I wrote an academic paper on Bitcoin for a sociology journal

Long time lurker, first time poster in this subreddit. I have written a paper on some of the more sociologically interesting aspects of Bitcoin, and would be interested to hear if the community had any opinions on it.

If you happen to have institutional access to the small Danish sociology journal Distinktion you can read a nicely formatted and proofread version here, if not you can read my ass-ugly Word version at my personal web page.

The TL:DR for the paper - which I realise is probably a bit heavy on the sociological theory, sorry about that - is that I consider Bitcoin to be an exciting and novel technological innovation that will have consequences in the way electronic transactions are handled in the future, but also that I don't think Bitcoin is a revolutionary new way of doing monetary policy, like a lot of people seem to assume. As a sociologist, I see markets as something more than a technical-economic question. They are also tied to a lot of institutions and ways of doing things which are far stickier than they seem. For example, I don't think people will be ready to accept a world where they are themselves personally responsible for keeping their money safe from theft or tampering. There are lots of "old" economic institutions that will get involved to make Bitcoin look a lot more like traditional currencies as it becomes more popular - and that includes types of regulation that does not appeal so much to the libertarians that originally designed it. Phew, that's a long TL:DR...

Oh, and if you see something in here that isn't correct, you're probably right. A couple of points in my defence:

1) The way academic publishing works, getting a paper out takes a long time. Given that things in Bitcoinland are developing extremely fast, a lot of the information in here is already outdated.

2) This is written for an audience that don't necessarily know anything about Bitcoin. Also, I'm neither an economist nor a computer scientist, so I'm sure there are mistakes in the technical descriptions here - I already see there are things I would have worded differently if I could rewrite it. I'm posting it here so you guys can understand something about what a sociologist sees when looking at something like Bitcoin.

That being said, feel free to criticize me!

EDIT: A word.

submitted by henrikkarlstrom

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