Computing Ledgers and The Political Ontology of The Blockchain

C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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METAPHILOSOPHY
Vol. 48, No. 5, October 2017
0026-1068
COMPUTING LEDGERS AND THE POLITICAL

ONTOLOGY OF THE BLOCKCHAIN
PABLO R. VELASCO
Abstract: This paper investigates ontological dimensions of the blockchain by

asking what kind of socio-technical object bitcoin is. It discusses both
blockchains political qualities and the political forms enabled by its emergence.
It first observes recent approaches to the ontology of money and the political
qualities of the ledgers used by the current fractional reserve banking model.
It then directs the same questions at blockchain technology. The paper discusses
an ontology proposed by Ole Bjerg (2016) and argues in favour of a mixed-
ontology approach to blockchains. It then questions the political qualities of the
distributed ledger as a digital object and highlights the apparent absence of
authority figures in the model. Finally, it argues that the political ontology of
the blockchain can be framed as the displacement of authority from in-
stitutional actors into instrumental control of trust, in a dynamically distributed
environment.
Keywords: blockchain, ontology, politics, authority, control, mining.
Money Ontologies
Investigations that focus on the material or commodity dimensions
of money are not new, nor is the emergence of electronic money (de
Jong, Tkacz, and Velasco Gonzalez 2015), but the popularity of bitcoin
invigorated the question of materiality, and how money (or electronic
money) is defined in relation to its materiality. Should we, for example,
think about money by the way it allegedly works, by the institutions
that deal with it, or by what it represents?
A recent book on the nature of money from a philosophical perspec-
tive dedicates a chapter to its metaphysical qualities, observed after the
appearance of electronic money. Inspired by the work of Georg Simmel
and John Searle, Mark Coeckelbergh (2015) develops the idea that con-
temporary money and trade are detached from the physical world, and
accordingly this affords a moral distance. While I shall not address the
main moral detachment argument, his reading is relevant because
Coeckelbergh questions traditional and contemporary metaphysics of
money and highlights the problematic of defining money (and virtual

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COMPUTING LEDGERS 713
money) within a material framework or purely as an informational

object.
Coeckelbergh distinguishes, and partly rejects, three money ontolo-
gies: money as object, money as information, and money as social
institution. First, object ontology understands money as a thing (and
electronic money instances, like bitcoin, as virtual things). Reality
within this ontology is composed of things, entities, or objects. Objects
related to money in the past were easily identifiable, and according to
Coeckelbergh money could be categorized then as a material thing.
However, the introduction of debt in instances like paper money
already dematerializes it and complicates its categorization. It still
retains materiality, but, Coeckelbergh argues, it is not only material.
Further reflection on the nature of money shows that money does not
have a clear ontological status, even at the earliest stages of its develop-
ment. Thus, for Coeckelbergh the materiality of money does not pro-
vide sufficient explanation of its ontological status.
Second, moneys information ontology derives from the work of
Luciano Floridi. For Floridi, the world in our age is increasingly
understood as information. What he calls the infosphere would even-
tually acquire the status of being (Floridi 2013). Understanding money
primordially as information has the advantage of avoiding other forms
of categorization, which allows focusing on new relations between what
appear to us as diverse elements, regardless of their material or imma-
terial form. This pan-informational position has the obvious disadvan-
tage of being fairly normative, however, considering that a priori
excludes any non-informational view or element. Coeckelbergh con-
cludes that Floridis relational model does not consider social relations,
unless they are framed in informational terms, and thus cannot account
for the subjective and social realms that also take part in the configura-
tion of an ontology of money.
In contrast, Searle (2006) proposes that social intentionality, a col-
lective acceptance of non-physical realities, is what provides a special
status to otherwise problematic entitiesthat is, the observer-
independent status of money goes beyond the physical piece of paper
associated with it, due to the general agreement that it counts as a
valuable something else. Following Searle, Coeckelbergh argues that
the non-physicality of electronic or virtual money is not relevant. The
advantage of Searles position is that it introduces the social into the
question of the ontology of money. However, a strong division between
objective and subjective realities endures, according to Coeckelbergh,
and only adds a social level of abstraction to an objective reality.
Searle presumes a division between the natural and the social, and
thus maintains a dualistic ontology (Coeckelbergh 2015, 99).
Cockelbergh ultimately proposes to understand money in its rela-
tional nature and through an epistemological prism: What can we

