Socio-Economic Review Cafe  — Cryptomarkets & Cryptocurrencies: Trust, Value, and Market Coordination

The event will take place on Tuesday, April 1st, 2025:
7:30 AM PST (Vancouver)
9:30 AM CST (Central Time, US & Canada)
Register at this link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/x03uBBsnQlWh5HmhvpXf5g 

Join us for an engaging SER Café event featuring a discussion with SER authors Ana Macanovic, Wojtek Przepiorka, Kobe De Keere, Martin Trans, and Stefania Milan.

Macanovic and Przepiorka’s paper, “The Moral Embeddedness of Cryptomarkets: Text Mining Feedback on Economic Exchanges on the Dark Web”, explores how cooperation is sustained in illegal cryptomarkets, online marketplaces where users trade illicit goods under conditions of anonymity. They show that while reputation systems structure exchange, their effectiveness depends on traders’ willingness to leave feedback, shifting moral norms from facilitating trust at the transaction stage to sustaining reputation as a collective good. De Keere, Trans, and Milan’s paper, “The Value of Crypto? Sociotechnical Imaginaries on Cryptocurrency in YouTube Content”, examines how cryptocurrencies are framed and valued in public discourse. Using a large-scale analysis of YouTube videos, they identify distinct imaginaries that shape how cryptocurrency’s value is constructed, contested, and legitimized.

Together, these papers offer insights into how decentralized markets function without traditional regulatory oversight, examining the mechanisms that sustain trust, reputation, and exchange, as well as the narratives that shape perceptions of value and legitimacy in digital economies.

As with all SER Café events, this session will prioritize dynamic conversation with the authors over lengthy presentations. Please come ready to engage, ask questions, and discuss these critical contributions to the field!

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Articles:

“The Moral Embeddedness of Cryptomarkets: Text Mining Feedback on Economic Exchanges on the Dark Web” By Ana Macanovic and Wojtek Przepiorka. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwad069

“The Value of Crypto? Sociotechnical Imaginaries on Cryptocurrency in YouTube Content” By Kobe De Keere, Martin Trans, and Stefania Milan.  https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwae081