c).
In an attempt to better understand how the technical aspects of this blockchain architecture
interacts with the semi-structured interviews, open conversation, and Reddit communities data, I parsed
the docstring and wiki content from the Pyethapp, Pydevp2p, and Pyethereum repositories. I then
removed comments and documentation internal to all files which were PEP8 (Python Enhancement
Proposal) compliant. Upon doing this, I was able to produce word clouds and word frequency tables for
four of the five data sources (I had some difficulty parsing the Pyethereum code repository). We can see
word patterns similar to those of authors in the Ethereum and Ethereum Classic subreddits. When
examining the GitHub wiki content for the Pyethapp (Figure 17a, 17b) and Pyethereum (Figure 18a, 18b),
we see many of the same prominent words as we see in the Ethereum and Ethereum Classic subreddit.
Examination of the docstring internal to the actual Pyethapp (Figure 19a, 19b) and Pydevp2p (Figure 20a,
20b) libraries reveal a much more logical and systemic language meant to elaborate on the underlying
code structures to developers of the software (sometimes these are as much notes on items that need to
be addressed as indications of functionality), but could still be related to the wiki information. This is
interesting for two reasons. The first is that this method of docstring extraction can be used to determine
if the tone and discourse from the subreddits are being guided by developers or being focused on
development issues within the blockchain community and the related blockchain infrastructure. Secondly,
it gives us an idea of the hierarchy of control within these code/spaces. Looking at the level of language
from the docstring, to the wiki, and then to the higher level system documentation and Reddit content,
we begin to see that developers are the gatekeepers of a particular form of knowledge/power dynamic.
They adhere to an intended functionality forwarded by core developers of the framework through white
papers and additional documentation on design decisions. But in order for the investors and users to
understand
Figure 17a: Word cloud for Pyethapp GitHub Wikipages
Figure 17b: Word frequency table for
Pyethapp GitHub Wikipages
Figure 18a: Word cloud for Pyethereum GitHub Wikipages
Figure 18b: Word
frequency table for
Pyethereum GitHub
Wikipages
Figure 19a: Word cloud for Pyethapp Docstrings
Figure 19b: Word
frequency table for
Pyethapp Docstrings
Figure 20a: Word cloud for Pydevp2p Docstrings
Figure 20b: Word
frequency table for
Pydevp2p
Docstrings
how these systems work, developers have to provide them that knowledge of what can and cannot be
done with which systems and why.
CHAPTER FOUR:
ANALYSIS
Toward the end of my data collection for this thesis, I desired to attend the 2016 BitFiniti:
the Blockchain Experience Conference in Miami, Florida. The website mentioned many
speakers from diverse backgrounds looking to share their experiences with blockchain
implementations or to discuss how such technologies would change particular business
paradigms. The conference required a registration fee of US$1500 and did not mention
usage of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies to pay the conference fee. I emailed the
organizers to see if they would allow me to attend for a discounted student rate, given my
research focus, to which they sent me a discount for $500. Shortly after the conference,
their website (Bitfiniti, 2016) was taken down and an email was given as the sole means
of contacting the organizers. Due to the price, I was unable to attend.
At the onset of this study, the goal was to determine if and how the spaces and places of everyday
life were evolving based on these new technologies and their effects on spatial productions in everyday
life, political economy, and the concepts of code/space and network society. To answer this larger
question, I will provide three very different answers to the three sub-questions presented in my research
statement.
Production of space
The social spaces of blockchain technologies are currently dominated by two positions: the
developers of these technologies and the people wiling to invest and sustain funding of particular projects.
The interviews revealed that many developers are also investors in these technological spaces. However,
examination of the Reddit data and the Ethereum code/space reveal that the developer is the key agent
within the dynamics which produce a blockchain space (Figure 21). Investors and those looking to
Figure 21: Social Spheres of Blockchain Spaces
capitalize on these technologies need people to innovate and produce prototypes which are then
promoted as revolutionary and evolutionary to many consumers today. Developers in many early
blockchain projects, such as Bitcoin, were the initial users and providers of use cases for these projects. It
also appears to be difficult to bring developers into these spaces and to maintain their involvement in
these projects without funding. In some cases, developers will accept digital assets produced within the
blockchain ecosystem. Others will accept a mix of digital currencies and/or equity in these projects as they
still need to interact with external economic systems (e.g., pay rent or mortgage, buy food, etc.). Many
projects have moved to the model of initial coin offerings (ICO) to keep investors, developers, and potential
users involved within the critical period of development required to get a project out to market. However,
there is no guarantee that these people will sustain involvement beyond that initial investment.
Developers are the key maintainers of the blockchain frameworks (many of the key frameworks
are open-source), users/investors of internal cryptocurrencies, and the core of these larger social spaces
(often developers will move between multiple projects in a relatively short period of time). This can be
seen to some extent through examination of the exchanges between Reddit communities and was also
mentioned in various forms through the interviews and open conversations. More abstractly, they also act
as the mediators in the human/machine code/spaces of the decentralized networks as a result of the
aforementioned developer positions as maintainer, user, investor, and community leader. In many cases,
they assign agency to the systemic actants (e.g., miners) through the designed functionality of the
frameworks, protocols, languages, and contracts that are the core of blockchain ecosystems. As elaborated
in the code and gray literature review, they are the gatekeepers of knowledge for these systems and,
therefore, are key agents in the production of these spaces through that knowledge/power dynamic.
Investors primarily see these systems as a way to personally invest their existing assets in order to
then extract some form of value that is ultimately economically beneficial. Investors and users may have
social or political motivations to initiate and sustain involvement that are largely ideological in nature (e.g.,
libertarian appeals to adopt these systems in opposition to governmental regulation of an economy;
criminal elements use of Bitcoin for black market activity on the Silk Road), but the end result is the holding
of a value token that is exchangeable, fungible, and potentially profitable for said investor and/or user
within any number of extended and connected economic markets. This is often accomplished in terms of
cryptocurrency/digital currency exchanges and blockchain companies/projects. The processes of crowd
funding as was witnessed in the rise of the Ethereum project is one example of investment in these
systems. Exchanges (such as the previously mentioned Poloniex, ShapeShift, and Coinbase) are used to
transfer between digital currencies to any number of cryptocurrencies that are then used in an ICO or in
more traditional venture capital/angel investments for a new blockchain system. This gives the participants
in the ICO an often large amount of the new token value for funding this blockchain system and, depending
on the consensus mechanism built into this new system, a potentially sizable amount of power in terms
of how the blockchain may execute consensus-based decisions and how the system may evolve based on
this pool of token value holders’ use cases as presented to the developers of the blockchain framework.
For investors who develop businesses around blockchain projects deemed as promising (this is determined
in any number of ways by the investor(s) and/or developer(s) assisting the investor in shaping the form,
function, and structure of the blockchain-focused business), the most common method is to establish a
legal business within the nation-state they feel provides the best regulatory environment for their form of
blockchain project and globally distribute the project development. This means the workers (e.g.,
developers, marketing, miners, etc.) are as decentralized internationally as the network of mining nodes
(specific to a proof-of-work system, but also extends to other governance protocols). More recently, there
has been a push to create more DAO-based companies on the blockchain which in turn hire developers,
obtain resources via the smart contract frameworks, and manage the scope of operations for that
blockchain-based business. However, this has ran into several problems and is still developing into a more
dependable framework of business development as seen with the events surrounding Ethereum and
theDAO. However, with the advent of permissioned blockchain frameworks such as Hyperledger, investors
are working to acquire developer power in order to implement more controllable versions of DAOs for
narrow, but much more lucrative, finance and business applications (as seen with IBM and DTCC) (Nicholas,
2017; Aitken, 2017).
It is difficult to determine the extent of absolute space for blockchain systems as their spatial
production is persistently in the processes of abstraction. Though these systems are suppose to operate
autonomously from humans, they depend almost exclusively on human interactions from the outside via
transaction mechanisms to perpetuate the production of intra- and inter-network space (Figure 22). As
smart contract frameworks and DAO technologies progress, this may shift the current paradigms of agency,
but currently these functionalities are being developed into a more stable standard that is acceptable to
the larger developer/investor communities. Looking at the blockchain, it must exist on the decentralized
network of mining nodes to meet the criteria of proof-of-work which acts as a mechanism
Figure 22: Spatial Dynamics – Blockchain Frameworks
of consensus and trust. This is contingent on the cryptographic key structure to not only provide the wallet
function for miners and users, but to inextricably link the blockchain to the miners. Therefore, the
production of space hinges around the human/machine nexus of mining. Humans must facilitate the
hardware, energy, and ICT connectivity for the miners, but would have no way of doing so without the
social, economic, and political conditions/functionalities the miner hardware/software provides. Humans
as developers, users and/or investors cannot proceed beyond the mentioned provisions if the
aforementioned consensus and trust are to be maintained via the miner network and their specified
actions as outlined by the framework and protocol. Therefore, humans have to interact with miners within
the specific protocol mechanisms as outline by the blockchain framework in question. However, the
autonomous, weak AI miners as actants given agency by the human agents to pursue this trusted,
immutable, consensus-driven decentralized network geared to produce a blockchain through competition
on block publication can still be directly affected by humans who control the blockchain framework of
these miners.
