Crypto-bros: anthropological and theological perspectives on cryptocurrency

Abstract

This study explores the humanity behind the digital phenomenon of cryptocurrency. It is an ethnography of the online cryptocurrency community and an analysis of the development of social and cultural structures in a hybridized digital and non-digital reality and the ethics of an alternative normative world. The study describes how cryptocurrency adopters have formed communities, on social media forums like Twitter/X and Reddit, that sustain an alternative normative world that rejects the notion of false consciousness and actively resists the state's control over the means of social and fiscal production. Taking advantage of both anthropological and theological perspectives, this study addresses the question, what is cryptocurrency. By establishing a theoretical base to look at the phenomenon as more than a technological advancement, this study argues that the phenomenon of cryptocurrency is inherently social. A phenomenon that is computationally generated but, sustained and materialized through its online community in direct opposition to centralized finance and its supporting institutions.