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714 PABLO R. VELASCO
know of money? How its subjects and objects are mutually constituted?
In this scenario, actors like central banks play a role in the definition
of money but are unable to offer a complete definition of money by
themselves. Even if it is true that one institution as big as the state pro-
vides legitimacy to it, the nature of money is established by many
other major institutionslike the World Bankand minor institu-
tions. The existence of bitcoin as some sort of currency would other-
wise be impossible, considering that it does not require any sort of
state entity (Coeckelbergh 2015, 105).
Sybille Kr amer also discusses the material composition of money
and its relation with the state. She reads money as a medium, not as a
symbol or a social institution. For her, money acts as the abstraction
of ownership that can be transmitted. Money is a medium between
people, and it belongs to a category different from that of other goods,
as its value is detached from any materiality; it embodies the disem-
bodiment of value, it desubstantializes values. It is the objectification
of an abstraction (Kramer 2015, 113). The idea of an objectified
placeholder of value can be applied, following Kramer, to a symbolic
value (such as the value of a commodity). However, the body that
holds (by desubstantiation) the immaterial property must nevertheless
be validated by a central entity. The very fact that people are unable to
produce or consume money, according to Kramer, without a central
institution that validates its otherwise abstract value shows the
otherness of money in relation to other goods.
Ledger Politics
The model of fractional reserve banking is a refined version of ledger
technology. State and bank-enabled ledgers are technical devices with
political qualities. Not only are they used politically, they have political
affordances themselves. In a seminal work, Langdon Winner argues
against the usual idea that it is peoples use of technology, and not
technology itself, that is political. He understands politics as arrange-
ments of power and authority in human associations that include the
design and use of technological devices: Rather than insist that we
immediately reduce everything to the interplay of social forces, it sug-
gests that we pay attention to the characteristics of technical objects
and the meaning of those characteristics (Winner 1980, 123). The
ledger acting in the fractional reserve banking and other facets of con-
temporary finances embodies a specific form of authority.
Winner distinguishes two ways, inherent and non-inherent, in which
an object can have political properties. In the former, the systems
require a certain kind of political relationships that are strongly, per-
haps unavoidably, linked to a particular institutionalized pattern of

V
power and authority. Here, the initial choice about whether or not to
adopt something is decisive in regard to its consequences (Winner
1980, 134). This kind of relation is deliberately designed or strongly
compatible with a certain ideology. In the latter case, the device design
can also be easily adopted by a certain pattern of power or authority,
or establish a new one. This political relationship is circumstantial,
however, as it can be subjected to change, depending on the different
practical uses of the artefact. Therefore, it does not require the mainte-
nance of determined social conditions. Winners main example is the
low bridges on Long Island in New York, built by Robert Moses,
which were designed in such a way that public transport buses cannot
use the roads that pass under them. The argument is based on Mosess
alleged discomfort with users of public transit (mostly poor people)
reaching his public parks. The main argument of Winner is that it is
necessary to look at both the use and the design of technological
devices to observe their political qualities. Artefacts like an atomic
bomb, a factory, or even a ship (according to Plato) are, for instance,
designed to be ruled in a hierarchical, authoritarian, and centralized
manner. Regardless of whether the process of decision making around
the properness of this kind of machine can be sorted out democrati-
cally, the technical operation, like the triggering of the object, requires
the expression of hierarchical authority.
Non-blockchain ledgers fuelling the fractional reserve banking
model are a technology with inherent, in Winners sense, political prop-
erties. Classical works of Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and Werner
Sombart have argued that double-entry bookkeeping as technique is
related to the emergence of capitalism and that ledgers contributed to
the emergence of a rational world view (Carruthers and Espeland
1991, 33). Most recent works on the history of accounting argue that
the original late medieval ledgers where used more to maximize profit
than to trace the flow of capital (Yamey 1949; Winjum 1970). Both
uses, profit maximization and scientific analysis of flow for planned
investment, sustain the current economic model.
Centralization is the inherent operative environment of double book-
ing in this model. Its functionality requires the maintenance of a partic-
ular set of social conditions. Much like the boat that cant be
democratically manoeuvred for practical reasons, ledgers are central-
ized by central and commercial banks as authoritarian entities in
charge of preventing counterfeiting. While it is possible to think of
working ledger technology without the involvement of banks or states,
as in a small family business, its overwhelming use in the form of frac-
tional reserve banking in our modern economy shows how highly com-
patible it is with the particular social form of the large-scale centralized
organization. The capacity to validate insertions and changes to the
books must be limited in order to avoid unauthorized movements like