In order to validate the above assessment, we have to examine the perceived, conceived, and lived
conditions for developers, investors, and users as each attempts to define form, function, and structure as
defined by Lefebvre within their respective relations to the blockchain framework and the other human
agents in the processes of spatial production. Developers produce the framework as part of their material
spatial practices, they only partially produce the representation of that blockchain space as the social
practices that provide the use cases are in part developer, but they are also guided by investors via their
use cases. This leads to any number of representational spaces as the process between spatial practice of
the developer and the imposed regimes upon the conceived spaces via the investor use case are
encapsulated in the token value or cryptocurrency. This is further complicated in blockchain 2.0 through
the acceleration of these processes as smart contract and DAO functionality, though nascent as it may be,
still assists the perception and conception of the blockchain space regardless of the decentralized mining
network which is allegedly autonomous from human influence, but has to operate within the intent of the
spatial regimes humans place upon that system and its spatial production. This is because absolute space
is representational in which the body, whether biological or digital, must assume meaning via the
perpetual testing of their embodied conditions (within varying forms of artificial relations within their
code/spaces) which affect the production of social spaces and these larger political economies of
blockchain systems.
Investors’ material spatial practices center on the potential exchange value of these systems within
larger circuits of the political economy common to neoliberal modes of capitalist production. They then
enter into any number of social relations with developers and the blockchain framework in producing
numerous representations of blockchain spaces which they bolstered through a set of politics formed of
these social and economic ties. In this case, the resultant representational spaces are prototypical of
capitalist circuits via the token value extracted from the social relations between investors, developers,
and users and the means of production facilitated by the developers. Users of these systems in everyday
life are extremely rare in comparison with traditional forms of currency (and their digital equivalents) as
of this writing. The current form of user is split between the providers of use cases and users of
cryptocurrencies. As discussed above, developers and investors, in their various aforementioned forms
and functions, are the agents of use case and token value use with a small remainder being those who use
it for expenses in everyday life. Participants in the semi-structured interviews and open conversation as
well as authors in the Bitcoin subreddit often expressed frustration about their inability to use
cryptocurrencies (specifically Bitcoin) outside of the social spaces of developers and initial investors.
However, as reflected in the subreddit data, there is an increasing push by businesses traditionally outside
of these social spaces to incorporate use of these currencies in the everyday lives of their customers. This
expands the investor dynamic as described above and increases the pressure on developers within
absolute space to increasingly acknowledge the use cases presented through these new social spaces and
to incorporate investor utility through their material spatial practices, accommodating the shared
representations of space which will both directly and indirectly affect any users’ representational spaces.
Developer resistance to these power dynamics can result in a departure from the social space, but often
they participate in contextualizing the space with investors, accommodating their political, economic,
and/or social sentiment; making them investors as well as developers. This may mean as individuals within
their representational spaces are increasingly exposed to the regimes and opportunities utilization of
cryptocurrencies and other token values afford them (via their exchange value), there may be a potential
shift in the developer/investor relations to incorporate these considerations into their respective material
spatial practices. This is by no means a sign of an alternative or revolutionary economy as the means, as
currently implemented, do not obtain a true condition of autonomy within the modes of spatial production
that are required to liberate the means of production from the spatial structures of centralized developer
and investor social relations and to obtain a true state of egalitarian participation within these
cryptocurrency-economies. These spaces of social relations provide for and dominate the transformational
Figure 23: Tokenization to Exchanges
processes that initiate and perpetuate reproduction of blockchain frameworks within unique economic
and political spaces, ultimately affecting how these human/machine spaces evolve.
The abstract spaces that emerge are contingent on the facilitation of persistent value
transformation via the cryptocurrencies or tokens these systems produce (Figure 23). This process strips
away the nature of the above developer/investor/user social relations leaving the abstracted, enframed
signifier of the underlying human/machine social relation. Digital currency exchanges and P2P evaluations
of value exchange utilize the token while the various politics that drive framework development allow for
diversification of these abstractions, applying technological fixes to obscure the relations found within the
initial social space. These processes of tokenization allow people to obfuscate the process of value
transformation from one transaction to another in the form of Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency
denomination. However, the token cannot truly obfuscate the material spatial practice despite being
projected as the dominant form within the processes born of the forms, functions, and structures of the
developers, investors, and users that conceived them.
The move from Bitcoin to alt-coin functionality and the introduction of the Ethereum smart
contact languages to DAO functionality demonstrate that due to the dominance of an abstract space via
its token value, some humans agents within those dynamics that produced that token value condition have
at some point found issues with those means and modes of spatial production. In the case of the Bitcoin
protocol, Bitcoin was widely accepted as a cryptocurrency in which state-of-value could be efficiently
stored and proven. However, other social circles with the technical ability to manipulate the Bitcoin
software frameworks solidified around a politics such as open DNS and data storage to produce Namecoin.
This new protocol still functions like Bitcoin in terms of decentralization, cryptographic key structure, and
mining, but the value is connected to another politics in the form of governance as produced in the spaces
of the blockchain framework protocol. The economic incentive is there in terms of mining Namecoin (just
like mining Bitcoin), but due to the similar costs in terms of hardware, energy, and ICT infrastructure, the
social space will dictate how the human/machine interactions will ultimately evolve with one
cryptocurrency versus another. This is due to how the process of encapsulating Namecoin (i.e.,
tokenization) varies from that of Bitcoin. Since the Bitcoin token is focused on producing a cryptocurrency,
that abstraction (the Bitcoin cryptocurrency) appeals to numerous economic and politically-driven social
spaces via its pragmatic application, but creates conflict and various restrictions in other social spaces
which may not have use for or may not accept the pragmatic application of the cryptocurrency token. The
Namecoin token produces a decentralized domain names blockchain which appeals to other economically
and politically-driven social spaces (e.g., people who do not want to use a DNS that is controlled by a
centralized regulatory body such as ICANN) which then accommodate those new modes of production.
Once these two enter the larger social spheres of blockchain technologies, people only deal with the token
commodity and eschew the larger dialogue on the underlying mechanisms, politics, and economics of the
respective protocols. Once these tokens enter a digital currency exchange, the process of parity evaluation
to the US dollar and other currencies takes hold as new cycles of token abstraction begin.
It is this contention between these aforementioned processes of abstraction and contradiction
that ultimately led to the many differential spaces within the blockchain 1.0 and 2.0 communities. Matters
of privacy are promoted as essential within some systems (e.g., the obfuscation algorithms used in Dash
and
ZCash) while matters of immutability are promoted as essential in others (e.g., the public, open ledger of
Bitcoin). However, the Bitcoin protocol, as well as many newer blockchain systems, was originally
conceived with the ideas of transparency and freedom at its core values despite the pseudo-obfuscation
of the cryptographic identity via the public/private key structure. This led to the development of projects
such as Dash and Zcash in order to provide truly anonymous and obfuscated transactions within a
blockchain-based system. So there is the simultaneous demand for privacy and obfuscation, but to still
maintain an immutable, censorship-proof record of transactions so the system can perpetuate itself via
mining. They also demand security from these systems in terms of reliable access and persistence of their
recorded token holdings on the network, but the systems often require transparency of the transactions
in order to do this. These systems can and do find a differential space in the form of soft or hard forks in
an attempt to resolve systemic contradictions and crises (e.g., a hack, change in consensus protocol, block
size, updates to framework), but these rarely resolve the issues connected to the deeper, underlying
functionalities, forms, and structures of blockchain technologies and their connected human spaces in
everyday life.
The above modes of spatial production and the associated means via blockchain frameworks and
protocols are also consistent with Massey’s concepts on spatial production. The developer/investor/user
social space dynamics are supported by the underlying blockchain framework (i.e., the blockchain,
cryptography, decentralized network of nodes, programming language (for 2.0)) (Figure 24) in which
Figure 24: Blockchain Framework – Core Concepts
consensus mechanisms play a large part in those micro-spatial practices. As mentioned previously, these
system social spaces are largely digital and transduced through social media and other ICT infrastructure.
However, the concept of governance implies and requires that the consensus mechanism maintain a mode
of production that is internal to the decentralized network away from the potential interference of human
agents. Mining nodes, via the protocol, express block creation as a micro-spatial practice that is regulated
by its relations to the other mining nodes. The resultant representation of space is a record of token value
transactions performed within the higher social space conceived of developers/investors/users in their
modes of production which produce the token value as well as the mining network’s absolute space.
