Bitcoin and its spheres of consumption: Transactional orders of consuming money in the Czech and Slovak Bitcoin community

Abstract

With the recent proliferation of modes of payment, anthropology must increasingly pay closer attention to innovative designs and uses of money in Western societies. Money has started to be perceived as a consumable service with multiple providers from which to choose. In such an environment, the question of how people consume money—instead of how they consume with money—grows in importance. This article is based on ethnographic research of Bitcoin communities in Prague and Bratislava. It examines how users variously consume Bitcoin and what consequences these diverse ways of consumption can have for the Bitcoin economy. The article identifies two discrete spheres of consumption that closely correlate with “transactional orders” or spheres of exchange as described in classical works of economic anthropology, for example, by Parry and Bloch. One of the spheres is concerned with the reproduction of social order, while the other considers the personal gain of individual consumers. The article also examines the tension between these two spheres and how it is dialectically resolved through strategies of conversion. In the final discussion, the case of Bitcoin is compared with other anthropological accounts of spheres of exchange, with special attention oriented to their dissimilarities.