Bitcoin: An accounting regime

IF 8.3 2区管理学 Q1 BUSINESS, FINANCE Critical Perspectives on Accounting Pub Date : 2024-03-01 DOI:10.1016/j.cpa.2024.102731

Mélissa Fortin , Erica Pimentel

引用次数: 0

Abstract

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and payment system that leverages blockchain technology to disintermediate financial transactions. Drawing on a netnography of the early Bitcoin community from the technology’s formation in 2008 through to the disappearance of its founder in 2011, this paper demonstrates the contours of Bitcoin as an accounting regime. We propose that Bitcoin constitutes a new technology built upon social practices infused with accounting language to inscribe economic value in a particular regime of verification and validation. These practices are shaped by social relations and fuse accounting and programming logic to create a new Bitcoin mindset. While Bitcoin purports to replace trust-in-persons with trust-in-systems, we demonstrate that the actual power of Bitcoin as an accounting regime depends on the human interactions underpinning the system. We also offer a critical perspective on Bitcoin by examining the potential consequences of a payment system that mobilizes accounting practices in service of an ideology that rejects any form of oversight.

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比特币：一种会计制度

比特币是一种加密货币和支付系统，它利用区块链技术解除了金融交易的中介地位。本文通过对早期比特币社区从 2008 年比特币技术形成到 2011 年创始人失踪期间的网络分析，展示了比特币作为一种会计制度的轮廓。我们提出，比特币是一种建立在社会实践基础上的新技术，它融入了会计语言，将经济价值赋予了特定的验证和确认机制。这些实践是由社会关系形成的，并融合了会计和编程逻辑，创造了一种新的比特币思维。虽然比特币声称要以对系统的信任取代对个人的信任，但我们证明，比特币作为一种会计制度的实际威力取决于支撑该系统的人类互动。我们还对比特币提供了一个批判性的视角，研究了一种支付系统的潜在后果，这种支付系统调动会计实践来服务于一种拒绝任何形式监督的意识形态。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Critical Perspectives on Accounting BUSINESS, FINANCE-

CiteScore

9.40

自引率

7.80%

发文量

期刊介绍： Critical Perspectives on Accounting aims to provide a forum for the growing number of accounting researchers and practitioners who realize that conventional theory and practice is ill-suited to the challenges of the modern environment, and that accounting practices and corporate behavior are inextricably connected with many allocative, distributive, social, and ecological problems of our era. From such concerns, a new literature is emerging that seeks to reformulate corporate, social, and political activity, and the theoretical and practical means by which we apprehend and affect that activity. Research Areas Include: • Studies involving the political economy of accounting, critical accounting, radical accounting, and accounting''s implication in the exercise of power • Financial accounting''s role in the processes of international capital formation, including its impact on stock market stability and international banking activities • Management accounting''s role in organizing the labor process • The relationship between accounting and the state in various social formations • Studies of accounting''s historical role, as a means of "remembering" the subject''s social and conflictual character • The role of accounting in establishing "real" democracy at work and other domains of life • Accounting''s adjudicative function in international exchanges, such as that of the Third World debt • Antagonisms between the social and private character of accounting, such as conflicts of interest in the audit process • The identification of new constituencies for radical and critical accounting information • Accounting''s involvement in gender and class conflicts in the workplace • The interplay between accounting, social conflict, industrialization, bureaucracy, and technocracy • Reappraisals of the role of accounting as a science and technology • Critical reviews of "useful" scientific knowledge about organizations