ENBy Maël Rolland23 June 202631 min

Crypto (Anti-)Commons? Controversies Surrounding the Status of Bitcoin and Public Blockchains as Digital Commons—Part 1

Introduction

Two recent events prompted this post. The first is the symposium “Digital Commons: Assessment and Perspectives”—on which I offered a report elsewhere—at the close of which I suggested that cryptocurrencies, beyond being instruments capable of funding commons, could also be understood as digital commons in their own right. The second is my participation in a debate entitled “Bitcoin: Digital Commons or Political Lure?”, in Strasbourg, which led me to spell out the terms of that proposition.

Such clarification is necessary because the idea is far from consensual. According to Lakomsky-Laguerre (2022), if a “consensus is emerging today, in the academic world,” it is to cast Bitcoin as “the archetype of the ‘anti-commons,’ even a serious contributor to their destruction.” This reading owes much to the widely cited paper by Denis Dupré, Jean-François Ponsot and Jean-Michel Servet, “Le bitcoin contre la révolution des communs”. Their critique partly extends that of Michel Bauwens, of the P2P Foundation, who was the first to offer a critical evaluation of the relationship between Bitcoin and the commons—though his remained more ambivalent: politically severe, he nonetheless granted Bitcoin genuine commons-based potential. Above all, this consensus remains relative and situated: it captures neither the international debates on blockchains nor the various ways of articulating cryptocurrencies and the commons, even as a growing number of authors read certain cryptocurrencies as possible forms of commons.

My aim is not to decide from the outset whether Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are or are not commons. Before qualifying them as such, one must first specify which “commons” one is talking about. The notion does not refer to a single theoretical framework, but to several traditions of analysis and to distinct moments of conceptualization. Hence, following Lakomsky-Laguerre (2022), a more nuanced and also more modest claim: Bitcoin — as a “proposal for an alternative payment system founded on the free-software principle […], a public blockchain, freely auditable, in which anyone can take part” — can be brought closer to, or conversely set against, each of these approaches depending on the criteria retained. Without claiming the exhaustiveness of an academic article, this post seeks to situate and map out the main theoretical and political fault lines that structure this debate.

Practices of sharing and collective use are ancient, whereas the contemporary notion of commons was constructed later, in reaction to their marginalization by market capitalism.

From a liberal narrative marginalizing commons as practice… Since Adam Smith — and against Smith himself¹ — the liberal economic narrative naturalizes the market order. Exchange, contract, private property and instrumental self-interest are presented as anthropological givens, inscribed in human nature. Human beings are said to be endowed with a

*“propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another”, following “the care [they take] of their own interest, [of] their own selfishness” *Adam Smith (1776), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. I, p. 23.

Karl Polanyi analyzes and criticizes this “utilitarian conception of rationality” as an economic sophistry: an anthropologically fallacious universalization (Chavance, in Polanyi, 2011). This naturalization of market exchange contributes to erasing earlier forms of economic organization such as redistribution and reciprocity — grounded in particular in collective use rights and common property regimes. In The Great Transformation, Polanyi shows that market capitalism does not proceed from a natural order but from institutional ruptures that transformed land, labor and money into “fictitious commodities”: these resources were henceforth subjected to a market order from which they did not previously derive. With regard to land, this upheaval is identified in the English enclosures — a movement begun as early as the twelfth century and unfolded in two waves, on either side of the English Revolution (1641–1649) — a profound recomposition of property regimes that transformed collective use rights into exclusive rights. The market, then, did not impose itself upon an institutional void: it was constituted through this erasure.

In this sense, Garrett Hardin’s famous “tragedy of the commons” (1968, published in Science),which promotes private property as the only solution, radicalizes this attempt at erasure: commons are described as an intrinsically unstable institutional form, doomed to disappear through inevitable overexploitation by rational actors pursuing their individual interests. Hardin constructs less a description of actually existing commons than a theoretical anti-model, which naturalizes private property as the only viable response to the collective use of resources. Yet, contradicting this eschatology, commons are ancient but persistent practices that never disappeared: forest use rights, millennia-old irrigation systems or collectively organized pasture rights². Hardin’s prescriptions nevertheless accompanied the drastic strengthening of intellectual property in the fields of software and the living world in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s (Coriat 2010). The extension of this “proprietary ideology” operates through law: economic efficiency requires that forms of “shared rights” be replaced by “full” private property rights, that is, exclusive ones.