If the miners were mere actants in this system, the network would act as an inert database of
transactions and would not be able to manifest a condition of immutability or trust as humans would be
direct mediator in its creation. However, if the mining nodes are given agency via the human agents’
protocol within the decentralized network as is proposed by the maintainers of the blockchain
frameworks, then the representational nature of the miners within their representations of micro-spatial
production is that of compulsory labor by the digital mining node as this space of consensus is fed energy
and infrastructure with the expected output of their labor being token value accompanied by a record of
that product of labor (i.e., the blockchain). This would be a space constantly produced of interrelations
between the coexisting heterogeneities found between the mining network and the maintainers of the
frameworks and infrastructures used within a living process of value transformation by the larger social
space. The maintainers of these systems, in cognizance of the micro-spatial practices, have to
simultaneously observe said practices in meeting the multiplicity of use case expectations from investors
and users. If a contradiction between the social space and the micro-spatial emerge, a technological fix
must be instituted within the existing system or a differential space must be created via a new system
(dissolving the previous modes of production to make way for the new).
This still leaves many questions regarding “sense of place” within the above spatial processes as it
relates to miners dual nature as actant and agent within the modes of spatial production for these
blockchain code/spaces. These modes of spatial production also call for further investigation as to why
there was an aversion to or lack of ethical consideration by participants of this study whose language
suggested some awareness as to the above spatial relations within these blockchain ecosystems and the
potential cyborg intentionalities that would need to be addressed in the human/machine processes of
space/place construction. As I will discuss in the next section, the transition of agency to the mining nodes
of the decentralized network creates a unique and new paradigm between humans and machines
experienced within the political economy of these cryptocurrency economic systems and the digital
blockchain frameworks within which they function.
Political Economy
In further examination of the results from our data sets, we now focus on how these blockchain
systems, since their respective conceptions, are situated in relation to political economy, neoliberal
capitalism, and globalization. The production of these spaces demonstrates the deeply interwoven
relations to existing economic systems and the mindsets that are prevalent in today's globalized world. In
much the same way Lefebvre drew from Marx in his examination of urban spatial production, we can
examine the means, modes, and mindsets surrounding and influencing these spatial processes today.
The dominant and arguably most critical facets of these systems are the frameworks and their
protocols. These frameworks encapsulate the protocols and their mechanisms while also acting as barriers
for environmental factors that influence the internal components and simultaneously reflect the very
forces that influence and form those barriers. The framework, as a key mean of production, is initially the
realm of the developers who are involved in their conceptions, maintenance, and evolution. As previously
discussed, frameworks using proof-of-work are means to produce a cryptocurrency as well as means of
perpetually reproducing blockchains’ requisite conditions. In this manner, these intangible software
systems meet the criteria of Lefebvre’s matériel in that it acts as the tooling, language, and instructions,
via an agenda, to enable the modes of production in these spaces. Open-source software, licensed in any
number of ways (e.g., MIT, Apache, GNU, Creative Common), is used in the creation of these systems which
in turn assists developers in conception of their tooling needed to create both a common language (for
both the social spaces of developers/investors/users and technical spaces of decentralized mining labor
networks and distributed technological human labor networks) and a usable protocol (instructions)
through which systemic actants and agents function intra- and inter-blockchain system. As a means of
production, open-source software, which began as community-led, “freedom as in free to use” tool sets
within technologist social spaces, has rapidly become a means through which companies like Google and
Facebook become economic Leviathans. The issue with this as it relates to this study is how labor is
compensated for its labor time within open-source projects and the larger open-source social spaces. As
proposed before, if the mining nodes are considered proxies of human agency in the decentralized mining
network, then we can also make a parallel case for developers in the open-source community in that given
the appropriate license on an open-source project, a multi-billion dollar company can take and use the
open-source software, earning millions from exploitation of the software and its developers’ labor time,
without the need to appropriately compensate developers for their efforts. The same can be said of an
autonomous network of digital labor within the human/machine spaces of blockchain systems.
This draws out the question as to the current condition of proof-of-work and the claims made
regarding proof-of-stake. Proof-of-work, within the blockchain systems that use this mechanism in mining,
is critical in the measure and persistent maintenance of consensus (every mining node has to agree on
which blocks are the true blocks in the canonical blockchain) while providing incentives to humans who
run the mining nodes through a token value reward system upon successful validation and publication of
a block. In proof-of-stake, the blocks are created at random by an account and an account’s chances of
doing this increase with the more wealth is accumulates (i.e., more wealth equals more stake and a higher
chance of publishing a block). As of the time of this study, proof-of-stake has yet to establish itself as a
better protocol to proof-or-work in that equating influence over the blockchain to one’s wealth in a system
is no better than the proof-of-work’s equating compute power and energy expenditure in the production
of the blockchain space. Both distributed consensus models, and all others, must answer the inherent
contradictions (e.g., token as a process, technology and human/machine labor) related to these blockchain
ecosystem power dynamics and the effects it has on global adoption as a legitimate financial and social
mean of production.
In terms of the framework as a mean of production, developers were the original owners (Figure
25). They were the first to mine and gather large amounts of cryptocurrency. This meant that the direction
and intent of the software, the decentralized network, and the relations between that machine
environment and the humans using it were ultimately due to the internal ethics of the developers
responsible for maintaining the open-source project. However, as time progressed and the cryptocurrency
Bitcoin began
Figure 25: Blockchain Ecosystem Relations and Transitions
to achieve and exceed parity with the US dollar, the developers who were once accumulating these
relatively worthless tokens then became the primary shareholders and investors in this blockchain system
and its means of production. Other cryptocurrencies could then find a relation (and relational value) to
Bitcoin. This quickly led to digital currency exchanges where those wishing to invest sans development
experience or access could now purchase a stake (sometimes a very large stake) in a cryptocurrency while
those who had stake (in terms of infrastructure, holdings, access, or all of the above) now have a means
by which to accumulate both traditional digital currencies and the new cryptocurrencies.
When developers and investors began blockchain 2.0-based systems, they accelerated the modes
of cryptocurrency accumulation via the ICO, which immediately put a controlling share of the token value
in the hands of a relatively small group of people with previous access to Bitcoin and its exchange
mechanisms. For systems wanting to move to a proof-of-stake, this means that an economic dynamic of
control is placed, by default, around the initial maintainers and investors of governance and consensus
mechanisms within the blockchain system. Whether by proof-of-stake or proof-of-work, movement
towards blockchain 3.0 applications, which are allegedly non-monetary applications, still have to worry
about how these shifts in mechanisms within the means of production affects immutability, censorship,
and trust within the modes of production. There are currently many proposed and implemented measures
to ensure those with a controlling stake in these systems (both in hardware and holdings) cannot override
the alleged democratic features that many state are at the core of their governance frameworks, though
there are example of these counter-measures being persistently challenged (e.g., increased hash difficulty
for PoW vs. 51% hash power achieved by Ghash.io in 2014). However, the theDAO hack and the following
hard fork prove that this is a difficult premise/promise to maintain when leaders in both their development
and investment cannot agree on the ethics which are supposed to be the defining features of a blockchain
systems and social spaces (e.g., immutability, trust, transparency, consensus, decentralization, security,
censorship-proof, etc.), especially in moments of systemic crisis.
To these points, there is a connection between the productions of space as discussed above and
the mindsets of the agents within the means of production. Throughout the data sets collected for this
study, it became clear that the developers and investors within the production of the blockchain space
often adhered to mindsets that were libertarian in nature. They wanted to be compensated for their labors
and make a profit under the hospices of a new form of economic regulation that is not directly
administered by a government (this is not true of all people participating in these spaces; this is simply
what the data I collected shows). However, this does explain the tendencies within these systems such as
accumulation and systemic crises endemic to capitalist modes of production via hard forks, soft forks, and
creation of new blockchain systems. This also relates to how value via tokenization is produced in the
processes unique to each blockchain system. Even the idea of purchase power is prevalent in the use of
venture capital, angel investment, and ICOs. As the absolute spaces of these blockchain systems are
produced and abstracted through the social dynamics of developers, investors, and users, largely within
places that have been the originators of the neoliberal capitalist mode of production via globalization
(namely, Western nations), it should be no surprise that the mindsets found within these modes of
production are reflected in the conception and utilization of the means (i.e., the mechanisms within the
blockchain framework). This presents a challenge to the claims that these systems are revolutionary in any
sense as they do not produce a new type of economic system. Rather, we see a reformulation and
digitization of economic processes typical of our current modes of electronic capitalism. This was noticed
through not only the interview and open conversation content, but through the differences seen in the
dialogue between and within Reddit communities. Bitcoin has transformed (from 2009 to the time of these
writings) from a token value that presented conjecture and challenge to existing forms of money to a
condition of integration with existing economic systems. Blockchain 2.0 and now 3.0 applications have
also, in a much more accelerated fashion, done the same, finding use cases in the augmenting and shifting
of relations and functionalities within finance and businesses across numerous industries. These new
applications often target contradictions such as labor, technological fixes, and uneven geographic
development persistent in existing neoliberal modes of production.
Through examination of relationships between the production of blockchain spaces and the
modes of production within the dominant form of political economy (i.e., neoliberal globalization), we
begin to develop a sense of the blockchains’ overarching political economy. As discussed above, the
sentiment found in the data set indicating libertarian and neoliberal mindsets suggests that these
technologies as fixes within traditional capitalist crises is far more counter-revolutionary than is currently
acknowledged. The manner in which blockchain technologies manifest and reproduce as technological
fixes depends on the dynamics between perspective of these relations, positions to and within these
relations, and sentiment within the abstractions of the spaces via the means of production. Much like D.W.
