The Indifference Engine: The Immaculate Misconception of Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work
Can it still be argued that Bitcoin is less than the sum of its parts?
We resume after the multi-part autoepistemological-memoiristic mashup of Axiomatic Realism, which will hopefully be out in the world in joined-up and final form before too long. I’ll let you know, not least because there’s rumour that an exhibition will accompany publication. Keep an eye out over at https://arsscientia.online.
This time it’s a a free post — free as in FREE PALESTINE, and also without paywall — from the archives. My (meltdown) story goes like this. A few years ago, shortly after I exited my journal editor’s position at the Epstein scandal-ridden MIT Media Lab, no longer restricted by the confines of ‘being publicly aligned’ with my colleagues at the incredibly conservative and orthodox de facto MIT Bitcoin research group — at that time, the largest concentration of Bitcoin Core contributors in the world in one organisation — I realised that I could, finally, say what I actually thought without hiding behind a myriad of aliases. In retrospect, the invention of a “collective-fiction” like the 0xSalon was at least in part a decoy which allowed a veritable multiplicity of anon sockpuppet-auteurs to spring forth and say the things that I was not able to at the time.1
The best thing about aliases — especially fake-collective ones — is that they engender a sense of mystique, of danger even. In many cases, people assume it’s some cool, famous, hot, or at least white people. Sorry to disappoint. One can come clean whenever one wants, and in effect collapse the aliases back into the default authorly persona. I’ve been doing that for the last little while, and indeed many of these fake-mes were the worst-kept-secrets around, iykyk, and most everyone that knew me, knew.
The flipside is that, well, the kudos due to the alias might not flow back to you so smoothly, and other people that were around but not involved might end up attracting some of those vibes. For sure that happened in these cases too, on both sides of the Hanlonian divide. Not naming any names here. Iytykyk.
Anyway, back to the point. I had found Bitcoin quite early, and softened over the 2010s from an overly science-brained and black-pilled universal sceptic to finding hope for liberatory and emancipatory potential within the network and its affordances. See for example these pieces on Bitcoin, privacy and freedom for the goTenna-funded publication In The Mesh (1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5), some written with old friend Matthew Breen. However, as time accrued in its ledger, the costs were stacking up much faster than the benefits. And at some point the sickly smell of burning oil and boiling oceans flipped my perspective on proof-of-work. The Indifference Engine was my vehicle to explore those: I gave some talks here and there, including at a pandemic edition of Chaos Communication Congress on the subject in late ‘20. By late summer ‘21, I proposed to write a piece for the wonderful Weird Economies platform, and not for the first time realised I’d promised far too broad a swathe to fit in the articular frame of the-usual-few-thousand-words.
“Due to the rigid formalisms encoded by the protocol’s chain selection ruleset, the Bitcoin ledger is a collective technofinancial hallucination where capital and energy, applied over time, dictate reality.”
Bitcointingency, Weird Economies, 2022.
As I recall, I wrote the essay plan and realised that it was about 80% of the length of what was wanted. A parallax delineating prodigious efficiency and horrendous overshoot that might have made a good episode of classic Star Trek.2 I refactored my thoughts and realised I had the makings of a serious book on my hands, duly parcelled off an apropos line of sight for WE, and got back to writing in the expanded scope. I had a publisher firmly in mind, and eventually heard back informally that though the subject was on-point, the humanist punchline didn’t really vibe with them. Fair enough I thought. By that point, I’d already had most of the interesting parts commissioned as articles, and so this book project went on the backburner as I began to work on The Art of Indifference via the 0xSalon: a suite of creative projects inspired by it, and a not-unrelated something else…which will in time come to occupy the majority of this outlet :)
Above: a taste of The Art of Indifference, the opening scene to The Black Hole of Money theatre production, where a time-travelling cowboy brings you up to speed on how far we’ve fallen in the late 2020s.
