🎉 🧵👇 Happy New Year to all! So, it's finally happened: i'm a PhD on Economics and Social Sciences, on cryptocurrencies governance! 🎉🎉🎉

🎉 Let's start 2025 with a thread presenting my thesis entitled "Beyond Codes: Discreet and Polycentric Governance of Cryptocurrencies (CM) Bitcoin and Ethereum Revealed by Their Crises." The general presentation will follow my defense summary.

RarePepe Artist (3*🐸 retired) | Collector | Come for the tech, stay for the meme | Art lover
 #TimeStampsPhilatelist

📜 Bitcoin was launched 16 years ago. A constellation of new assets has emerged along with cryptocurrencies (CC) phenomenon. Crypto markets have surpassed $3.5 trillion in capitalization, with Bitcoin representing 56% and Ethereum, second, accounting for ~70% of the DEFI sector

The media, gray literature, and academic sources still use inconsistent designations for these objects, labeling CM as "virtual payment methods" excluded from the monetary field, due to the (presumed) absence of trusted third parties enabled by blockchain/cryptography...

📜These definitions are inspired by pioneering ambitions, asserting that technical consensus replaces political consensus, eliminating discretionary interventions and uncertainties. This libertarian "dream" or "nightmare" intrigued me as it contradicted my understanding of money.

🔍 I examine these liberal-technicist ambitions posited in syllogism. By approaching CC as socio-technical infrastructures, I critique these premises, avoiding the pitfalls of both technologism and sociologism, grounding the perspectives of both coiners and their detractors.

📚  Theoretical Framework: Integrating the frameworks of Francophone Monetary Institutionalism and STS, I analyze CC as constructed social and technical objects. Controversies & crises are both a meeting point for these frameworks and a privileged observation point for their gov.

🛠️ Methodology: I conducted a multi-sited qualitative investigation in two phases (2015-2020) with four access mechanisms. This allowed me to collect rich and diverse data, capturing CC as socio-technical infrastructures, relational networks renegotiated through uses & practice

📜 Summary of the Thesis: I achieve this through three chapters: a socio-history of the emergence of Bitcoin and Ethereum infrastructures, a critical analysis of the monetary status of CC, and a sociology of crises revealing their polycentric governance.

🌟Contributions 1: Within the framework of infrastructural studies, I unveil the invisible and carnivalesque nature of CC. As socio-technical infrastructures, they are shaped by social, political, and economic issues, revealing an unpredictable and multifaceted development.

🌟 contribution 2 I argue that BTC and ETH are a new form of currencies! Their uniqueness lies in a polycentric governance establishing a distributed consensus logic, different from the contractual logic of signature or the fiduciary logic of seal characteristic of private and public currencies

🌟 Contributions 3: Using a sociology of crises, I analyze the polycentric governance of CC, revealing two types of crises (vulnerability & evolution) and two forms of governance (closed doors & public). Beyond their code, CC ultimately rely on social consensus.

As an illustration, here are some Rare Pepe Cards: through this pioneering NFT project on Bitcoin, I undertook my first participatory immersions online and On Chain... and experienced the practical norms within Bitcoin (its codes and community)...