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double expenses. Trust cant be democratized, as it is provided not by

the system itself but by the managers. Thus, techno-social assemblages
based on trusted management and centralized control are inherent in
pre-blockchain ledger technology. Management of the large-scale led-
gers that run the governable part of our economy happen to reside in
central and commercial banks that co-evolved alongside ledger
technology.
The political design of the current economy provides the state and
banks with the control of the ledger and the power to reconstitute
credit money in other financial instruments, like shares or derivatives.
Brett Scott (2015) states that in the current economy, banks are merely
entities controlling the recordings of transactional data. Meaning that
the privileged position of the state in the current structure of power is
linked to recording as a means of control. Scott proposes to replace
the databases of banks and find a way for people to control them. For
him the blockchain is already a solution to the first problem. Cryptog-
raphy used in the system completes the operation by providing person-
al, but anonymous, transactions.1 In this scenario, the state enacts
power in what has been called extensive politics: power expresses
itself in a normative framework, and thus it can be exercised by one
entity over another (Lash 2007). An example of this is the persecution
of an alternative currency when it is declared partially legal, without
any use-value recognized for state affairs, and the state and commercial
banks are the exclusive authorities for its production, as with the tumin
in Mexico.2 In Britain, famous alternative currencies like those of the
Transition Townsthe Lewes, Stroud, Brixton, and Brighton pounds
are considered retail vouchers with legal status but with regional
restrictions. These alternative currencies can be freely used within a
particular region and can even be used to pay taxes to the local city
council: the Bristol pound has a potential reach of one million people,
within the city of Bristol (Bristol Pound-Scheme Rules for Individual
Members and Trader Members 2016). However, they are lacking in
regulation in comparison to currency issued by the central bank
pound sterlingwhich is the only permitted legal tender, and thus the
user has good defence in law (Naqvi and Southgate 2013) if sued for
non-payment of a debt to be paid in sterling.
The (a) ownership of the production of cash, especially of credit
money, and the (b) control of the registry allow the execution of hard
power, that is, the capacity to affect others to obtain a desired out-
come (Nye 2009). Both the risky use of credit by banks and their
1
Scott (2015) emphasizes that the digital anonymous decentralized ledger systems are
not by themselves a guarantee of the good use by or community growth of societies.
2
The tumin remains legal in Mexico so long as it is not used as legal tender (http://
blogs.elpais.com/alterconsumismo/2016/05/tumin-moneda-alternativa-mexico.html).