I started getting more and more Bitcoin-related speaking invites, to the extent that I hadn’t had for a while, since before the MIT times pre-pandemic. What was different this time, was that these were mainly for differing audiences all outside the community of coin believers, seemingly hungry for nuanced and skeptical sense-making made intelligible to artistic and humanistic sensibilities. Bitcoin was riding high in the charts and in people’s minds: all-time price highs were minted in late ‘20 after a few wilderness years, and its energy requirements were increasing even faster. The central idea of The Indifference Engine was that Bitcoin does not, and indeed can not, care or reason about what lies outside its environs. It just needs energy to stay secure, and there’s no upper limit to this thirst, owing to the way the network recalibrates every couple of weeks to keep the clock ticking to a reasonably steady beat. Read more on this in Reminiscences of a Clock Operator and Twenty-Two Years of Transcendental Time Machines. Further, because these are techno-social systems, nothing happens in a vacuum. The way the system is acts as an attractor for the types of people who resonate with its affordances and can reason away its downsides. I somewhat provocatively call these people Necroprimitivists, and wrote both speculative scripture and as post-CCRU scholar and theorist Mattie Colquhoun aka Xenogothic very kindly put it “necro-baroque theory” to elaborate these fringe positions.
Looking back on this work now — which was in effect the culmination of a decade of Bitcoin obsession — I can say that perhaps the pendulum swung a little too far the other way as a result of my increasing disillusionment with the network and its supplicants. In reality, I had gone in way too deep in the early years, and like so many true believers, had made a personal identity from this stuff. Reader, if you are the sort of person I hope you are, you probably wouldn’t have liked me very much if we’d have met a decade ago. So it goes. My feelings now a little more tempered, perhaps I have come to mirror Bitcoin’s indifference towards me. One major change in my mental model is the proliferation of “artificial intelligence”: whatever you think those words mean, there’s no denying that gargantuan amounts of capital and energy are going into training, inference, and generation for all kinds of emerging computational systems. Along with it, every bigtech company worth its stripes is YOLOing into on-site nuclear power to keep the lights on as these systems scale up. So, has AI’s thirst rendered Bitcoin moot? Or will the pendulum swing the other way, as autonomous agents armed with private keys realise the true potential of cryptocurrencies, DAOs, and whatever else? Time will tell.
So, here’s what I’m sharing with you today. It’s the book pitch document for The Indifference Engine. I cannot overplay how much work went into this, so I hope it reads well to you. Let me know what you think! And if any publisher is reading this and wants to resurrect the project, I’m open to suggestions. As for the provocation in the subtitle — can it still be argued that Bitcoin is less than the sum of its parts? — I would say yes. But today, perhaps the apocalypse cocktail of choice would be composed differently than I imagined five years ago. The thermodynamic element seems less important than before, with AI-nuclear plants coming online in droves, renewable energy proportions fuelling Bitcoin increasing, and grid load balancing improving. On the other hand, the socio-political spirits seem as bitter and toxic as ever. Just log onto “Bitcoin Twitter” for a taste, if you’d like to see for yourself.
Title: The Indifference Engine
Subtitle: The Immaculate Misconception of Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work
Author: Wassim Z. Alsindi Ph.D.
Audience: Though some prior knowledge of Bitcoin & blockchain technology is assumed of the readers of this proposal, the full manuscript will include introductory sections to provide appropriate background and context for those less familiar with cryptocurrency. The Chapter-by-Chapter Outline provides the gentlest introduction to the topic, followed by Key Themes, and the Summary.
Summary
"You will not find an answer to political questions in cryptography."
Anonymous reply to Satoshi Nakamoto’s Announcement of Bitcoin,
Cypherpunks Mailing List, 2008.