…to the response of their conceptualization. Hardin’s thesis deeply shaped academic debates and public policies. It also provides an essential context for understanding the emergence and stabilization of the notions of commons, and later of digital commons. Far from being univocal, the genealogy of this concept refers to three major lineages.

For material commons, Elinor Ostrom opposed Hardin with her empirical analyses from the late 1980s onward: the criteria of rivalry and excludability mobilized³ are partial, and the nature of a good determines neither its property regime nor the effectiveness of its management.

At the same time, immaterial resources were themselves threatened by market privatization: software, information and knowledge of the living world. It was in this context of expanding intellectual property — denounced by James Boyle as a “second enclosure movement” over the “resources of the mind” — that a group of jurists and researchers, including Boyle, Jessica Litman, Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig, brought the notion of digital commons into being (Coriat and Broca 2015, pp. 272–273). As Sébastien Schultz recalled in his introduction to the study day, the first occurrences of the term appeared in 1998–1999 in Lawrence Lessig’s work, where he used it to criticize the extension of intellectual property rights over informational resources: here, digital commons are first and foremost understood as informational resources in open access.

A second lineage proceeds from a displacement, encouraged by the jurists of the previous current, of the analytical framework developed by Elinor Ostrom for the study of material commons toward immaterial resources (ibid.). Once transposed to the analysis of knowledge and information commons, this framework shifts attention from questions of access alone toward those of collective resource governance.

A third lineage, finally, more critical and later, emphasizes practices of cooperation themselves, as an opposition to the market framework. Often described as post-Marxist, this approach conceives the common as a social and political activity — commoning — embedded in a broader critique of capitalism, a perspective illustrated in particular by Carlo Vercellone during the study day.

It is within this diverse conceptual inheritance that the contemporary debate on Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and blockchains is situated. But before examining what Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies might have in common with these different approaches, let us first return to what leads some authors to qualify them as “anti-commons”.

Michel Bauwens: a pioneering critique in nuance I will begin this mapping with the critiques that lead some authors to describe Bitcoin as an “anti-common”. These texts are valuable: by explicitly confronting Bitcoin with the conceptualizations of the commons, they allow us to identify, by contrast, which dimensions of these approaches are judged absent from or incompatible with cryptocurrencies.

The first explicit rapprochement between Bitcoin and the commons seems to be attributable to Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, in a short blog post published in 2014, A political evaluation of Bitcoin. Bauwens does not use the notion of “anti-common” there, but offers a first critical evaluation of the protocol from a perspective he describes as commons-based. His analysis matters precisely because it is not one-sided. On the one hand, he recognizes real “positive aspects” in Bitcoin: the proof that a global, distributed and post-Westphalian currency can function without a central bank, without a state and without a traditional payment intermediary; a “weapon of last resort” against financial censorship — Wikileaks is the illustration; and an opening, at least potentially, toward new forms of “human self-organization”. He therefore reduces Bitcoin neither to a purely technical device nor to a purely ideological project: he sees in it a socio-technical and political singularity.

This recognition is nevertheless accompanied by a severe critique. For Bauwens, Bitcoin is not a genuine peer-to-peer currency: access to mining is unequally distributed, it favors early entrants and holders of technical or financial capital, and its concentration accentuates rent and accumulation effects. But the critique also belongs to a political sociology of the project: what Bauwens calls into question is the libertarian — or “proprietarian” — imaginary historically associated with it, a freedom indexed to property, in which “the more one owns, the freer one is”, and which tends to reinforce already favored groups — early entrants, investors, venture capital, oligarchic actors — to the detriment of emancipatory and progressive forces.

Bitcoin’s commons-based potentialities are thus caught within a social and ideological coalition that tends to orient them toward a hyper-capitalist or “netarchical” model: a capitalism capable of relying on distributed networks while capturing the value they produce. His critique therefore amounts less to a rejection in principle than to a political diagnosis: an infrastructure can be open without being politically common.

Dupré, Ponsot, Servet: the crystallization of the anti-common We owe to Denis Dupré, Jean-François Ponsot and Jean-Michel Servet the hardening of the critique of Bitcoin from the standpoint of the commons, to the point of coining the formula of the “anti-common”. In “Le bitcoin contre la révolution des communs”⁴, beyond considering that Bitcoin cannot be recognized as a commons, these authors go further: Bitcoin would stand against the political and institutional dynamic of the commons. This text constitutes an important moment in the controversy, making Bitcoin a counter-model of the common. This critique would later be supported by a broader set of subsequent texts.