V
bailout by governments after the global economic crisis of 2008, which

directly affected masses of people, are political examples of the power
to control the registry and production, respectively.3 Aside from exem-
plary cases like the citizens of Iceland, the majority of the population
had no chance to affect the evolution of the crisis or the outcome of
the bailout. The control of the registry and production of the global
credit systems and the technology that supports them allowed banks
and governments to exercise power, via decision-making management
of public money, over a majority of people.
If money is a political design of power from the state and banks,
what is the political design of bitcoin money? Blockchain technology
shifts exactly these two points, production and registry. Theoretically, it
distributes both the monopoly of production and the central validation
of the registry. I argue next that changes in these characteristics modify
more how power is enacted within ledger systems than the notion of
money as it currently works. A closer look at the instrumentality per-
formed by these changes shows that new political forms emerge from
the works of the digital device, by it setting its own logics and generat-
ing a particular form of exploitation.
Blockchain Ontologies
Blockchains are a relatively recent object in the world. Although differ-
ent experiments were developed before, bitcoin money, which became
public at the end of 2008, was the first of its kind. Even though the
technology is now almost a decade old, it became popular gradually,
then rose rapidly in 2013. While there is now a large body of popular
commentary, theoretical, social, and philosophical research on this spe-
cific technology is still scarce.4
One notable exception is the work of Ole Bjerg (2016), who aims to
provide a philosophical approach to bitcoins particular ontology. Even
though his work explicitly uses bitcoin only as a resource to reflect on
the nature of money, his comparison traces quite an accurate outline of
it. Bjergs antithetical approach stresses the qualities bitcoin retains
from other forms of money, while at the same time dissociating it from
those very forms. The bewildering end product is a digital currency
that retains gold-standard quality without being gold, is fiat without
3
Interestingly, it has been argued that the lack of a normative framework was an
important factor for the crisis: The standing rules and regulations that assure a good
deal of transparency in old-fashioned stock and bond markets were not upgraded to
assure equivalent transparency in the new financial markets that emerged in the 1990s
(Congleton 2009, 315).
4
See for relevant examples Golumbia (2016), Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz (2013), and
Velasco Gonzalez (2016).

V
the necessity of the state, and can be classified as credit, but without
debt involved.
First, in such a currency the gold without gold quality would be
based on the commodity theory originating from the seminal work of
Adam Smith, who drafted a speculative history of money. In it, barter
was a primordial form that eventually evolved into money by using
tokens (metals) as a means of exchange (Smith and Skinner 1999).
Bjerg recognizes the historical inaccuracies of the commodity theory,
which neither account for the role of a sovereign power in producing
money as currency nor convincingly explain the role of debt (Graeber
2012). It acts as the standard against which all other commodities are
priced. Close to Kramers reading of the commodity, Bjergs view iden-
tifies gold as that which symbolizes other commodities, and its rele-
vance is due to its de-substantiated transmission properties. Gold acts
as a standard not thanks to its use-value properties (as it is not a par-
ticularly useful metal) but thanks to its capacity to structure the sym-
bolic system of money by being a priceless standard.
Second, digital money is money without a state. The state is the
producer of an object designated as money and is the regulator, at least
to a certain degree, of its rules of exchange. A second function of the
state would be to demand that very same object as payment for ser-
vices, thus controlling and stimulating circulation by being partly in
charge of the supply and demand of money. Following Slavoj Zi zek,
Bjerg argues that the state is the placeholder of the big Other. The
demand of payments is expressed as desire for money. When this desire
is inherited by private agents, the Other is not associated with the state
but is the desire of the economic subject. Bjerg argues that bitcoin does
not require trust in a central authority, relying only on the trust that it
would be accepted by a community, and is therefore post-fiat money,
where the Other does not exist. Bjergs argument does not, however,
explain why, after the alleged disappearance of the state or any form of
centralized institution in the process of production and circulation of
money, bitcoin should still qualify as fiat money. The tumin in Mexico
and the Bristol pound are examples of community trust-based curren-
cies that work partly outside state control but are still not considered
fiat.
Finally, credit without debt understands money as a claim for
payment. Credit money does not need to become cash to circulate or
even to be considered payment. Bjerg follows the idea that our contem-
porary economy is a combination of fiat and credit (Ryan-Collins,
Greenham, and Werner 2014).5 The production of money in the form
5
It is worth noting that the report by Ryan-Collings, Greenham, and Werner (2014)
restricts itself to the British economy, but the interplay between fiat and credit by banks
can be successfully applied to a great part of the global economy.

