The Illumination of Money : An Ethnography of Bitcoin in El Salvador

Abstract: Money can be understood as a disembedding mechanism, detaching social relations from a spatiotemporal context. However, different infrastructural instantiations of money make visible–and invisible–different qualities of money. Through a two-month ethnographic study of El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin as a complimentary legal tender, I show how Bitcoin in El Salvador functions as a technology of the imagination that brings future-making and deterritorialization into the forefront of money infrastructure(s).  The thesis is divided into three main parts. First, I briefly introduce how people leverage Bitcoin as a tool for shaping subjective attitudes towards time, and consequently–to inspire hope.  Then, I show how foreigners travelling to El Salvador to use Bitcoin are not doing this out of economic considerations. Rather, this transnational group of Bitcoiners can be characterised as a recursive public that utilises Bitcoin to escape the formation of the nation-state and form a deterritorialized community around shared speculative visions of the future. Bitcoin also allows them to make general infrastructural features of money visible and to contest these. The prime example being money’s disciplinary effects on subjective attitudes towards time. In the last part, I show how deterritorialization and speculative futures also come to the forefront of Salvadoran imaginaries of Bitcoin. We can understand attitudes of fear and attitudes of hope as responses to this imaginary. The thesis concludes by arguing that Bitcoin’s materiality affords imaginaries of disembedded social landscapes, thus rendering visible preexisting infrastructural features of money. However, in the specific context of El Salvador Bitcoin also works as a tool for re-embedding, but only for the Bitcoiners.