Meinig’s reading of landscapes, one can explore and expand on the condition of agents and actants within
the means and modes of production through perspective and position, but we must also expand this to
account for the transformative processes that generate not only the abstract spaces of blockchain systems
within which this dialectic is examined, but the sentiment of the abstraction itself as a mechanism of
persistent re-situating of the absolute space and its social dynamics.
Figure 26: Perspectives and Positions
The perspectives of developers and investors towards the blockchain frameworks are that of
innovation and investment (Figure 26). Developers invest their labor time in the hopes of producing an
innovative solution to a unique use case via the investor and/or user. Investors see these spaces as largely
ecosystems of economics and political investment which is fostered by the social dynamics. This indicates
that investors and users via an initial investment of their time via money (in some form) into the spaces of
developers and blockchain frameworks is expected to yield some form of token or money value from this
transaction. These perspectives on innovation and investment often find different manifestations within
the positions of developers and investors dependent on the sentiment permeating the abstract spaces of
the blockchain ecosystem. As previously discussed, the politics that drive projects like Bitcoin are different
from those that drive Namecoin within the same generation of blockchain technology and both are far
different than the politics and ideologies driving projects like Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. This in many
ways is due to how the means of production manifest themselves in their pragmatic applications to the
investor and users of these systems via their associated modes of production. A distributed DNS can be
extremely useful, if not more so, in liberating control of international domain name control from the
centralized power of ICANN than Bitcoin is useful as a cryptocurrency via its initial pragmatic application.
However, when a transformational sentiment is adopted within a dominant politic and exerted through
the dynamics of social spaces of these blockchain systems, the abstractions are imbued with a sentiment
which then has to engage and merge with societies, economies, and political structures that are
dominated by the situated processes of neoliberal capitalism (Figure 27). For Bitcoin, the initial pragmatic
application found in exchangeable and fungible cryptocurrency was adopted by libertarian social spaces
and was then given a sentiment of freedom from regulations, increased individual security and privacy,
and increased individual and collective control over how governance in this system is determined. For
Ethereum, the pragmatic application of smart contracts was seized upon by industries in which labor
concerns and government regulation are key factors in increasing profitability and then injected the social
and political abstraction surrounding the blockchain ecosystem with sentiment of revolutionary innovation
in the means of production to these ends.
However, the examination of perspective, position, and sentiment of agents and actants to and
within the means and modes of production for blockchain ecosystems make apparent that the current
counter-revolutionary conditions, within which these system are utilized, largely serve as technological
fixes within the larger neoliberal modes of production (Figure 28). This, as we will discuss shortly, are
meant to answer capitalist contradictions while accelerating the processes within the neoliberal mode of
capitalist production, but is done so with unseen and unknown effects. There is a third possible way to
harness the means and modes of production for blockchain ecosystems in the realm of localized,
grassroots-based activism and economy, but this would require smaller scales of political economy to deal
Figure 27: Heterogeneity via Sentiment
with the above productions of blockchain space and the implication for those smaller scales based on the
form of pragmatic application and the resultant political economy that emerges via the sentiment through
any number of abstract spaces via token values.
This leads me to my previous assertion that the space/time of blockchain systems, as fused within
their coeval micro- and macro-spatial processes of renewal, produce emergent social, political, and
economic sentiment (the abstract condition) through one’s position (as developer, investor, user) to any
number of subjective perceptions which in turn forces the means of production (the human/machine
blockchain framework) into its processes of evolution to adapt to the modes of production being shifted
through the abstract condition. The miner within the decentralized network via the framework and
consensus protocol is now given agency for more than the purpose of consensus and governance; its
agency is infused with the politics of the abstract condition for the purpose of social and economic
reproductions of space. For the purpose of examining the above analysis, I turn to Harvey’s theory of
space/time compression and his analysis of capitalist functionalities and contradictions.
Figure 28: Modes of Pragmatic Application Production
Harvey initially has an issue with how space is conditioned and subdued relative to time which we
can see when the blockchain core processes within the means of production (Figure 29). As the means are
increasingly obfuscated, the abstract condition opts to increasingly promote the temporal efficiency of its
pragmatic application and obscure their true spatial natures as manifested through the production of their
token values. However, when we look back to the material spatial practices of developers, investors, and
users in their processes of producing token values within blockchain systems, we also observe the
reproduction of a social space in which conflicts between the material practices of the three groups, in
their respective temporal constructions, results in lumping together their temporal perceptions, their
Figure 29: Blockchain Space subdued by Time
Figure 30: Resolution of Space/Time Conflicts
systemic relations to varying scales per the blockchain system, and ultimately simplify the spaces of their
pragmatic application (Figure 30). When there is a shift in the abstract condition, it comes into direct
conflict with material spatial practices for one or more groups and their individual spatial practices
resulting in their simplification to the point of erasing the traces of social practice in both time and space.
As was seen in the course of the interviews, open conversations, and in the dialogues of the Reddit forums,
discussions on accessibility centered around getting more users and more use cases introduced into the
systems for investors for purposes of overall growth of a blockchain systems. Developers also saw a need
to get more accessibility which was tied to a number of concerns related to specific social, economic,
and/or political rationales, but centered on increasing the amount of human interaction within the
blockchain system to spur developer, investor, and user spatial practices. However, both groups had a
difficult time explaining how issues of distanciation for many people with accessibility issues would be
resolved. The investors specifically promoted persistent engagement with blockchain social spaces and
appropriation of their token values given their personal heuristics on the blockchain systems’ past and
current abstract condition; developer engagement was centered on appropriate use and use cases within
the social spheres surrounding the blockchain framework. The material spatial practices and their
processes of abstraction placed in relation to the abstract condition and the token value generation now
put developer, investor, and user positions in direct conflict with the varying perspectives (both internal
and external to those positions) in a struggle for control of the abstract space of the token value. These
social power dynamics now force subjugation or transformation in the modes of production for and by the
blockchain system, resulting in a change to the old or creation of the new. This process is exemplified in
the hard fork of Ethereum as seen in the dialogues of the Ethereum and Ethereum Classic subreddits.
These power dynamics now bring into this analysis the form, function, and structure of the token
value in relationship to the abstract condition of the blockchain ecosystem’s space/time. With a focus on
ultimately producing a profitable, exchangeable, fungible, and legitimate token (i.e., cryptocurrency), the
token value as commodity must negotiate the exchange/use value dialectic within a power dynamic which
forces a resolution through impacting socially necessary labor time (Figure 31). Unlike traditional economic
systems, the most important part of labor, the governance and consensus on the blockchain, is performed
by machines. Therefore, the resultant conflict between the abstract condition and the pragmatic
application mirror Harvey’s suggestion that this being/becoming relationship exposes the true nature of
these human/machine spaces through the symbolic ordering via token values (Figure 32).
This leads us to how the above processes are related to the creative destruction of labor and the
acceleration of economic processes (Figure 33). The use of cryptography and decentralized networks of
nodes are essential in maintaining blockchains; these core mechanisms within the blockchain system
require transactions via human or human automation to engage mining network protocol which, via its
agency, internally regulate the blockchain within the larger social dynamics of the abstract blockchain
Figure 31: Token Value Formation Figure 32: Token Value Dialectic Structure
condition for a given system. This means that given the form, function, and structure of the developer’s,
investor’s, and/or user’s material spatial practices, the social dynamics, in the processes of their
abstraction, also manifest a power dynamic through the position/perspective/sentiment triad of the
human agents which then becomes an imposed regime upon the blockchain framework and the
underlying decentralized network of miners. In this way, competition and crisis, for both human and
machine, is an integrated part of the core blockchain ecosystem as machine labor via the mining network
is infused with the aforementioned politics stemming from those social dynamics. However, instead of
erasing borders, these systems keep a record of how borders evolve and shift while accelerating via the
systemic crises such as hard/soft fork, changes to the protocol and framework, and the social dialogues
found within the written and recorded history of the developers, investors, and users of these systems.
Therefore, issues such as friction of distance are made visible via their spatial manifestations as seen in
the varying dialogues of the human agents (e.g., developers, investors, users) involved with and guiding
these
Figure 33: Effects on Labor
systems’ usages and evolutions in relation to subjective ethics, issues of ICT accessibility, and regulation
within the social, political, and economic dynamics of these larger global spaces. As was seen with
Ethereum and Bitcoin, hard forks have been initiated by social dialogues within political and economic
ethics related to the material spatial practices of the token value (i.e., cryptocurrency). As the crisis
accelerates, the competition to provide a solution within the contradictions of the space (shifts between
the abstract condition and pragmatic applications) and the result is devaluation of the token value. If the
resolution to this process is a change in the existing system, the token value will recover if the abstract
condition via the social power dynamics can maintain the material spatial practices of developers,
investors, and users in the reproduction of pragmatic applications. If resolution to this process is a new
blockchain system (as seen in Bitcoin and Ethereum forks) or maintaining of a variant of the old blockchain
system (such as Ethereum Classic), further crisis and competition will emerge effecting both the old and
new systems alike until the abstract conditions and pragmatic applications of both systems resolve their
conditions of being as distinct from the their historical legacies of becoming (in terms of stabilization of
material spatial practices following the creative destruction of labor within both the old and new systems
at their respective accelerations). In terms of the micro- and macro-scalar dynamics of these systems, the
ultimate goal of the abstract condition of the blockchain systems is to maintain an appearance of
homogeneity at the macro scalar as to not draw attention to the internal natures of these systems as
related to their means and modes of spatial production via the blockchain systems spatial,
human/machine organization.