V
of credit is a standardized way for commercial banks to create new

money. What is known as fractional reserve banking allows commercial
banks to lend money to consumers, while keeping only a small percent-
age of it as a reserve. The amount of fiat money in the form of cash
that circulates in the economy is insignificant (Jessop 2015) com-
pared to the credit in circulation: it is estimated that fiat money
accounts for less than 3 percent of the economy, while credit accounts
for almost all of the remaining 97 percent (Ryan-Collins, Greenham,
and Werner 2014). Bjerg observes that this system functions as an ide-
ology: the bank offers each customer the possibility of withdrawing his
or her savings in cash at any moment, even though most of this money
is borrowed. It would be impossible to offer this possibility to all cus-
tomers, but, Bjerg argues, by maintaining this fantasy, this ideology
regulates the chance of this scenario happening. The vast majority of
payments are effectively made not by repositioning fiat from one place
to another but by updating the ledgers containing those credits. Unlike
credit money, new bitcoins created in the zone of indistinction
between official government and private banking enterprising (Bjerg
2016, 26) come into circulation without debt, while the system still
functions as a bank-independent ledger. Bjergs reading of bitcoin poses
the right kind of questions for developing an ontology of bitcoin as
electronic money and offers great insights into the question of the
nature of money itself.
In bitcoin, there is an evident lack of a material object, and, like any
other money token, it is fitted to represent the value of other commod-
ities, though these are non-specific qualities. Yet the absence of author-
ity is unique. The disappearance of the state (the Other) from the
money milieu, or of any central authority for that matter, is excep-
tional. I argue next that this disappearance is illusory, and that the
Other is displaced to the production process itself.6
By considering its instrumental operation as the key element that
underpins the attributes of money, I shall offer a specific ontology for
the bitcoin blockchain, in the same way that old ledger technology
underpins debt money. Relying on Winners work on the politics of
design, I show how the digital object of blockchain technology is
strongly compatible both with centralized and distributed social and
political relationships, but without requiring one or the other. I stress,
6 zeks notions of the

It is important to state that Bjergs arguments rely heavily on Zi
real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. Bjergs argument should be read in this light, and
a counter-argument must take this into account. I consider this original negative ontology
of bitcoin through the prism of bitcoins instrumental functions, with the intention to
zeks relevance for
identify and criticize its politics, and without attempting to include Zi
Bjergs argument, or its suitability.

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however, that the capability for control of trust is what is politically

inherent to its unique design.
Blockchain Politics
The co-occurrence of both Bjergs singular reading and the symbolic
functions of bitcoin as a money-related entity makes Coeckelberghs
proposal of mixed categories relevant. When dealing with the issues
of the object ontology, Coeckelberg proposes to deal with the catego-
rization problem of mixed categories: Things can belong to different
categories at the same time . . . their ontological status is mixed or mul-
tiple (2015, 94). Although he recognizes the limitation of this mixed
ontology (which sprouts from object-centred and dualistic thought),
the convenience of such non-deterministic ontology becomes clear
when applied to the blockchain. For it is as much a digital financial
token, an infrastructure, a digital object, and, as I shall argue, an entity
that is both human-made and computer-made. A fluid ontology suits
an object that is heavily material when is produced with the tangible
electric and electronic needs of the mining industry; embodies a deeply
symbolic value on market exchanges; is a formal abstraction of an
alphanumeric series at a textual level; and is the infrastructure where it
unfolds itself, as argued by Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz (2013). In the
same way that code is as much a mode of thought as it is a platform
for the enactment of its own use and consumption (Parikka 2014), or
that infrastructures are both things and relations between things (Lar-
kin 2013), the blockchain performs diverse ontological roles.
Considering this multiplicity of readings, I propose an ontology of
the blockchain derived from the political qualities embedded in its sui
generis function: the logical performance of a technically trusted, dis-
tributed ledger. It is crucial to distinguish that the organizational model
of blockchains can be distributed while having different degrees of cen-
tralization. On the one hand, bitcoin is an example of a distributed
instance that gets centralized in relation to the amount of computer
power. A hypothetical cluster of computationally powerful machines
would effectively regulate the behaviour of the network, regardless of
the number of less powerful machines. Given its open protocol and
software, this scenario is unlikely though not impossible. On the other
hand, the same distributed technology can be implemented in private
blockchains, in which a defined institution or group can control and
modify the basic rules of behaviour. An example of this is Linq, a pri-
vate Nasdaq blockchain, aiming to provide private securities transac-
tions (Nasdaq Linq Enables First-Ever Private Securities Issuance
Documented with Blockchain Technology [NASDAQ:NDAQ] 2016).
Like other private blockchains, the shareholders of the system are

