From a Digital Infrastructure to a Geopolitical Space: Which Geographies for Bitcoin?
Résumé
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.