The trust and belief in bitcoin as a remedy to purported problems with traditional finance has been reflected in the popular discourse around bitcoin. There is hyperbole, half-truth, and excitement here and much blurring in this discourse between bitcoin as currency, bitcoin as technology, bitcoin as the free market realised, bitcoin as commodity, bitcoin as investment, cryptocurrency as in bitcoin, cryptocurrency in general, the blockchain as in bitcoin, or the blockchain as in general. Digital discussion is discomfortingly reliant on the Californian Ideology and business, journalistic, investor, and enthusiast commentary regarding the apparent utopian impact of digital technologies on economies and societies in the twenty first century. This discourse is not disinterested. As Fisher suggests, “the discourse on technology is not a transparent vignette on reality but rather a particular outlook on it…technology not only constitutes the material foundations of modern societies but also functions as its legitimation” (Fisher, 2010, p 2). A trading firm research analyst has announced that, “[w]e see the intrinsic value of Bitcoin as the conduit in a new global crowd-funded open-source payment network” (in Popper, 2015, p 347). Bitcoin has been described, by various enthusiasts, as “the internet of money” (Popper, 2015, p 430) and the “first online currency based on highly distributed trust” (Popper, 2015, p 434). Somewhat immodest claims have been made on behalf of the possibilities of bitcoin: It “will replace the current financial system” (Falkvinge in Golumbia, 2016, p 81); it is to money what the Internet was to property, “with Bitcoin giving people control over their money and trade again, [there is] the potential for a monumental shift in the power structure of the world” (Barber, 2015); and it is posited “as the new First Amendment app” (Falkvinge in Golumbia, 2016, p 67). It is announced that the bitcoin “blockchain is as revolutionary today as were personal computers in 1975, and the internet in 1993” (Andreessen in Golumbia, 2016, p 87). One early adopter excitedly exclaimed that it is, “the first thing I know where you can both get rich and change the world” (Voorhees in Popper, 2015, p 9). Bitcoins are “the most important invention since the internet itself. They will change the way the entire world does business” (Ver in Popper, 2015, p 130). This is the “future universal currency, as science fiction had promised” (Popper, 2015, p 142); it “will change the entire world in a decade” (Popper, 2015, p 149); and “Bitcoin is the first time in five thousand years that we have something better than gold” (Popper, 2015, p 220). Finally, “[a] decentralised, anonymous, self-verifying and completely reliable register of this sort is the biggest potential change to the money system since the Medici. It’s banking without banks, and money without money” (Lanchester, 2016, p 8) Taken at face value then, on the one hand, there is interesting potential to be explored in bitcoin and a challenge to established financial power. On the other hand, this might all be merely “myopic technological utopianism” (Golumbia, 2016, p 42) or a deliberate attempt to talk up a venture capital investment.Footnote 10

Perhaps the apogee of bitcoin discourse is presented by ideologue Kelly (2015) in The Bitcoin Big Bang: How Alternative Currencies Are About to Change the World. Bitcoin discourse gains its evangelical zeal and its “euphoria stems from the realisation that Bitcoin could be the vehicle that transforms the financial system from centralised to decentralised” (Kelly, 2015, p 59) Kelly proclaims that, “[a] decentralised system is superior to the centralised system when preventing a failure at the hub is essential. There remains a risk that multiple hubs fail at the same time, but it is a step forward in the evolution of systems” (Kelly, 2015, p 67) This mirrors the discussion of decentralised networks instigated by Baran which I discuss further below. Instead of decentralisation being considered as based upon a geopolitical decision, being a contingent choice, serving a specific historical function, and with appropriate cost-analysis, it is claimed to be “superior,” and indeed, a “step forward in the evolution of systems.” The ideological process of universalising and naturalising that which is cultural and specific is achieved by positing decentralization as partaking in evolution and natural selection. The idea of technological change as quasi-autonomous, driven by some process of autopoiesis or self-organisation, “allows many aspects of contemporary social reality to be accepted as necessary, unalterable circumstances, akin to facts of nature” (Crary, 2014, p 36) In this way bitcoin and digital discourse “naturalizes, theologizes and teleologizes network technology” (Fisher, 2010, p 185). This discourse considers progress due to network technology as being a natural law and inevitable. Digital discourse thereby “neglects negative aspects of technology and society and provides a profoundly undialectical picture of the Internet and society” (Fisher, 2010, p 209) The consequence, for Fisher, is that digital discourse depoliticizes and neutralises the relation of technology and society. It is seen as something that the social should serve rather than serving the social.