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limited and deliberately selected. The system design of a distributed

ledger remains, but the centralization differs on each blockchain.
While traditional ledgers are inherently centralized, blockchains are
only compatible with centralization: A given kind of technology is
strongly compatible with but does not strictly require, social and politi-
cal relationships of a particular stripe (Winner 1980, 130). The distrib-
uted ledger of the blockchain does not require centralization any more
than decentralization, at least for the technical system to fulfil the basic
necessity of genuinely updating the books. Blockchain technology, how-
ever, remains strongly compatible with centralized systems, and thus it
is being implemented privately by different institutions, especially in the
financial technology sector. On the other hand, a hypothetical block-
chain made of all the worlds population, evenly distributed, would not
be instrumentally different. Blockchains are thus equally compatible
with centralized or decentralized systems, but all blockchains require
social and political relationships where the control of trust is displaced
from institutional production and recording to computational produc-
tion and recording.7
What is being distributed is the control of trust, the confidence that
no matter how extended the universe of shareholders, all recorded
statements are valid. This consistency has the caveat of being
computer-made. When digressing on the best way to address the onto-
logical status of money, Coeckelbergh distinguishes between human-
made and computer-made objects, or algorithm-made, robot made,
etc. (2015, 94). This distinction becomes handy for understanding the
novelty of blockchains. Even if the code for the software and the basic
rules of the protocol are human-made, on a blockchain the tokens
themselves (such as bitcoins, ether, and so on) are produced exclusively
by computation. What is more, the production of the tokens is folded
with the checking for transaction consistency, or what is commonly
called mining. This is the big breakthrough of bitcoin, and all block-
chain systems inherit this basic but crucial operational characteristic.
The primordial finding of bitcoins anonymous designer was to solve
the Byzantine Generals problem (Lamport, Shostak, and Pease 1982),
which requires an algorithmic implementation for secure communica-
tion and common agreement among unreliable peers (Nakamoto 2008).
The solution of the blockchain demands solving a hard computational
puzzle in order to validate aggregated communications, so that forging
a message would require redoing the whole chain of messages.8 This
computational puzzle involves the use of a random number in the pro-
cess. Because every attempt to find a solution requires a new random
7
Matteo Pasquinelli (2016) uses the term mathematical recording when researching
the database as a political form. I prefer to use the more concise term computational.
8
I discuss the specificities of bitcoins mining in Velasco Gonz
alez 2016.