Cryptocurrencies are among other things: communication networks, scarcity-based economic systems, contingency attractors, architectures for imaginaries, externality engines, and time machines. A widely replicated, append-only data structure sometimes known as the timechain affords a high degree of assurance that the network will continue to respect a particular set of transaction orderings. When these priorly ordained ordinalities are chained together, they collectively manifest a canonical historicity. As Bitcoin’s usage increased over time, it became apparent that protocol-mandated network specifications gave rise to technical, socio-political, ecological and economic constraints unintended by the system design. As a result, the narrative imaginaries that have been projected onto the cryptographic tabula rasa of Bitcoin by observers, acolytes and critics over time have consequently mutated.
Bitcoin reaches network-wide agreement over the state of its accounting ledger in a leaderless manner by employing a mechanism known as proof-of-work, incentivising the defence of the system and by implication its value proposition. However, proof-of-work is insensitive to its externalities: Bitcoin is an indifference engine. As a consequence of the feedback mechanism which regulates the rhythm of network events, proof-of-work has an insatiable desire for energy with no capability to discriminate between power sources. Bitcoin is an algorithmically materialised instantiation of capital as power, energetic and political. As the engine of Bitcoin's inhuman apparatus, proof-of-work may be regarded as a lossy thermoeconomic mechanism for the convertibility — but not necessarily commensurability — of capital into power and vice versa.
Bitcoin’s timechain provides a quantum temporal metaphysicality with which transcendental idealists, physicists and network scientists alike may propose and test grand speculations. A striated schizotemporality is extant within the Bitcoin network: a continuous mode exists where nodes propose transactions in ‘real-time’, and a discrete mode ticks to the sequential rhythm of confirmed blocks. Proof-of-work is the transcendental mechanism which leaderlessly collapses continuous time into strictly sequenced batches of confirmed transactions. As a byproduct of this process, temporal paradoxes are encoded in the beating heart of cryptocurrency network logics, leading to unintended consequences as chronobandits run wild in the dark forests of the timechain.
Proof-of-work is determinacy-as-a-service: certainty comes at a price that few can truly pay, as the price must be paid in perpetuity. A tyranny of the thermodynamic majority can hypothetically reveal a privately-constructed timeline at any moment, rewriting the ledger history and therefore account balances. As a consequence of the hard boundary between Bitcoin's inside and outside and the zero-sum scarcity economics, a necroprimitivist scorched earth socio-political imaginary dominates the worldview of its acolytes. This technoconservative systems belief is so puritanical and resistant to change that it would rather see the boiling of the oceans than a change to Bitcoin's costly mode of operation. Though the system is not truly autonomous, fervent human supporters of Bitcoin are economically incentivised and ideologically motivated to defend the network at any cost.
Despite being a profoundly suboptimal and barely functional system, the Bitcoin network's resilience and reliability means it can be thought of as the cockroach of money. Bitcoin mediates a zero-sum game between capital and ecology. Proof-of-work is the Google Death Drive: a distributed system collating and archiving history, as it poisons its surroundings. As a communication system, the speed of light provides a hard limit on the sphere of influence of a terrestrially-centred network. Unless humanity develops a limitless source of energy on Earth, Bitcoin will directly compete with natural life, and will continue to outbid the biosphere as time and capital accumulate in its ledger. There seems to be no way to stop Bitcoin from the outside. Instead, all that can be done is intervene in its social consensus: critique, dialogue, and regulation to dissuade necroprimitivists from allowing Bitcoin to create a hothouse Earth. It is through the indifference and repetition of proof-of-work that we can see the resolute inhumanity of the Bitcoin system, its own Nietzschean moment: an infernal return.
