Breaking Out of the Bank in Europe - Exploring Collective Emergent Institutional Entrepreneurship Through Bitcoin

21 Pages Posted: 12 May 2013

See all articles by Robin Teigland

Robin Teigland

Stockholm School of Economics - Department of Marketing and Strategy

Zeynep Yetis

Stockholm School of Economics

Tomas Larsson

Kairos Future

Date Written: May 11, 2013

Abstract

In recent years, the Bitcoin community has collectively developed an open source platform that allows for the mining of the Bitcoin currency as well as instant global peer-to-peer payments and financial transactions using Bitcoins - without any central authority. With its theoretical roots in the Austrian School of Economics, the community can be seen as a potential threat to the mega financial institutions and governments in Europe and across the globe as the Bitcoin currency and its underlying principles challenge the long-standing fiat money system. Designed and implemented in only 2009, Bitcoin has rapidly grown from being an idea in the head of a “Japanese programmer” to becoming a legitimate currency as Bitcoin-Central was awarded an International Bank ID number and became a Payment Services Provider equal to organizations such as PayPal. However, perhaps due to its rapid growth during the past four years and the fact that the currency is primarily a virtual one, the Bitcoin community has been subject to external threats such as fraud, hacker attacks, and a lawsuit. Despite this, the community has shown significant resilience and has even shown continued exponential growth in recent months. As such, our research purpose is to investigate the process through which the Bitcoin community acts as an institutional entrepreneur. As a first step in fulfilling our research purpose, we conduct an exploratory analysis in this research-in-progress paper of the formal and informal “organizations” of Bitcoin as well as of the topical network structure of the Bitcoin community using secondary sources and the complete archive of 1.15 million English posts written by 21,903 members between 2009 and 2013. Some preliminary results and findings as well as future steps are discussed.

Keywords: institutional entrepreneurship, open source, semantic analysis, social network analysis, Bitcoin, banking

Suggested Citation

Teigland, Robin and Yetis, Zeynep and Larsson, Tomas, Breaking Out of the Bank in Europe - Exploring Collective Emergent Institutional Entrepreneurship Through Bitcoin (May 11, 2013). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2263707 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2263707

Robin Teigland (Contact Author)

Stockholm School of Economics - Department of Marketing and Strategy ( email )

Box 6501
Stockholm, Stockholm 113 65
Sweden

HOME PAGE: http://www.knowledgenetworking.org

Zeynep Yetis

Stockholm School of Economics ( email )

PO Box 6501
Stockholm, 11383
Sweden

Tomas Larsson

Kairos Future ( email )

P.O. Box 804
Stockholm, SE-101 36
Sweden

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