V
variable, the problem must be solved by trial and error, hence the
necessity of arduous computational resources. Mining effectively solves
the Byzantine Generals problem, by generating a computer-made
operational version of trust. This computer-made operation is at the
core of blockchain technology. In order to emphasize the difference
between human-made and computer-made, I shall digress briefly to dis-
cuss a recent commercial implementation of the computer-made.
No Mans Sky is a recent space-exploration game that exploits
computer-made virtual worlds. While it is not the first game to use
procedurally generated elements, the game made this technique the
basis and banner for its launch. Most elements in the gamestar sys-
tems order, flora, fauna, behavioural patterns, and so forthare
computer-generated. By giving the game a set of simple rules and varia-
bles, the computer generates every possible combination of them. The
result is the overwhelming possibility of exploring eighteen quintillion
planets. The creators advertise the factual impossibility of the task as
one of the highlights of the game: If a new planet was discovered
every second after the game comes out, it would take 584 billion years
to visit every one just for a second (Hiranand 2015). Outsourcing
design labour to the computer allows the production of large amounts
of content with the use of random combinations of individual elements.
These elements are human-made, but their factual combinations are
generated by the computer. The combination of randomness and
computer-made operations results in unpredictable outcomes, even for
the developers.9
What No Mans Sky and blockchain share, among other things, is
the predominance of the computer-made element for their operations.
In the case of the blockchain, shared trust is displaced from institutions
and a diverse array of social interactions to the instrumental operation
of mining. Specifically, it is the controlled distribution of truth that
makes blockchains unique. As detailed in James Benigers seminal
work The Control Revolution (1986), the industrial revolution generated
a crisis of control when communication technologies, and information
processes, lagged behind the fast developments of energy technologies
and their applications. The current economy of information is seen,
then, as a reaction to the accelerated improvements of manufacturing
and transportation of the nineteenth century, what Beniger calls the
societal control revolution of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Blockchains make possible a mode of control that performs even
among distributed, fluid, pseudo-anonymous, and apparently non-
9
It is interesting to observe that the promise of infinity was good enough to lure a
considerable interest before the release, but the hype among the users faded shortly after.
Wide computational permutations in exchange for narrative were not enough to impress
an understandably angered human audience.

V
authoritarian social schemes. They provide a type of control of commu-

nications tuned to the pace of decentralized arrangements. Like truth,
authority too is folded into the performance of the efficient system.10
Authority in these kinds of control systems does not have to be
embodied in an outside agent. Winner quotes Friedrich Engelss brief
essay On Authority as providing an example of an imaginary
arrangement that does not require a pilot but nonetheless is character-
ized for being an authoritarian system. In this hypothetical instance,
land and instruments of labour have become collective, and control is
apparently decentralized; however, Engels warns that authoritywithin
a cotton millwould pass from a few capitalists to the authority of
the steam, which is the timed operational work necessary to keep the
mill running. Engels adds, The automatic machinery of a big factory
is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers
ever have been (Engels 1978, 731). In this kind of control system,
intentionality can be ignored, since authority is embedded in the device
not as an addendum but as a main property. Engelss example is rele-
vant because it states that the rules for timed labour are set by the
workers in the cotton mill but that once they are put into action, the
machinery takes over, leaving no space for autonomy. The same can be
applied to the human-made rules that design blockchains, which are
surpassed once the system is operational.
Conclusion
I have undertaken here an ontological inquiry towards the current
notion of money as legal tender. I argued that the current economical
model of production based on the fractional reserve banking system
demands that the question on the current nature of money takes into
account the politics involved in its production and control through cen-
tralized registries. I then turned the question to blockchain-generated
digital assets, such as bitcoin. I acknowledged Bjergs attempt to dissect
the ontology of such digital objects, and I expanded the research on
the subject by observing the notions of production and control of regis-
try through the lens of blockchains distinctive technical performance.
Considering that the ownership of production and control of the block-
chain as registry are computer-made, I argued that political ontology
of the blockchain is the embeddedness of authority through computer-
made control of trust in an actively fluid environment. Particular
meanings of control, trust, and authority are folded into the
10
My argument here is in tune with, and inspired by, Alexander Galloways analysis
of the protocol. For Galloway (2004), protocol is a management style or distributed
technique that allows regulation of a heterogeneous and contingent environment, such as
the Internet.

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instrumental operation of production and recording of the distributed

ledger. The political forms described cannot be entirely defined by tra-
ditional actors, such as the state, a group of developers, or the market.
They require the development of mixed ontologies and the questioning
of not only how political frameworks produce technological devices but
also how technological devices produce politics.
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies

University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom
p.r.velasco-gonzalez@warwick.ac.uk
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