@inproceedings{Serada2020,
  author    = {Alesja Serada},
  title     = {The Continuous Materiality of Blockchain},
  series = {Konferenzband zum Scientific Track der Blockchain Autumn School 2020},
  publisher = {Hochschule Mittweida},
  address   = {Mittweida},
  issn      = {1437-7624},
  doi       = {10.48446/opus-11868},
  pages     = {71 -- 76},
  year      = {2020},
  abstract  = {Both cryptocurrency researchers and early adopters of cryptocurrencies agree that they possess a special kind of materiality, based on the laborious productive process of digital ‘mining’ [1]. This idea first appears in the Bitcoin White Paper [2] that encourages Bitcoin adopters to construct and justify its value in metaphoric comparison to gold mining. In this paper, I explore three material aspects of blockchain: physical infrastructure, human language and computer code. I apply the concept of 'continuous materiality' [3] to show how these three aspects interact in practical implementations of blockchain such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. I start from the concept of ‘digital metallism’ that stands for ‘fundamental value’ of cryptocurrencies, and end with the move of Ethereum to ‘proof-of-stake’, partially as a countermeasure against ‘evil miners’. I conclude that ignoring material aspects of blockchain technology can only further problematize complicated relations between their technical, semiotic and social materiality.},
  language  = {en}
}