This nexus of human/machine labor also exposes points made by Harvey on technological fixes
related to class dynamics (Figure 34). Within these systems, we are not seeing an egalitarian system of
exchange as promoted in many mainstream applications of this technology. We are in fact seeing a
reinvention of the mobilities of capital and labor as these systems have great potential in hyperaccelerating
expansion via micro- to macro-competition within global economic systems. However, the conflict
between the vectoralist bourgeois and the hacker working class takes three distinct forms: the machine-
to-machine competition as found within the DAO construction of the blockchain system; the machine-to-
human relation to transactions; and the abstract condition’s effects on human agents vis-a-vis one another
and how it affects the human-to-machine relation. As discussed above, the machines are designed and
then given an infused autonomous-agency to engage in competition which then affects a human agent via
the balance between token value to infrastructural investment. This then entails a dynamic in which the
form, function, and structure of transaction is negotiated between the human and machine with the
machine as the exploited working class within this lower layer of technological fix for the higher layer of
neoliberal capitalist practices as negotiated between the developers, investors, and users of these
blockchain systems. Though it appears that the human/machine relations control a sense of place in terms
of abiding by the framework and protocol of a blockchain system for an allegedly
‘revolutionary’ application, it is still at the mercy and control of the dominant capitalist spaces and logics
Figure 34: Technological Fixes and Class Dynamics
which ultimately guide its abstract conditions, space, and time.
In observation of the above dynamics relationship to decentralized autonomous organizations
(DAOs), and corporations (DACs), time/space compression uses the perspectives of the human agents (in
their material spatial practices) as the mediator of human/machine relations within the blockchain system
(as representations of space) which then codes the reproductions of these spaces (through the processes
of abstract condition reproduction), in an attempt to resolve contradictions that arise for spatial
fragmentation of capitalism through the homogenization of these spaces in their conceptions of
human/machine place. As we explored above, the conflicts between the micro- and macro-scalar, moving
from machine space dynamics to human social space, exemplify these processes as described by Harvey
as these demonstrate a persistent need to intensify labor and apply new technological fixes within new
organizational forms through automation in areas such as blockchain framework, machine learning, and
“Internet of Things” (IoT) devices. We sees these when examining the blockchain social space’s effect of
the conception and reproduction of the abstract condition for that very system. These systems also make
transparent how the attempts to diminish spatial barriers through the DAO concept via the blockchain
systems expose the increased sensitivity of capital shifts through these blockchain places within the larger
capitalist spaces: fragmented, unstable, uneven.
Code/Space
I have made many references in my analysis to blockchain systems as code/spaces due to the
meeting of several criteria as presented by Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge. Through an examination of the
core components of these systems (e.g., blockchain, cryptography, decentralized network), we can see the
overarching software framework, via a chosen protocol, is necessary in terms of how human agents engage
in processes of reproduction of these spaces. In order for the blockchain to grow, it must be mined by the
mining nodes and supplied transactions from humans and/or other machines. The blockchain is not an
inert record as through the cryptographic requirements of the system; it becomes the place through which
humans interact with the machine spaces and from there begin negotiating the social dynamics that then
manifest themselves, via the abstract condition and pragmatic application, as conceived through the
human agents’ material spatial practices. As seen within the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain systems and
between many other forms of blockchain system, these processes are neither deterministic nor universal
in how form, function, structures, and purposes within these systems contingently evolve within and
between each other.
In terms of the levels of code/space activity, we start with the mining node as coded object (Figure
35). Of all the actants in these blockchain systems, it requires the framework software to function as a
node and to maintain its form as a miner within the structures and purposes of the decentralized mining
network. The mining network, defined and governed by the framework as used by the mining nodes and
through which they are situated, constitutes the coded infrastructure through which the human
Figure 35: Blockchain Code/Space – Levels of Activity
agents form their social relations and spatial material practices. The human agents then used
cryptographically-signed transactions that the coded objects and infrastructures use to establish their
conditions within the blockchain systems’ coded processes. These processes vary depending on the
generation of blockchain technology and the form of DAO a particular blockchain system takes its intended
function and surrounding structures. Within the Bitcoin blockchain system, transaction within the process
are focused on the relatively simple state-of-value function for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. However, within
the Ethereum blockchain system, the transactions that are processed by the coded infrastructure are
smart contracts, which are data objects that are also coded objects within the virtual machines of the
Ethereum state machine. Not only that, but these virtually held coded objects can also produce other
functional coded objects within that same virtual machine anywhere in the decentralized infrastructure.
When we come to the level of coded assemblages as proposed by Kitchin and Dodge, a dilemma
arises. Bitcoin and its exchange relations to other cryptocurrencies fits the description of an assemblage:
its infrastructure and any number of other infrastructures can interact to exchange one cryptocurrency for
another. This is in terms of alt-coins of the Bitcoin framework and protocol as well as its mechanisms to
interface with newer generations of blockchain technologies such as Ethereum. However, how do we
classify an infrastructure like Ethereum when at the infrastructure level, smart contracts and the more
complex DAOs (as transactions) can conceive and perpetuate their own cryptocurrencies, crowd sales, and
liquid democracies virtually within that infrastructure’s coded objects (i.e., Ethereum’s decentralized
nodes), but then have the ability to act autonomously as coded objects themselves (post-validation to the
blockchain) in creation of their own coded objects and coded processes within Ethereum’s virtual
infrastructure (i.e., Ethereum’s virtual machine). Instead of creating coded assemblages from connected
coded infrastructures moving from micro- to macro-scale in the case of system scaling (such as automated
warehouses and other examples), we are creating two different forms of code/space via these transactions
moving from micro- to nano-scale. First, coded assemblages are created that sit in parallel with the
decentralized network in the case of smart contracts, but have autonomy in how they form as coded
objects post transaction and have the ability to establish their own processes given the limitations of the
programming language built for the blockchain framework and the human or machine actants’ ability to
manipulate it. The second potential code/space created is decentralized, autonomous infrastructure
(within any scale not exceeding the extent of the Ethereum decentralized network of mining nodes, but
not nested within it) within which it defines any number of coded infrastructures based on its own
framework, even
Figure 36: Potential Processes of Collective Autonomous Life (Ethereum)
to the point where those infrastructures can create smart contracts and DAOs (e.g., a DAO that interacts
with IoT devices and manipulates the data to provide a desired output as established via the DAO). Given
this ability to hyper-compress the space/time of these coded infrastructures within a very different form
of code/space, this has direct implications on both the production of space and its effects on humans
involved with and affected by these technologies within varying scales of political economy.
Though stated that these coded parts have the potential to produce a kind of collective,
autonomous life, Ethereum’s form of blockchain code/space gives us the opportunity to explore the
processes by which this may occur (Figure 36). Through the code walk-through and the analysis connecting
it to the conditions within the Ethereum social spaces of Reddit and specific cases of individuals guiding
these spaces, we can in many ways see how the developers and their numerous intents formed the
Ethereum blockchain in such a way that considered the code/space of the Bitcoin blockchain, built coded
objects and processes to interface with this legacy system, and then built a framework and protocol for a
new infrastructure using these considerations, but with a focus on the desired form, function, and
structure of developers for their material spatial practices (for Ethereum, a blockchain framework with a
Turing-complete language for the creation of smart contracts and DAO transactions). This allowed people
with Bitcoin to purchase Ether through the ICO crowdsale (later through digital currency exchanges) which
funded the development of the larger functionalities of the blockchain framework (e.g., key functions for
the core framework, tools for developers, tools for investors and users). Now looking to the code walk-
through, any individual with Ether can learn the smart contract/DAO language as not just a tool (or
medium) to produce a transaction, but to take form itself as a coded object (a token value via smart
contract functionality; one of the initial claims of Ethereum is that you could replicate Bitcoin within their
blockchain framework). A new form, function, and structure is encapsulated in its smart contract and/or
DAO framework, given a purpose through its conception, but also subject to the dynamics of the social
spaces of the larger blockchain community as the processes of spatial production begin to emerge from
the abstract condition/pragmatic application dialectic.