Speculations around possible endgames for Bitcoin’s thermocapital singularity: one is a blessed/acc timeline where proof-of-work provides the necessary incentives to bootstrap Earth’s clean energy generation into a boundless — but incredibly unequal — post-scarcity future. The other is less rosy, insofar as Bitcoin would lock capital and ecology into an endless zero-slum game where resource scarcity tips the balance in favour of competition as opposed to cooperation, and machines become direct antagonists of nature. Perhaps this might be the Stalker/Roadside Picnic timeline, or a Bitlerian Jihad invoking Frank Herbert’s prehistory of Dune. In such a case, rather than being a new form of artificial life as zealots proclaim, Bitcoin appears more akin to anti-life, or even a form of artificial death. Bitcoin's proof-of-work does not, and cannot, care about life, other than in its need for intelligent agents to continue to provide it with energy. For now, Bitcoin's useful idiots are necroprimitivist humans, but someday non-human agents may meet all its needs and render humans superfluous — or as adversaries in need of destruction. Is Nakamoto's Basilisk also an Immaculate Misconception which is destined to kill all planetary life, or die trying? Remember the all-important fact about proof-of-work: it works, and works, and works, and works…
"Necrosetta Stones are read,
Boiling oceans are blue.
To halt the technocapital singularity,
You’ll need more than a CPU."
The Necroprimitivist Manifesto Pt.1, 0xSalon, 2021.
Key Themes & Context
What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a protocol, which when implemented in code gives rise to a peer-to-peer network — also known as Bitcoin — containing its own native currency, commonly referred to as bitcoin or BTC. What the humans using and mythologising Bitcoin see it as however, is something far more nuanced, complex, varied, and telling. For example: a distributed timestamping server for peer-to-peer messaging (Nakamoto); a shared set of narrative fictions (Warmke); infrastructural mutualism (Swartz); computational Takfirism (Brekke); digital metallism (Swartz); a transcendental reality criterion (Land); an anticomputer (Galloway); the black hole of money (many Bitcoiners); a mechano-vampiric paradigm (Stevenson); a chronogenic process (Land); the currency of enemies (Dryja); stable dematerialism (Noys); the immaculate conception (Zucco).
Bitcoin & desire. The proof-of-work process resembles both lottery due to its probabilistic nature, and bingo as many winning possibilities exist so the first to be accepted by the network is made canon. This process famously requires enormous quantities of electricity and specialised equipment to participate in. Invoking Lyotard, the libidinal question can be posed: what does the Bitcoin network desire? Security through time, which proof-of-work neatly and brutally reduces down to energy. By scaling the probability of an individual proof-of-work operation corresponding to a ‘winning’ lottery ticket, there is no ceiling to Bitcoin’s energy requirements. The Bitcoin protocol is incapable of sensing with care for its environment, by design. Tsabary et al. have estimated that Bitcoin ‘overpays’ for its network security by at least a factor of two. Bitcoin’s proof-of-work is indifferent to the energy sources used to fuel it. The writings of Deleuze & Guattari, Bataille, and Spinoza regarding machinic desire, solar economies, and monist conatus will be explored in more detail regarding Bitcoin’s algorithmic materialist drives.
Bitcoin & time. Taking a cue from Anna Greenspan’s vintage Ph.D. thesis Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine, Bitcoin may be perceived as a transcendental time machine. A new kind of time — a chronaissance — divorced from the celestial and anthropic markers of time such as calendars and clocks. Bitcoin does not have an endogenous mechanism to access clock-time, so the network relies on proof-of-workers including honest temporal attestations inside their proposed blocks. As those searching for blocks have a chance to dictate the future of the network, de facto privileges are bestowed upon temporal polities of insiders that can leverage information asymmetries for their gain and the network’s detriment.
Bitcoin & risk. Uncertainty — in the sense of contingent risk rather than superpositionality or durational deception — is encoded in the core machine logics of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work. Nakamoto Consensus mandates that the canonical timechain is the one with the most accumulated work. Therefore Bitcoin is always vulnerable to a 51% attack: when a nefarious actor takes control of the majority of hashing power and is able to modify the order of transactions or reverse transactions that they themselves made. The effect of this is that the same digital coins can be spent twice, violating Bitcoin’s primary value proposition. Baudrillard’s and Agamben’s writings on contingent truths of information are useful to invoke and develop in that they do not rely too heavily on thermodynamic or information theoretic approaches to networked communication.