The point here is not to criticize the Francophone institutionalist tradition of monetary theory, of which Servet is one representative and within which I also situate part of my own work, but to discuss a more precise operation: the qualification of Bitcoin as an “anti-common” in the name of a certain normative conception of money as a commons.

From the framework of the critique… This conclusion is embedded, for them, in a general theory of money as a commons, and in a rapprochement with social and complementary currencies. Their conception of the commons is explicit: “a commons is characterized by the use of a good or service organized in such a way that it can be mutualized through the voluntary, coordinated and non-dominating bringing together of the particular interests of its stakeholders” (Dupré, Ponsot, Servet 2015, p. 3). It is situated within a theory that seeks to “think money as a commons” in a dual dimension: “global, as the production of liquidity necessary to the functioning of economies and society; local, as an instrument of communities that give themselves democratic rules” (Servet 2017).⁵ Hence their rapprochement, in “Le bitcoin, une tragédie du marché”, between local and complementary currencies: “solidarity-based local currencies are constructed as a ‘commons’, whereas bitcoin is constructed, in its current state, as a private good of a mainly speculative character”.⁶

The core of their critique lies in the gap between two monetary imaginaries. Complementary local currencies are conceived as instruments of economic relocalization, support for social and ecological activities, and democratization of money by situated collectives. Bitcoin, by contrast, appears to them as a deterritorialized currency, governed by programmed scarcity — which would favor early entrants — exposed to speculation, and marked by the supposed opacity of certain uses, the concentration of mining, the private appropriation of seigniorage and the energy cost of proof of work. These traits then become symptoms of the same problem: Bitcoin would pursue no explicitly collective or solidarity-based purpose.⁷ In this reading, it is therefore not merely a “bad commons”: it almost embodies the reverse of the commons — not a currency placed at the service of a political or territorial community, but a competitive, scarce and appropriable asset whose dynamic would favor private accumulation rather than mutualization. Their critique rightly brings to light real tensions — concentration, speculation, entry asymmetries, value capture — but moves too quickly from this observation to the impossibility of the commons. In this sense, it extends and hardens certain intuitions already present in Bauwens: the technical potentialities of a distributed infrastructure do not guarantee its emancipatory scope.

This critique is not without interest: for Dupré, Ponsot and Servet (2015), technical openness is not the same as the commons. Open source code, a public ledger or a distributed architecture are not sufficient, in themselves, to make a commons. But the strength of this diagnosis is correlated with a series of analytical slippages that must now be identified.

…to the critique of analytical slippages. First, the structuring contrast with solidarity-based complementary local currencies reveals these slippages. These currencies are described as commons because they are said to be “backed, territorialized, articulated to associations and to forms of democratic governance” (Dupré, Ponsot, Servet 2015). But this term-by-term comparison with Bitcoin proceeds from an idealization: complementary currencies do not obey a single and solidarity-based rationality, but articulate at least four distinct rationalities, some of which are more mercantile (Blanc 2002, p. 11); some of them rely on a community of relations rather than on territorial localism (ibid., p. 6),⁸ and their degree of integration into the national monetary system varies considerably according to generations and promoters (Blanc 1998; Blanc and Fare 2013). In other words, the opposition between “solidarity currencies” and “speculative crypto-asset” constructs a contrast that erases the internal diversity of monetary commons in order to better support a normative judgment on Bitcoin.

Second, the status acquired by this text — widely taken up in the Francophone debate — calls for a proportionate standard of rigor. Yet this critique rests, in my view, on a methodological limit: it tends to reify Bitcoin on the basis of the protocol alone and the white paper, without investigating the effective practices — those of developers, miners, node operators, entrepreneurs, users or activists involved in the ecosystem — that give the system its social and political reality. Yet these practices cannot be reduced to anonymous and competitive transactions. They also involve forms of cooperation, debate, funding, maintenance, conflict and governance. The openness — of the network and of the source code — is reduced to a simple technical property of the protocol, without examining the practices, rules, conflicts and forms of coordination, even cooperation, that make Bitcoin exist. Bitcoin is conceived as the pure and perfect realization of a libertarian ideological project, in which governance is reduced to protocol rules alone, as if the set of institutions and sociabilities at the heart of money dissolved into technology. Thus, all the socio-political dimensions of the system are set aside — “the potential universality of the circulation of bitcoins, the claim to cross borders without control and the absence of real coordination between its different stakeholders outside competitive relations, [as well as the supposed anonymity of actors,] stand in opposition to the definition of a community” — reducing Bitcoin to its theoretical design alone, as if that were sufficient to exhaust its social, political and institutional reality.