Figure 37: Potential Effects of Blockchain Technicity
This is a form of technicity much more evolved than that of Bitcoin; moving from cryptocurrency
to smart contracts and DAOs while advancing the capabilities of the infrastructures (hyper-accelerating
and compressing the space/time under which larger assemblages are conceived (Peck & Theodore, 2015))
(Figure 37). These productions of space also have the potential to then drastically affect the creative
destruction of labor and accumulation typical of neoliberal capitalism. If one can create a smart contract
within or in combination with a DAO/DAC that replicates the function of a human laborer, that jobs
become obsolete within the circuits of political economy seen today. The proposal of a company called
Chronobank (2017) stands to eliminate thousands of jobs in the recruitment industry by connecting skilled
labor directly to employers if they are to launch and be adopted successfully. Sberbank in Russia is
eliminating 3000 jobs by installing a robot lawyer (a weak AI program) which will process letters of
complaint (Naumoff, 2017). As these technologies advance in their ability to completely fulfill employee’s
job requirements, numerous crises will increasingly emerge in these human/machine code/spaces. In
these cases, code once again must be used as more than a tool; it is the language within which developers,
investors, and users are placing their politics, ethics, and codes which can then be read and deconstructed
like any other text. This was demonstrated in the connecting of documentation from the code to the
topical discussions found on Reddit and in the rhetoric of my study participants. This is where we also have
to ask whether code/spaces are defined through their co-production or if this should be expanded to a
condition of co-evolution within the cyborg spaces of the ever accelerating spatial productions of the
Anthropocene (affecting the physical, human, and cyberspaces in a simultaneous multiplicity of inter- and
intra-relations).
Code as a product as presented in the text does agree with the above analysis in terms of the
process of conception, manifestation, abstraction, and discursive relations. This extends to the assertion
that these blockchain spaces affect both the human spaces of everyday life while simultaneously being
effected by those spatial dynamics and relations. Within the context of nonrepresentational theory, we
can see aspects of the material spatial practices of developers and investors as instinctive and/or
subconscious as these are guided by the blockchain framework once established as a space which is
controlled by an abstract condition and any number of pragmatic applications. However, there is also an
answer to why these spatial practices are partially or completely automated in the course of resolving
persistent relational problems in that, as we have discussed with Ethereum’s smart contract and DAO
transaction process, these micro spaces become the most efficient way to resolve the internal conflicts of
abstract spatial production within the modes of neoliberal capitalism. As with the above examples, when
crises emerge from value extraction via the abstract spaces of the token value (i.e., a blockchain space
related to pragmatic application fails to yield a “promising” investment of token value and/or time), the
abstract condition begins its processes of reproduction through the social, economic, and political aspects
of the social space (often guided by developers who are also key investors or have tied their interests to
key investors via a provided use case) to then guide the developers, investors, and users in shifting the
forms, functions, and structures of these systems (both human and machine). In the case of the Ethereum
hard fork, a crisis emerged surrounding a hack of a DAO that was unintended by both the creators of that
DAO and the core developers of the Ethereum framework they were using. However, the token value of
both Ethereum and that DAO still yielded a “promising” investment to the holders of that token value
which forced the maintainers of the software framework to propose a shift in that space’s abstract
condition (i.e., the political idea that transactions are immutable on the blockchain) that would undo the
hack. Due to the mechanism of consensus within the means of production for that blockchain space, a
vote could be taken by the human maintainers of the mining nodes as to whether a hard fork should occur
to resolve this dilemma. In this case, the shift in form, function, and structure guided by the abstract
condition resulted in a bifurcation of the Ethereum community; resulting in the creation of Ethereum
Classic which then began its processes of reproduction via its abstract condition.
A final point to address is the concept of transduction (Figure 38). As elaborated above, these
blockchain frameworks not only have the ability to transfer labor and functionality into coded spaces and
code/spaces, it is the imperative at the core of their conception. I previously mentioned the persistent
Figure 38: Blockchain Code/Space Transduction
occurrence of “idea” as mentioned frequently in the course of interviews and open conversations related
to “concepts”. This coincided with the explanation of how certain blockchain-based projects would be
carried out in order to fulfill a pragmatic application within a larger blockchain ecosystem directly related
to human labor tasks. These tasks ranged from data storage and notary services via smart contracts and
hashing structures to banks and insurance companies via complex DAO assemblages. These human tasks
range from moderate to high skilled, single employee jobs to hundreds of thousands of jobs within global
finance industries. There was persistent mention within all three study areas regarding elimination of
third-parties. In terms of the interviews and Reddit content, this was in the context of reducing
unnecessary human labor. For the code walk-through, this was in the context of the internal governance
mechanism built into the core blockchain framework and its means of production.
The conversation on transduction then pertains to matters of tokenization. The transduction of
labor into these spaces in not just about the elimination of redundant human jobs that can be automated,
it is about the socially necessary labor time the jobs represents. If a business can maintain the same
function with a reproduction of the form and structure which yields equal or more profit, that profit comes
in the form of labor time, 100 percent extracted from collective, autonomous robot labor. Bitcoin has
survived, functions, and will continue to function because it is simple in respects to this form of
transduction. The protocol may be used for a great many things such as side-chain applications, metacoins,
and colored coins, but the primary purpose (and the purpose for which any change is made) is to produce
and sustain use of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. This is something that many people as developers, investors,
and users can perceive as reliable and legitimate because it is something they can understand in very
simple terms. Even if they do not understand the complexities of how monies or currencies are generated
and what that represents, they now (following the white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009) have little
trouble transducing such functionality and structures into underlying blockchain code/space forms that
sustain the
Bitcoin blockchain system. Despite the frequent mention of the complexity of the Bitcoin core framework
(which is open source and available for anyone to access), the simplicity is due to the condition of Bitcoin
as a DAO that provides a general use commodity via a tightly controlled set of robot laborers that mine
the blocks using proof-of-work in order to create consensus and trust in the blockchain and the resultant
token value: the Bitcoin money commodity in the form of the Bitcoin token. Blockchain frameworks such
as Dash and Zcash have take these concepts and applied them within the politics of security and privacy
as they provide a protocol that ensures transactions are recorded but remain obfuscated to all except the
sender and receiver of the transaction. This means that robot labor which regulates and mints blocks and
associated tokens for Dash or Zcash are now being controlled by an additional layer of robot labor which
regulates security and privacy.
As the complexity of a blockchain system and its resultant DAOs increase, so does the complexity
and difficulty of their abstraction processes into the token form; general understanding of a smart contract
is far more involved than that of a generalized currency and therefore becomes difficult to find a general
acceptance and use of the token form (representative of its underlying systems and its cryptocurrency).
This also means that the politics surrounding and permeating a more complex blockchain system becomes
more apparent as do the resulting contradictions in their purposes and ethics. The implications for
transduction are now tied to much more complex human processes in which developers and their material
spatial practices are responsible for the resultant representations of space and these now automated
processes within newer, more complex code/spaces. However, this is all contingent upon the social spaces
of the key human agents producing the blockchain spaces and their ability to negotiate the abstract
conditions by which the process of transduction occurs. Developers would have to transform a job or set
of jobs into a labor function with a form and structure that would meet the requirements the robot labor
would then need to fulfill within the contract language. The related DAO would accept and then institute
this robot laborer via a blockchain transaction. This may be another point at which a crisis emerges in
these systems as the use cases presented by developers, investors, and users become more complex,
requiring a much more involved process of spatial production of the surrounding scales of code/space and
their intricate micro-spatial relations.
Network Society
Examination of the data sets collected for this thesis exposes another dimension of these
human/machine code/space. As the processes surrounding transactions and block generation reproduce
themselves and one another, often encapsulated and abstracted via a symbol token, they provide another
direct challenge to the distance-lacking network society. This challenge comes in the dialogues emerging
from the critical discourse on scaling these code/space architectures (Figure 39). In the now present proof-
of-work-enabled systems, these decentralized systems that span the globe experience both technical and
social barriers to entry which manifests themselves in the mining of the blockchain. Each side (technical
and social) necessitates the other’s condition of existence in their respective spatial productions: the social
harnesses a geopolitic, within and surrounding a blockchain ecosystem, relating any number of economic
systems to this, and then perpetuates the standards of both within the
Figure 39: Blockchain Scaling and Network Society – Borders
development of a compatible software framework. However, the blockchain ecosystem and its core
components (e.g., blockchain, cryptographic security, distributed mining) have now had three generations
of evolution in which not only have the applications of the blockchain technologies expanded beyond a
state-of-value as seen in Bitcoin, they now enter the realm of ‘non-economic’ applications which are
ironically still commodified within neoliberal capitalist dynamics. These are ‘code/spaces’ as not only
defined in the sense that Dodge and Kitchin presented through their work, but also through the measure
of the social and economic distances (i.e., flows and puddles) that indicate shifts in politics (which
manifests in the abstract condition) since the conception of the blockchain as promoted by Satoshi
Nakamoto.