Bitcoin & ideology. Bitcoin is an asset wrapped in an ideology, motivating stakeholders with a delicately balanced mixture of economic incentives which are not sensitive to ecological externalities. The human supplicants to the algorithmic juggernaut of thermocapital that proof-of-work motivates and mediates in makes discourse extremely difficult between humans sharing differing opinions on Bitcoin. Laruelle’s Christo-Fiction and Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory can be invoked alongside Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, laying out a path for the nascent necroprimitivist cult of proof-of-work supremacism.
Bitcoin & resilience. The network shows incredible resilience, and very high uptime. Such strengths are afforded by the following attributes: a widely replicated ledger allows nodes to leave and rejoin the network; economic incentives for thermodynamic defence; ideological coherence; and the inherent impossibility of truly killing a cryptocurrency network. Dead zombie chain networks can always be reanimated, and attempts to change protocol parameters result in network schisms via forks. In the parlance of Meillassoux, Bitcoin is après la finitude.
Bitcoin & ecology. The climate epistemicide of ‘greening Bitcoin’ becomes apparent once lifecycle analysis is conducted on hydro, solar, wind and geothermal energy generation facilities and the resources used to manufacture them. The utopian promise of moving Bitcoin's mining off-planet is implausible, as every light second in distance that a mining operation moves away from the economic centre of gravity of Bitcoin is in effect a cumulative probabilistic penalty, hamstringing faraway proof-of-workers in the race for each block in the timechain. There seems to be no way to stop Bitcoin from the outside. Instead, all that can be done is intervene in its social consensus: critique, dialogue, and regulation to dissuade necroprimitivists from allowing Bitcoin to tip the balance in favour of a hothouse Earth.
Chapter-by-Chapter Outline
1. What is Bitcoin, what was it, what will it be?
This chapter chronicles the narrative evolution of the technological, social and economic imaginaries projected onto Bitcoin. These run the gamut from reductive computational conceptions and hyperbolic delusions of grandeur to poorly conceived criticisms and pithy hot takes. The differences in these conceptual constructions are one of the reasons why discussing and rationalising the nature of Bitcoin is so challenging.
2. Tragedy of the communications
This chapter introduces Bitcoin and its constituent components - public key cryptography, hash functions, proof-of-work mining, peer-to-peer networking, and the ordinal append-only accounting technology originally named ‘the timechain’. There follows a concise history of the Bitcoin network and its antecedents (BitGold, B-Money, DigiCash etc.) in the context of scarcity-based economic systems throughout history, from gold and silver to sea shells, giant stones, and tally sticks. Technical and economic phenomena resulting from the novel manner that the Bitcoin network reaches agreement such as network forks and 51% attacks are also discussed, revealing Bitcoin to be perpetually mired in uncertainty.
3. Proof of truth: thermo-, solar-, crypto-, necro- economics
This chapter focuses on the emergent economic behaviours of the marketplaces both within and surrounding the Bitcoin distributed system. Here I first posit the theory that the hard boundaries (proof of truth) that the Bitcoin network creates through its stringent application of cryptographic and thermodynamic validation has important implications for the emergent economic and socio-political behaviours observed, built upon in later chapters. By framing the machinic paradigm of proof-of-work as a competing drive to that of natural life, in a scarcity-based society it follows that Bitcoin exists in direct competition with natural life for the harvestable energy of the Sun, and it will continue to outbid the biosphere as time and capital accumulate in its ledger.
4. Thermocapitalism: finance, power, work and desire
Here I extend (and contort) Nitzan and Bichler's conception of 'Capital as Power' for application in the context of Bitcoin mining by invoking the energetic conception of 'power', in addition to its political connotations. A perspective emerges of Bitcoin being an algorithmically materialised instantiation of capital as power. What does Bitcoin network want? Security through time, which proof-of-work neatly and brutally reduces down to energy, as much energy as it can have - with no discrimination as to source. The consequence of Bitcoin’s system design is that no satiety is possible.
