This book is a journey through coexisting, emerging or speculated about, types of digital value transfer infrastructures. Using digital value transfer infrastructures as a central case study, this thesis is concerned with unpacking the negotiation processes that shape the governance, design and political purposes of digital infrastructures that are closely linked to the public interest and state sovereignty. In particular, the papers that are assembled in this manuscript identify and inspect three main socio-technical developments occurring in the domain of value transfer technologies: a) the privatization and platformization of digital payment infrastructures; b) the spread of blockchain-based digital value transfer infrastructures; c) the construction of digital value transfer infrastructures as public utilities, from the part of public institutions or organizations. Concerned with the relationship between law, discourse and technological development, the thesis explores four transversal issues that strike differences and peculiarities of these three scenarios: i) privacy; ii) the synergy and mutual influence of legal change and technological development in the construction of digital infrastructures; iii) the role of socio-technical imaginaries in policy-making concerned with digital infrastructures; iv) the geography and scale of digital infrastructures. The analyses lead to the argument that, in the co-development of legal systems and digital infrastructures that are core to public life, conflicts are productive. Negotiations, ruptures and exceptions are constitutive of the unending process of mutual reinforcement, and mutual containment, in which a plurality of agencies – expressed through legal institutions, symbolic systems, as well as information and media structures – are entangled.
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This book brings together voices from various fields of intellectual inquiry, based on the idea that technological, legal and societal aspects of the information sphere are interlinked and co-dependent from each other. In order to tackle the existing gap in shared semantics, this glossary converges the efforts of experts from various disciplines to build a shared vocabulary on the social, technical, economic, political aspects of decentralised, distributed or sovereign technologies: artefacts which seek to challenge the techno-social status quo by, for example, circumventing law enforcement, resisting surveillance, or being participative.The idea ofthis glossary arose from the need for a workable, flexible and multidisciplinary resource for terminological clarity, which reflects instead of denying complexity. Situating the terms emerging through technology development in the wider context of multidisciplinary scientific, policy and political discourses, this glossary provides a conceptual toolkit for the study of the various political, economic, legal and technical struggles that decentralised, encryption-based, peer-to-peer technologies bring about and go through.Choosing relevant technology-related terms and understanding them is to investigate their affordances within a given ecosystem of actors, discourses and systems of incentives. This requires an interdisciplinary, multi-layered approach that is attentive to the interlinkages between technological design nuances and socio-political, economic implications.The glossary was envisioned as a long-term collaborative project, and as a work-in-progress, as new entries are periodically added over time. The present book collects the entries published on the Internet Policy Review between 2021 and 2023. Therefore, it represents the first volume of what hopefully will be a long-term, ever-evolving editorial collaboration, whose sources of inspiration and goals evolve with the evolving of the broader discussions on decentralized technologies.
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CRYPTOPOLIS is a project supported by EU which focuses on the financial management knowledge of teachers and the emerging field of risk management and risk analysis of cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency has shown to be a vital and rapidly growing component in today’s digital economy therefore there is a need to include not just financial but also crypto literacy into the schools. Beside multiple investors and traders the market is attracting an increasing number of young individuals, viewing it as an easy way to make money. A large pool of teenagers and young adults want to hop on this train, but a lack of cryptocurrency literacy, as well as financial literacy in general amongst youth, together with their inexperience with investing makes them even more vulnerable to an already high-risk investment.Therefore, we aim to increase the capacity and readiness of secondary schools and higher educational institutions to manage an effective shift towards digital education in the field of crypto and financial literacy. The project will develop the purposeful use of digital technologies in financial and crypto education for teaching, learning, assessment and engagement.
