Talk given by Jaya Klara Brekke at the advaya event Alternative Economies: Decentralisation & People Power.
Cryptocurrencies and "blockchain" promise to decentralise money, law, governance and much more. But what happens when concepts like decentralisation travel across political, technical and organisational fields? Which exact modes of decentralisation are encoded in blockchain protocols? What do they mean in terms of power and control, autonomy and risk and the ability to connect and disconnect? Do decentralised systems “give us back control” or put us at the mercy of uncontrollable and very complex systems? The distinction between “centralised” and “decentralised" might very well not be sufficient to understand what matters in terms of our ability to determine our conditions.
Jaya Klara Brekke writes, researchs and speaks on the political economy of blockchain and consensus protocols, focusing on questions of politics and power in distributed systems. She is currently a department member at Durham University.
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