5. Transcendental time machines
This chapter balances esoteric Kantian temporal theory with insights from the relativistic and quantum domains of experimental research to discuss temporal phenomena made possible by Bitcoin’s architecture, affordances and flaws. A theory is proposed and elaborated upon that temporal polities of insiders leverage durational informational asymmetry to extract additional value from the network in behaviour not originally considered by Nakamoto’s system design, connecting the line of enquiry into capital and time that Anna Greenspan developed two decades ago to the transcendental time machines of today.
6. Risk, limits and externalities: 51% lyfe
As a consequence of the way that Bitcoin is architected, the network operates in a mode of eternal contingency. As new nodes join the network, they must have a way of discriminating the ‘true’ timechain from all other permutations: be they honest, but inferior, timelines, or maliciously seeded histories by would-be attackers. The protocol specifies that the longest chain with the most accumulated work is canon, and as a result a usurper timeline may manifest at any moment as part of a so-called 51% attack. The vulnerabilities inherent with an open-source computing stack when technology paradigms shift are explored, such as novel computational architectures and energy sources.
7. I/Odelogics: necroprimitivism rising
This chapter addresses the human supplicants to the algorithmic juggernaut of capital that proof-of-work drives in the Bitcoin network. The theory emerges that Bitcoin’s defensive network architecture creates in effect a scorched earth socio-political imaginary that has taken root in the humans motivated by Bitcoin's scarcity economics. An extreme form of libertarianism has emerged within the human penumbra of the Bitcoin network, that is conservative to the point of tolerating the increasing threat of ecological collapse over a change to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work. This emerging strain of techno-nihilism is termed necroprimitivism. As a result of Bitcoin’s system architecture, it is almost impossible to halt or retard, let alone destroy. In combination with the conservative zeal of its acolytes, Bitcoin’s protocol-enshrined escalation in energy requirements poses an existential risk to life on Earth.
8. To the limit: a matter of life and death?
This chapter follows the unquenchable thermodynamic thirst of Bitcoin to its logical conclusion: Bitcoin is bounded by the physical constraints of the Universe and its technical parameters such as its block time. As a result, Bitcoin can only realistically harvest energy with a radius approximately equal to the distance between the Earth and the Sun (8.5 light minutes), and moving proof-of-work off Earth is unlikely at best, impossible at worst. Bitcoin’s arrow of time will continue its inexorable continuation, monetary black hole that it is, sucking capital and energy into its ever-accreting thermoeconomic core. Humanity’s options are to accelerate, mitigate, or capitulate.
Author’s Note
Work on this book was preceded by specialised theoretical and practical research within the cryptocurrency space over a number of years. I began as a passionate advocate of the emancipatory potential of Bitcoin, authoring articles on this topic for In The Mesh as recently as 2019. Alongside articles for wider audiences, research programmes mixing epistemology and empirical analysis (Forkonomy, TokenSpace, DAOs and Don'ts) led to many appearances on the cryptocurrency conference circuit across 3 continents. Following this, I spent an intense 18 month spell at the MIT Media Lab, setting up a flagship cryptocurrency journal and conference series Cryptoeconomic Systems, alongside Joi Ito, as co-founder and Managing Editor. Currently I specialise in the philosophy and design of cryptographic economies, and operate a post-disciplinary knowledge collective that discusses and critiques — amongst other things — Bitcoin through discourse, reportage and art. An invited keynote lecture at December 2020’s Chaos Communication Congress entitled ‘The Indifference Engine’ forms the core of this book’s arguments and scope. It is available on YouTube and the 0x Salon website.
Biography
Wassim Z. Alsindi Ph.D.
