Data Money: Inside Cryptocurrencies, Their Communities, Markets, and Blockchains by Koray Caliskan

Author:Koray Caliskan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BUS114000, Business & Economics/Bitcoin & Cryptocurrencies, SOC026000, Social Science/Sociology/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2023-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

A Young Introvert in Britain

Electra01 was twenty-five years old when he first began mining Bitcoin (BTC). He had learned about it from a BBC story on the demise of Silk Road, a dark-net exchange platform that drew on Bitcoin to facilitate the anonymous trading of goods and services. Its founder, Ross Ulbricht, had been arrested and would later be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Managed and owned by Dread Pirate Roberts, a pseudonym used by Ulbricht, the Silk Road marketplace helped its founder amass unprecedented wealth in just two years. Ulbricht was twenty-five years old when he built Silk Road; when he found himself in prison, he had more than 173,999 BTC, an amount that would be worth around $10 billion in February 2021. The U.S. Marshals Service seized all the Bitcoin they could find in Ullrich’s secret accounts and began selling them at auction, thus contributing to the legitimation and public acceptance of the world’s first data money.

Electra01 became acquainted with blockchains and cryptocurrencies thanks to this traumatic story of monies and markets. Then two years younger than Dread Pirate Roberts and with a major in economics from a top British university, he decided to deploy his minor—computer science—to make some money. Bitcoin was worth around $13 then. It would increase in value by 92 percent before the year ended.

In part inspired by Bitcoin’s legendary founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, he decided on the pseudonym Electra01 and began to think about making “his own Bitcoin.” There was another, even more fundamental reason for his choice to remain anonymous: he was a young introvert living at a time when data money materiality allowed individuals to amass an extraordinary amount of wealth in the form of very small materialities, such as a cell phone or a representation such as data, without needing a bank account. If someone knew how much money he had, it would be a challenge to protect that wealth and himself. For instance, if he was kidnapped, everything could be taken from him. His “Bitcoin” was going to be worth several million dollars soon. In our last meeting, in December 2020, he said, “I would become a theoretical billionaire in a couple of years, but of course I didn’t know about that. I was only dreaming.”

After studying the computing infrastructure of data monies during 2015 and planning the launch of his own money during 2016, Electra01 took the first public step in 2017, around ten months before our first meeting. Over the next three years, I was the only person in the entire Electra community he would meet in person.

Electra01 thought that for data monies to be valuable, they had to offer a novel economic service, and people had to find that service valuable. For him, without something real and new and without a community, data monies were worthless. In his mind, a data money community was composed of two kinds of people: miners and transactioners. His business plan was to appeal to miners in order to attract the attention of transactioners.

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