The inevitable sociality of money: the primacy of practical affirmation over conceptual consensus in the construction of Bitcoin’s economic value

Abstract

Abstract Bitcoin went from being an obscure online project to a globally exchanged money valued at tens of thousands of dollars (USD) per unit. It has achieved this in spite of fundamental irreconcilabilities between the economic theories which spurred its creation and its own material basis. This article investigates how this happened using a computationally grounded analysis of 100 000s of messages from the early years of Bitcoin’s two main online communities. It will show how the continuing divergence in participants’ understandings of why Bitcoin possessed value ultimately gave way to an emerging focus on the social problem of adoption. In demonstrating this shift and accompanying promotion of activities that affirmed Bitcoin had value in practice, this article with argue that shared meaning in the form of practical affirmations of worth, rather than conceptual understandings of it, are key to communities’ ability to ‘bootstrap’ a money’s initial economic value.