Wassim is the founder and host of the 0x Salon, which conducts experiments in post-disciplinary collective knowledge practices. A veteran of the timechain, Wassim specialises in conceptual design and the philosophy of peer-to-peer systems, on which he writes, speaks, and consults. He writes an editorial column at the MIT Computational Law Report, and he co-founded MIT’s Cryptoeconomic Systems journal and conference series. Wassim has curated arts festivals, led a sculptural engineering laboratory and published experimental music, improvisatory theatre, poetry, and speculative scripture. Building upon initial specialisations in the natural sciences, Wassim holds a Ph.D. in ultrafast supramolecular photophysics from the University of Nottingham.
Selected Writings
Bitcointingency: An Economics of Indeterminacy, Weird Economies, 2022.
Reminiscences of a Clock Operator (Relativistic Version), Nascent Temporal Secessionism: Timezone#4, 2021.
(Mis-)Adventures in Crypto Governance, MIT Computational Law Report, 2021.
The Revolution Will Not Be Tokenised, Spike Art Magazine, 2022.
The Necroprimitivist Manifesto, 0x Salon, 2021.
Mining Glossary Definition, Internet Policy Review, 2021.
TokenSpace: A Conceptual Framework For Cryptographic Asset Taxonomies, Parallel Industries, 2019.
Forkonomy: Towards An Analytical Discipline, Parallel Industries, 2018.
References
Agamben, G., The Kingdom and the Glory (English Translation), Stanford University Press, 2011.
Agamben, G., What Is Real? (English Translation), Stanford University Press, 2018.
Alsindi, W. Z., The Necroprimitivist Manifesto, 0x Salon, 2021.
Bataille, G., The Accursed Share (English Translation), Zone Books, 1988.
Baudrillard, J., Information at the Meteorological Stage (English Translation), Screened Out, Verso Books, 2002.
Clemens, J., In the State of Nature Nothing Will Be Lost, Australian Humanities Review, (66), 2020.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (English Translation), University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Galloway, A. R., Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, MIT Press, 2004.
Greenspan, A., Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine, University of Warwick, 2000.
Golumbia, D., The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Land, N., Crypto-Current, An Introduction to Bitcoin and Philosophy, ŠUM Magazine, 2018.
Laruelle, F., Christo-Fiction: The Ruins of Athens and Jerusalem, Columbia University Press, 2015.
Lyotard, J.-F., Libidinal Economy, Indiana University Press, 1974.
Malik, S., The Ontology of Finance, Collapse VIII, Urbanomic, 2014.
Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (English Translation), Continuum, 2009.
Moreno, C., Chassé, D. S., and Fuhr, L., Carbon Metrics: Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide, Heinrich Boll Stiftung, 2016.
Nakamoto, S. and Brekke, J. K., The White Paper, Ignota Books, 2019.
Narayanan, A., Goldfeder, S., Bonneau, J., Felten, E., and Miller, A., Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction, Princeton University Press, 2016.
Noys, B., Stable Dematerialisations: The Dialectics of Bitcoin, Australian Humanities Review, (66), 2020.
Raymond, E. S., The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, O’Reilly Media, 1999.
Stevenson, D., Bitcoin = Death Processors, 2016.
Swartz, L., What was Bitcoin, what will it be? The techno-economic imaginaries of a new money technology, Cultural Studies, Vol. 32 (4), 2018.
Tsabary, I., Spiegelman, A., and Eyal, I., Just Enough Security for Cryptocurrencies, 2019.
Warmke, C., What is Bitcoin?, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 2021.
It’s all out in the open now, if you care to look. The Byzantine Business School, The Cryptographic Poetics Researchers’ Union, Le Jargonneur Crypto/Kleptographique, Satoshi Wept, Research and Destroy, m3m3pl3x, Essential Abstractions, and probably a load of others I’ve forgotten.
Speaking of Star Trek, one of the articulations I would often rely upon in lectures and debates on the shortcomings of Bitcoin and blockchain technology more broadly, was a failure to imagine and enact meaningfully post-capitalist logics. To bring that back down to Earth — after all, I was often speaking to crypto-Neanderthals or music festival freaks — I would typically say something like “we could be living in Star Trek, but instead we’re living in “Star Wars”.