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  • Reviewing

  • Main Author

    • Email address
        h.estecahandy@gmail.com
    • Lastname
        ESTECAHANDY
    • Firstname
        Hugo
    • Organization / Institution
        Institut Français De Géopolitique - Geode / Université Paris 8

  • Communication type

    • Your choice
      Oral presentation

  • Selected Session

    • Your type of session
      UGI Commission Session
    • Session
      Cartography Of The Datasphere
    • Session format: On site
      Chairman of the session: Alix DESFORGES
      Working language: English, French

  • Institutions

    • Affiliation n°1 :
    • Affiliation
        Institut Français de Géopolitique - GEODE / Université Paris 8
    • City
        Saint-Denis
    • Country
        France

  • Working language

    • Working language
      English

  • Title of your abstract

    • Title of your session
      From a digital infrastructure to a geopolitical object: which geographies for Bitcoin?

  • Resume of your abstract

    • Your text
      From its adoption as a legal tender in El Salvador to the banning of its physical infrastructure in China, the year 2021 has seen Bitcoin emerge as a technology with significant geopolitical repercussions. However, the work in geography and geopolitics on this alternative financial network is still limited due to its technical complexity and the multi-dimensionality.



          The objective of this presentation is to try to define Bitcoin as a geopolitical object and to propose innovative methods to map this digital network and its stakes. This work will be based on an ethnographic approach to the digital infrastructure (Star, 1999) that is Bitcoin, in order to identify the different entities (actors, institutions, protocols, behaviors, processors) that compose the network. This approach will allow us to study the distribution and centralization of power (Musiani & al., 2016, Makarov & Schoar, 2021) that appear within a network with theoretically distributed authority. But above all, this reading will allow us to highlight the important materiality of Bitcoin, and to study the geography of its physical components (Bakis, 2013).



          Finally, we will propose different methods to try to map this infrastructure. Starting with a mapping of the lower layers of Bitcoin (mining infrastructures, copies of the blockchain), we can begin to identify the actors and networks present in territories where Bitcoin is strongly anchored which influence its development and location in physical space. This cartographic thinking will then be taken further within the software and application levels, to use the terms of a definition of cyberspace composed of different "layers" (Douzet, 2014). We will see how we can use a visualization of the Bitcoin network in the form of graphs to study and map certain phenomena of centralization of power within the network. We will then combine our two approaches in order to build a mapping model appropriate for the visualization and study of Bitcoin.

  • Keywords

    • Keyword
      Bitcoin, digital, infrastructure, geopolitics, cartography

  • References

    •  
      Reference 1  H. Bakis, « Les facteurs de localisation d’un nouveau type d’établissements tertiaires?: les datacentres », Netcom. Réseaux, communication et territoires, n? 27?3/4, Art. n? 27?3/4, oct. 2013, doi: 10.4000/netcom.1473.      
      Reference 2  F. Douzet, « La géopolitique pour comprendre le cyberespace »:, Hérodote, vol. n° 152-153, n? 1, p. 3?21, juin 2014, doi: 10.3917/her.152.0003.      
      Reference 3  I. Makarov et A. Schoar, « Blockchain Analysis of the Bitcoin Market », 2021.      
      Reference 4  F. Musiani, A. Mallard, et C. Méadel, « Governing what wasn’t meant to be governed. A controversy-based approach to the study of Bitcoin governance », in Bitcoin and beyond: cryptocurrencies, blockchains and global governance, London?; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.      
      Reference 5  S. L. Star, « The Ethnography of Instrastructure », American Bahavioral Scientist, vol. 43, n? 3, déc. 1999.      

  • CNFG Member

    • Are you member of a CNFG Commission ?
      No
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