These shifts and their resultant distances can be seen in all data sets. The first and most dominant
border creating shifts are found in the social space dynamics of developers to investors and users (via the
use-case). In many ways, the newer generations of blockchain framework are blank slates: they can be
used in any number of ways to create a pragmatic application for a use case. As discussed above, this
happens within three interrelated spaces: the abstract condition; the micro-spatial processes; and the
macro-spatial processes. The social space affects the form, function, and structures within which the
material spatial practices occur for and with the developers and the blockchain framework. The
microspatial processes of the miners must operate within the protocol assigned to their labor tasks. The
macrospatial, which dominates the use-case as provided by the investor (by or as the user which may be
a developer, fellow investor, or user in everyday life), acts through the abstract condition of this burgeoning
blockchain code/space to then negotiate distance between the users of the potential pragmatic
applications and the mean of production through which the scale of pragmatic application is bound (i.e.,
the distributed network of nodes and the related algorithmic protocols). This process of negotiation takes
form in the physical aspects of accessibility to and within ICT infrastructure around the world (via the
required hardware, software, and knowledge to leverage these means of production (i.e., the mechanisms
of the blockchain framework)). The result is a limitation of the extent and penetration of this form of
code/space infrastructure to form the limitless coded assemblage status as promoted through many
blockchain-based companies and service providers. We can see this in the discussion surrounding
distribution of and access to mining resources in the process of establishing Ethereum Classic as a
legitimate blockchain system. In the process of bifurcation from Ethereum, during and post hard fork, the
concerns immediately turned to how a secure consensus through a critical mass of mining nodes could be
achieved. Without this critical mass, crises of over-accumulation would plague this framework via a
concentration of mining power through the proof-of-work-enabled decentralized network. In the physical
sense of decentralization to and within ICT/Internet systems, Ethereum Classic had to establish the extent
of their network (i.e., its borders of functionality via its form and structure) in order to be seen as a
legitimate entity within the cyberspaces of blockchain systems.
However, there is another border forming set of processes happening across and guiding from
within the three interrelated spaces mentioned above: the developer/investor social space dynamics and
their relation to any number of ephemeral ethics (Figure 40). The physical aspects of these blockchain
ecosystems, via the human/machine code/spaces co-evolution, requires a persistent engagement with the
hardware, software, and the coded matériel (via the programming languages and their documentation)
from and dominated by the processes of the abstract condition for a given blockchain framework. The
dialogue within and between developers must as some point engage with the dialogue within and
between investors; these dialogues involve one another in defining use-cases through which the pragmatic
application will be conceived. These set the terms of the material spatial practices of both, resulting in the
abstraction of the processes leading to the creation of the pragmatic application through the established
modes of spatial production. In the case of public blockchain projects, much of this is transparent in terms
of the open-source software that anyone with access to it can obtain and examine. Many projects with
resources to do so ensure that at a minimum there is a website, social media, and multi-media resources
available to inform the voyeurs of these spaces of the blockchain systems intent. Bitcoin and Ethereum
both have the resources and reach to ensure their use-case providers have ample information to engage
with and use the means of production of these systems, extending this to the social spaces of
blockchainrelated conferences and the more focused developer conferences (or smaller hackathons).
However, the voyeurs of these spaces rarely see the processes within the social spaces of the
developer/investors dynamics that ultimately determine the material spatial practices (even through
videos, podcasts, and other conversations made open to the public). This is because it is often hiding in
plain sight. There is a literacy needed on both the part of the developer and investor in their material
spatial practices. For developers, there is a barrier in the ability to produce understanding of how the use-
case take form through coded matériel resulting in the pragmatic application as negotiated via the
developer/investor social dynamics. For investors, there is a barrier in the ability to understand developer
processes for both their internal utilization and external proselytization. Though both appear to be
transparent, these barriers establish a knowledge/power dynamic over the physical and ephemeral
aspects of these systems, creating real borders to true entry with these system. One can see this in
Ethereum code documentation and how it
Figure 40: Blockchain Scaling and Network Society – Ethics
manifests through the blockchain system documentation, and the dialogues of Reddit and other
blockchain communities. Developers, as key contributors to these dialogues, affect and are affected by the
other members of the communities who desire or need to leverage these systems in any number of
pragmatic applications. But the processes that reproduce the abstract condition via the social space
through the abstraction process into the token value is mired with the tropes of coded language of both
the developer and the investors, within and between these blockchain systems.
The relation of the developers and investors to each other in their material spatial practices not
only produces the representations of space at the micro-spatial and macro-spatial scales, but also
produces an ethics through their negotiations with the physical and ephemeral aspects of these systems’
borders. Bitcoin and Ethereum both work diligently to ensure their language is internationally
understandable and accessible. However, the borders of the physical systems are still dominated by the
people and nations that can afford investment in these blockchain ecosystems (both in human and
machine labor resources) and interpret their numerous coded languages. A developer, investor, and/or
user wanting to enter a blockchain space or a number of blockchain spaces must then negotiate how
understanding of these systems and their abstract conditions (still partly unknown due to the coded
language obscuring the internal spatial relations of developers and investors) must then accommodate
their own social spaces and processes of spatial production within a burgeoning abstract condition in
which they begin another layer of abstraction via the relations between their use-case and the unknown
manifestations of their pragmatic applications. They must then utilize their forms of robot labor in a way
that ultimately accommodates the production of spaces within and surrounding their pragmatic
applications. The developer/investor dynamic over the blockchain framework, whether inadvertently or
intentionally, creates a set of borders (though informal as they maybe) in terms of the ethics tied to the
sense of accessibility via the coded language regimes of systemic agents and actants. This is ultimately
what produces the multi-scalar senses of place for agents and actants in these blockchain systems and
larger network societies.
Conclusion
At the time of drafting this for review, I contemplated attending the 2017 North American
Bitcoin Conference in Miami (one of the largest blockchain technology conferences in the
world). Despite the raise in Bitcoin and Ether value in January of that year, the primary
payment option for the conference was still US dollars. To pay with cryptocurrency, one
had to email the organizers directly to arrange for payment in Bitcoin and Ether; no other
cryptocurrencies were accepted. They responded to me stating they would accept any of
the top ten cryptocurrencies on an exchange which also happened to be the
cryptocurrencies that had the highest levels of exchange to US dollars at that time.
Cash was still the preferred method of payment.
“What is the purpose of human life… what is value?”
In the course of exploring the research question for this thesis, we have addressed numerous
aspects and relations of the production of blockchain spaces to the realms of political economy,
code/space, and network society. This was accomplished through a case study of two blockchain systems,
Bitcoin and Ethereum, within three data set: semi-structured interviews and open conversations; content
analysis of Reddit communities associated with these two systems; and a walk-through of the processes
and code related to the Ethereum Project use-cases as experienced from a user and developer perspective.
These data sets were then examined individually and collectively through the three distinct approaches: a
phenomenology of these systems’ developer, investor, and user material spatial practices; a content and
discourse analysis of their larger communities dialogues on the forms, functions, and structures of these
systems based on the individual and collective perspectives, positions, and sentiments; and a systemic
analysis of the software framework of Ethereum as a text to determine the connections to the larger
phenomenology and discourses of developers, investors, and users.
In examining how spatial production of blockchain ecosystems occurs by and with the blockchain
software/hardware frameworks as DAOs from the situated contexts of the human/machine dialectic, we
were able to explore the manner in which the means of production for each of these systems are
distinguished from each other. We examined how developers currently dominate these spaces via their
control over the means of production and how they play a major role in the process of reproduction of the
social, political, and economic dynamics contextualizing both the systems and the systems’ byproducts.
The counter to this influence is found in the investor position, its associated logics, and the simultaneous
conception of the sentiment (the abstract condition) of the modes of spatial production for a given
blockchain ecosystem (the human/machine code/space). These relate to any number of use-cases intra-
or inter-blockchain system, the pragmatic applications, which then integrate into the means and modes of
production within the political economy of neoliberal capitalism. Much of this is facilitated through a
transference of agency with the human/machine dialectic of collective, automated labor via the
distributed network of nodes required for the blockchain framework and gives form, function, and
structure to that network as well as the overarching framework via the abstract condition, all of which is
ultimately abstracted into the token form of value.
I came to this conclusion based on the developer participant personal accounts of their material
spatial practices which were then placed in the larger context of the Reddit posts. The subreddits also
served as the communication mechanism by which developers would translate their coded language to
the large community of investors and users in terms of the systems’ functionality, any issues related to the
system or functionality, and how these related to any number of external concerns for projects requiring
knowledge of the token value, the blockchain framework, and/or the potential exchange value. These
areas also show how crises in the conception and abstraction processes related to token values are
symptomatic of the internal contradictions and the processes of their resolution as described in the event
leading up to and following the Ethereum hard fork. This thread of analysis concluded with an examination
of the effects of scale, simultaneity, and multiplicity as manifested in the heterogeneous action taken
within the human/machine dynamics of the blockchain framework. This is typified in the manner by which
a contradiction calls for a technological fix to either reform the blockchain ecosystem or create a new
variant as seen in the creation of Ethereum Classic.