This reduction, methodologically revealing, reappears in a particularly clear form in a short text by Jean-François Ponsot published in 2021. He writes that “the contrast is striking between the blind trust expressed by bitcoin users in code and algorithm and the generalized distrust they express toward laws, monetary institutions and states”, before adding, with regard to possible flaws, cyberattacks or systemic instabilities, that “the bitcoin community does not seem to worry about this because it has faith in bitcoin”.⁹ The formulation is all the more striking because it appeared in 2021, after the controversies over SegWit (2015–2017), the Bitcoin Cash fork and the discovery of the CVE-2018-17144 vulnerability had given rise to intense public debates over risks, correction procedures and protocol governance. In other words, the formulation does acknowledge the existence of a Bitcoin community, but immediately reduces it to a quasi-religious belief in code. Yet Bitcoin’s history is precisely traversed by crises and governance conflicts: failing to integrate them into the analysis means missing an essential dimension of the object studied — which is precisely what my own doctoral research sought to displace.

Finally, this slippage is all the more remarkable because the mobilization of the Ostromian framework appears partial. The text refers essentially to works on material commons, without fully taking into account the extension of the research program toward immaterial commons and knowledge commons (their references pointing to Ostrom 1990, and not, as one might expect, to the later works of Hess and Ostrom 2007). This omission matters because it leads them to reduce the question of the commons to an institutional model narrower than the one proposed by Ostrom and its extensions. More fundamentally, their analysis tends to reproduce several confusions that the Ostromian literature seeks precisely to avoid: confusion between the nature of the good and the property regime; confusion between resource system and resource units; confusion between common property and open access. Thus, asserting that the idea of the commons necessarily differs from that of private goods and public goods can foster the idea that there is a natural correspondence between type of good and property regime. Ostrom’s contribution consists precisely in dissociating the nature of the good, the property regime, the resource system and the resource units. A single category of resources can be managed through public, private, communal, associative or hybrid arrangements, with variable results depending on contexts¹⁰. Likewise, the critique according to which Bitcoin organizes a competitive rivalry that increases scarcity for the benefit of those who already hold it partially ignores the distinction between resource system and resource units. One can indeed distinguish the protocol, the network and the blockchain — as shared infrastructure — from bitcoins themselves, as individually appropriable units. The fact that the units are subject to private appropriation is therefore not sufficient, in itself, to disqualify the resource system as an object of analysis in terms of commons.

In all cases, this reading makes invisible the internal debates of the Bitcoin ecosystem and the off-chain relations of members of a community that is nevertheless clearly identifiable. In other words, the qualification of Bitcoin as an “anti-common” rests less on an empirically demonstrated incompatibility with the Ostromian framework than on the adoption of a normative definition of the commons.

As Yannick Allaire (2019) emphasizes, discourses on the commons are “ambivalent”, often oscillating between empirical analysis and political project, which sustains a confusion between the description of existing practices and the prescription of desirable economic forms. Commons are frequently mobilized both as an analytical category, intended to describe certain institutional configurations of collective resource management, and as a normative or activist category, intended to promote alternative forms of economic organization. This tension is not accidental: it runs through much of the field.

Ranville (2018, pp. 94–97) reminds us that the “commons” is not, in Ostrom, a unified political category or an ideal institutional form: the term common is never autonomous, always specified — common-pool resource, common property, commons dilemma — whereas French usage tends to merge what Ostrom carefully distinguished: the nature of the good, the property regime and the mode of governance. Chanteau and Labrousse (2013) draw the consequence: making Ostrom the theorist of an ideal “third way” between state and market is a “theoretical and methodological misinterpretation” (p. 13), because her conjunctive, structural and constructivist method precisely refuses to reify concepts into dichotomies (state/market, public/private). The aim is not to prescribe a superior institutional model, but to build a comparative grammar for studying the diversity of arrangements and their situated performances.

For Ostrom, therefore, the type of good is not mechanically linked to a property regime: a common-pool resource can be managed by a community, an association, a cooperative, a private company, a public institution or a hybrid arrangement. Concretely, the point is not to classify objects within a binary opposition between public/private/common, but to analyze their morphology: what rules? which actors? which decision arenas? what monitoring mechanisms? what sanctions? what rights of access, withdrawal, management or exclusion?

This reminder helps situate the problem more clearly. The point is not to disqualify all normativity in the use of the word “commons”. Some traditions fully assume it, particularly those that think of commoning as a political activity and a critique of capitalism: the common does not designate only an observable institutional arrangement, but also a political orientation, a practice of cooperation, even an alternative to proprietary capitalism.

