Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York City, New York, USA.
Br J Sociol. 2022 Jan;73(1):168-187. doi: 10.1111/1468-4446.12916. Epub 2021 Dec 27.
Proposed by an unknown young man using the pseudonym Electra01, Electra appeared in the cryptocurrency markets in 2018. Thanks to its innovative supply mechanism, the money's market capitalization briefly reached 136 billion USD, surpassing Bitcoin in value. Focusing on the empirical case of Electra, a project that was chosen as the "best cryptocurrency community" by the users of world's largest exchange, Binance, this paper ethnographically analyzes the sociological universe of a cryptocurrency community. The research consists of two years of fieldwork, interviews with the core team and the project's anonymous founder, a survey among its community members, and computational analyses of the interaction data of the project's Twitter community of 376,600 handles, as well as their Bitcointalk forum. The paper approaches the socio-technical universe of a cryptocurrency community by examining the devices, networks, and representations that the community actors produce, use, and maintain in data-money making and proposes a way to make visible and examine centers of power in a global community operating a seemingly "decentralized" blockchain.
Electra 由一位匿名年轻人以 Electra01 为笔名提出，于 2018 年出现在加密货币市场。由于其创新的供应机制，该货币的市值短暂达到 1360 亿美元，超过了比特币的价值。本文以 Electra 为例，这是世界上最大的交易所币安的用户评选的“最佳加密货币社区”项目，通过民族志分析了加密货币社区的社会学宇宙。研究包括两年的实地考察、对核心团队和项目匿名创始人的访谈、对其社区成员的调查，以及对该项目 37.66 万用户的 Twitter 社区互动数据的计算分析，以及他们的 Bitcointalk 论坛。本文通过考察社区参与者在数据货币制造中产生、使用和维护的设备、网络和表示，探讨了加密货币社区的社会技术宇宙，并提出了一种方法来观察和研究在一个看似“去中心化”的区块链上运行的全球社区中的权力中心。