The examination of the modes of spatial production reveal the distinct relations to current modes
of neoliberal capitalist production studied extensively in human geography and how these blockchain
systems both manifest these modes of production in their political economies and their crises. This
entailed examination of these spaces’ means, modes, and mindsets dominating their unique spatial
productions which began with the blockchain framework. The framework encapsulate the protocol and
mechanisms required by the system to situate itself as a blockchain system. The framework is also the
space in which the material spatial practices of the developers, investors, and users are manifest through
its means, giving it form, function, and structure within its specific modes of production. Bitcoin and
Ethereum as open-source projects, within which unique human politics are leveraged in a social space
with numerous economics considerations, exemplify how the resultant token value carries with it the
abstract condition of those relations in both the framework and the processes by which these systems
reproduce those conditions via the exploitation of automated robot labor and shifts in the
human/machine dialectic based on the pragmatic application. This involved an examination of how these
differed through their similar consensus mechanisms and protocols which produced very different effects
based on their frameworks reflecting of the intent imposed by the human agents upon the
human/machine dialectic. This related to the legacy of these systems’ evolution from the initial Bitcoin
blockchain to that of Ethereum in how developers as the dominant class within the social and technical
spaces of the blockchain technology have ultimately leveraged their knowledge/power dynamics to
accumulate wealth via the token value, and shifted them into the role of investor. This now directly affects
the processes of spatial production for the framework as a developer-driven condition is now conflicting
with the investor driven one. This not only affects the form, function, and structure of the framework, it
means that there is also an imbalance within the power dynamics tied to the token value system as
situated within and between wider systems of token value exchange and their respective knowledge
structures, placing users at an extreme disadvantage. As reflected in the collective examination of the data
sets, this could and has resulted in the abstract condition’s dominance over the pragmatic application as
conceived via the framework. For example, there is no generally accepted ethic for how these systems are
used as they are viewed as inert and only given an ethic when actualized within a specific use-case
(ultimately denying any form of politics being attached to the framework). Another example is in the
opinions of accessibility improvement in such a way that users entering the system can utilize the system,
but at the upper level of a layered obfuscation of the underlying framework via a simple user interface
(once again eschewing the politics of the framework via its abstract condition). Even when used as a
technological fix within the means and modes of capitalist production, it is presented as a means through
which efficiency and reliability of an existing system is achievable, but only as a tool within the existing
politics of that space and not as a means of creative destruction of labor, means of accelerated
accumulation, and catalyst of crisis that the implementation of the framework could potentially manifest.
Through obscuring of the politics as applied within the abstract condition and then reformed through the
token value, the practical application is produced via these means as inert and can then take on the politics
of the use-case.
Finally, these systems were analyzed in terms of their conditions as code/spaces and networks
within the context of network society. A comparison between the two theories (i.e., code/space and
network society) suggests many symmetries between the two schools of thought. However, using
blockchain systems as a case study to both expose the bifurcations and juxtapositions in those symmetries,
we expanded both the theoretical possibilities for code/spaces and network society while simultaneously
expanding the exposition on how blockchain systems connect to and manifest the conditions of DAOs to
the human/machine dynamic. The data supports the assertions that blockchain ecosystems meet the
criteria of coded objects and processes. However, their forms, functions, and structure make defining them
as infrastructures and/or assemblages in their own rights difficult. This is due to the introduction of Turing-
complete language used for smart contract and DAO creation which in turn reproduces a micro-scalar
space of blockchain form, function, and structure based on, but not determined by that initial blockchain
space. These new micro-scalar spaces can then, if so conceived as part of a new abstract condition, build
yet another micro-scalar space ad infinitum. As shown in the data, hash tree structures using various forms
of induction and recursion have the potential to store massive amounts of data on these blockchains. This
also means that these code/spaces can not only scale in either the micro or macro directions, but they can
create their own interstitial spaces that do the same and in turn produce borders in the code and
infrastructures of these distributed networks and any networks that connect to or contain them. However,
these spatial productions are still conceived through human domination of the abstract conditions that
interacts to create these code/spaces, then reproduce within the human/machine code/spaces of the
originating blockchain frameworks. The ability of these code/spaces to compress or unfold space/time
within their spatial productions becomes the place of displacement and deferral for crises within the
modes of capitalist production. This displacement depends upon the concept of transduction, where the
processes connected to tokenization (via the token value of cryptocurrency) then become the vehicle of
encapsulation for crises through automation and obfuscation of the mechanisms within the means that
are creating the crises in the modes of neoliberal capitalist production. This extends from social conflicts
over security and privacy to the labor and logistics issues of corporations. We then use all of the above
points to debunk the idea that network societies, such as those in the blockchain space, are borderless
and distanceless intra-system. When examining the human/machine dialectic of these spaces and how
conflict, as part of their nature, creates shifts in old spaces or creates new spaces, the result are spatial
productions that have to account for the scale of the physical and coded spaces, producing geographic
borders via the conflicting abstract conditions (social, political, and economic) within the varying aspects
of the evolving code/spaces.
The assessment for these courses of study and thesis is that these specific technologies and their
various manifestations are not the revolutionary technologies promoted to many consumer bases, but are
a technological fix with immense potential to both answer and complicate issues related to neoliberal
capitalism and its related political economies. The space of the blockchain and its processes are grounded
in the qualitative context of the social dynamics by which that are both produced, given form, function,
and structure to not only overt byproducts of their use (pragmatic applications), but the underlying politics
embedded in both the byproducts and the systems that produce them both (abstract conditions). This
produces contradiction such as the legitimacy that is wanted for cryptocurrencies with an absolute lack of
regulatory purview, but legitimacy from people would need regulation of some sort to ensure recourse for
violations within the system. However, such legitimacy would be in direct economic contention with
political and economic entities which currently hold those powers dominantly around the world today. It
is therefore critical that we take what is presented in the literature and expand it towards our present and
possible future; this is what these studies, this thesis, and my continued research attempt to accomplish.
Limitations
New cyber geographies present challenges not previously engaged geographically, but stand to
gain the most from that engagement which only the interdisciplinary field of geography can provide. As
the literature pertaining to these newer forms of spatial production and political economy grow, so will
the ability of researcher to engage the more complex and technical aspects of these spaces. If interviews
and open conversations are to be used, there will be a need for a larger sample of participants as the
number obtained for this thesis were far less than desired. This includes far more ethnographic
involvement with key developers of these technologies which for the purpose of this study were
developers of the Pyethereum software. Also, to perform a far more complex, textual, and symbolic
analysis of the texts collected for this thesis, more time and resources will be needed to develop the
custom and open-source software used which would make the analysis and interpretation much easier to
perform and reproduce for validation. There are lingering questions surrounding delineation of simple
robot labor (miners) from more complex robot labor (smart contracts and DAOs) within the heterogeneous
dimensionalities of automated and AI labor that require additional research focused, in part, on blockchain
technologies as a new manner by which labor power is organized. Those answers would improve and
expand on the distinction of cyber geographies via code/spaces and their robot/cyborg relations from
human geographies of human/machine spaces of social relations that are still a determinant factor in the
productions of code/spaces.
Significance
At the time of writing this thesis, Coinbase (one of the largest digital currency exchanges) was sent
a subpoena by the IRS for records of all US customers (Armstrong, 2017). These technologies are expected
to reach market caps in the billions in 2017 which is less than a decade from the creation and initial
implementation of Bitcoin. It is assumed by many speculators in these spaces that 14% of governments
will be using blockchains by the end of 2017 and 90% of all governments globally will be using some form
of this technology by 2020 (Zaharchuk, 2017). The UAE has begun integrating these systems into their
central banking system (Central Bank of The United Arab Emirates, 2017) and the US is quickly examining
the ways in which these systems can be used for payments, clearing, and settlement (Federal Reserve
Board, 2016). Despite the work on blockchains’ effects on banking, governance, and how humans affect
these evolving systems, there has been little critical work done on their geographic effects within political
economy; a gap that private, multi-national companies are rapidly filling with ample rhetoric (MacDonald,
Allen, Potts, 2016; Reijers, O'Brolcháin, Haynes, 2016; De Filippi & Loveluck, 2016; BBVA, 2016). Almost a
decade after Bitcoin’s genesis, this rhetoric is still being negotiated from blockchain code/spaces to the
broad dialogues between developers, investors, and the world which are quickly being dominated through
the funding and direction of large blockchain consortiums who are keen on garnering adoption of their
respective frameworks (Figure 41) (Marr, 2017; Buntinx, 2017; Braunstein, Volintiru, Laboure, 2017). Usage
of these technologies for global, distributed citizenship movements and basic income cannot escape the
increasing focus on these technologies for the acceleration of neoliberal capitalist processes and the
commodification of new forms of poverty (d’Anconia, 2017; Kastelein, 2017; Iyer, 2017; Thomason, 2017).
In many ways, the rhetoric promoting these technologies and their applications as revolutionary obscure
the fact that industries are simply retrofitting existing systems, ideas, and people to make them fit a new
paradigm for political economy and the spaces of everyday life.
Studies such as this thesis position geography as a key discipline through which studies,
methodologies, methods, and validation can be developed. This is due to the sheer complexity of the
functional mechanisms and processes involved at the micro- and macro-scales of these human/machine
code/spaces. For research related to the production of space, there is great potential in how we approach