There are examples of how, like other digital intermediaries, bitcoin enthusiasts must discursively frame their services and technologies as the march of progress, as superior, natural, and inevitable. They must also lay out a cultural imaginary within which their service makes sense (Wyatt, 2004). In the digital cultural imaginary, it is essentially compulsory that the individual be on-line, consuming, gambling, gaming, working, blogging, downloading, or texting 24/7: “since no moment, place, or situation now exists in which one can not shop, consume, or exploit networked resources, there is a relentless incursion of the non-time of 24/7 into every aspect of social or personal life” (Crary, 2014, p 30). Bitcoin, with its ethos of ultra-fast and smooth transactions, partakes of this 24/7 instantaneous imaginary. The digital cultural imaginary both fosters and requires “nodal citizenship” and “nodal consumption.” For Bolimer, “nodal citizenship” is Deleuzian control, and Foucauldian governmentality of the self. Digital culture is not simply just a set of technological platforms or devices, but normalises certain behaviours, and carries specifications for “the proper conduct one should internalise in a world defined by network technologies…in which the maintenance of connections and perpetuation of flows is the task of a good ‘citizen,’ especially as embodied by the materiality of network technology” (Bolimer, 2016, p 6). During Fordism, technology discourse and the cultural imaginary legitimated the interventionist welfare state, central planning in business and the economy, the hierarchized coroporation, and the tenured worker. However, during financialization and our contemporary, post-Fordist society, technological discourse and the cultural imaginary legitimates instead, “the withdrawal of the state from markets, the globalization of the economy, the dehierarchization and decentralization of business, and the flexibilization of production and the labour process” (Fisher, 2010, p 3).

Such a cultural imaginary is one in which centralization is deemed an impediment to the decentralised flow of neoliberal finance. All government, especially centralised government is deemed oppressive, all central banks are rotten, finance and consumption must face no temporal or spatial limit, and freedom is freedom to engage smoothly in markets and neoliberalism and not freedom from markets and neoliberalism. In such bitcoin discourse several tropes come together—libertarian tropes from Nakamoto such as no need to “trust” government or banks, techno-utopian tropes such as efficiency, speed, connectivity, and cyber-anarchist tropes such as freedom, decentralization, distribution, and anonymity. Bitcoin’s social and cultural imaginary is one in which government and banks cannot ever be trusted, where digital technology is always empowering, and where decentralized individual anonymity is preferred to collective recognition of social identity. Any form of regulation, law, centralisation, organisation, and collectivity, is rendered politically problematic and invisible to this imaginary. Such notions are considered big government interference, the road to serfdom, and an obstacle to be overcome. The corporation, neoliberalism, the free market, and economic power however, apparently need no check on their own trustworthiness, centralisation, growth and consolidation.

As Gillespie has shown with the notion of “platform”Footnote 11regarding Facebook, a term such as “decentralised,” (or “distributed,” or “financial flow,” or “trust”) in bitcoin discourse can become a “discursive resting point” (Gillespie, 2010, p 350) that conceals and elides various tensions. Further innovations may be oriented towards that idea of how technology is to function in the social and cultural imaginary. Such terms “institute” a way of being: as Bourdieu puts it, they “sanction and sanctify a particular state of things, an established order, in exactly the same way that a constitution does in the legal and political sense of the term” (Bourdieu in Gillespie, 2010, p 350). In bringing together ideas of decentralisation, digital utopianism, and technological progress, right-wing libertarian ideology sets and shapes public discourse around digital currencies: “These terms and claims get further established, reified, and enforced as they are taken up and given legitimacy inside authoritative discourses such as law, policy, and jurisprudence” (Gillespie, 2010, p 356) This discourse maps onto recent enthusiasm for user-generated content, amateur expertise, popular creativity, peer-level social networking, and online commentary. Aside long-standing rhetoric about the alleged democratizing potential of the Internet, bitcoin rhetoric is like much digital discourse with connotations of “open, neutral, egalitarian, and progressive support for activity” that accompany the notion ‘platform’ as Gillespie has identified (Gillespie, 2010, p 353). This discourse functions to make the terms compelling for digital intermediaries to appeal to users, especially in contrast to traditional mass media or, in the case of bitcoin, traditional economic institutions. However, despite the promises made, “ 'platforms’ are more like traditional media than they care to admit…And the discourse of the ‘platform’ works against us developing such precision, offering as it does a comforting sense of technical neutrality and progressive openness” (Gillespie, 2010, p 360) Likewise, as shall be argued, decentred financial networks function more like traditional financial powerhouses and operate in line with the power structures of centralized networks. There is no neat ideological fit between the digital dream of the decentralized, open, participatory web, and the digital reality. Within such fissures critique can operate.Footnote 12

Bitcoin discourse and Nakamoto’s white-paper collates into a series of presuppositions that I would like to begin to problematize. First, that decentralized networks and free-markets without regulation or government mediation are fully enabling and apolitical. I challenge this by emphasising the right-wing ideology inherent in bitcoin technology and discourse. Second, there is a valorisation of decentralisation that is in some sense a progression from centralisation. This notion forgets the architecture and origins of the internet. It also omits the threats to decentralisation such as the virus and hacking. Finally, there is a utopian sensibility around the network that does not consider the problems of networks. I suggest this is a form of network-fetishism.Footnote 13