The problem is not that Dupré, Ponsot and Servet mobilize a normative conception of the commons — it can be perfectly legitimate — but that they present it as a simple descriptive application of the Ostromian framework, whereas it rests on a much more substantive conception: democratic cooperation, solidarity, explicit social purpose, limitation of speculation and private appropriation. Servet (2021) formulates this without ambiguity: “a commons differs from a public good in that its property is collective […] and that its use and modes of management imply the recognition and participation of stakeholders whose motive is not personal interest but also aims at recognizing the interests of others and satisfying their needs. This shared resource must be managed democratically. Bitcoin has none of these characteristics, which are based on trust in the collective” (Servet 2021, note 3).

Bitcoin is therefore not evaluated only with regard to its effective rules, its actors, its decision arenas or its governance practices: it is judged against a political horizon of the common. This horizon is legitimate, but it must be made explicit as such — otherwise two operations are confused: institutional analysis of a socio-technical arrangement, and political judgment of its conformity to a desirable conception of the commons.

The same kind of ambiguity reappears in the use of the very term “anti-common”.

Anti-common or anticommons ? A final ambiguity lies in the very term “anti-common”. For Dupré, Ponsot and Servet, the expression functions above all as a notion enabling a normative qualification: Bitcoin would be the reverse of the commons, because it would organize scarcity, competition, private accumulation and speculation rather than mutualization, cooperation or solidarity.

But the polemical use of “anti-common” masks the more precise meaning that anticommons has in the legal and economic literature: it does not designate the moral inverse of the commons, but an institutional pathology made of fragmented rights and blocked uses. For Michael Heller, it refers to a situation in which the use of a resource is blocked by excessive fragmentation of property rights or veto capacities: “when too many people own pieces of one thing, nobody can use it”. The problem is therefore not the overuse of an open resource, but its “wasteful underuse”, a costly underuse produced by an excess of exclusion or blocking rights. In other words, anticommons is not the absolute opposite of the commons: it is rather one possible institutional pathology of it.

When Adrian McCullagh mobilizes this notion with regard to blockchains, notably around the SegWit episode, he does not say that Bitcoin is foreign to any problematic of the commons.¹¹ On the contrary, he treats Bitcoin as a shared infrastructure whose modification can be made difficult by the dispersion of blocking powers among several groups of actors.

The paradox is therefore the following: in its analytical sense, speaking of anticommons with regard to Bitcoin already amounts to recognizing what Dupré, Ponsot and Servet largely refuse, namely the existence of a shared resource system traversed by problems of governance, rules, rights and coordination. This does not yet mean that Bitcoin is a commons in the full sense; but it already shifts the discussion onto the Ostromian terrain of institutional analysis — a shift that the next part of this series will take as its starting point.

This is precisely where my own work invites us to harden the response — and not to leave the last word to these normative critiques. For by remaining at the level of the protocol and of the declared imaginary, they miss what actors actually do. Even if the community were mostly liberal, speculative, attached to competition and hostile to classical collective institutions, its effective functioning does not identically reproduce the market world it claims to extend. A currency that is issued by no central entity, whose maintenance and evolution are decided among stakeholders, compels these actors — even if they are liberals — to coordinate, to cooperate and, in fact, to engage in the political deliberation from which they thought technology would protect them. As Nigel Dodd (2017) points out, Bitcoin succeeds as money only insofar as it fails as ideology: it depends precisely on what its imaginary claims to overcome, namely social relations, trust and community. Actors thus institute arenas of discussion, procedures of recording and control, and devices for expressing and arbitrating disagreement. They rarely claim this — they even contest it — but it is in their practices, far more than in their declarations, that this dimension can be read: like Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain, they make commons without knowing it.

And this shift is not merely procedural: it also concerns the relations of production around money. The capital I hold in cryptocurrency does not appear on the balance sheet of a bank that could use it, for its own profit and under its sole direction, to issue additional debt; the beneficiary of seigniorage is no longer the same, and the holder ceases to be a mere depositor and becomes a stakeholder in the infrastructure. This recomposition is undoubtedly less clear in Bitcoin than it becomes, more spectacularly, in Ethereum — which the next posts will seek to show.

The choice to start from Bitcoin — and then from Ethereum — therefore matters. One could reply that the critiques examined here target Bitcoin first and foremost, not blockchains in general, and then oppose to Bitcoin explicitly social, cooperative or solidarity-oriented projects. But the risk would be to retain only cases that are normatively compatible with the idea of the commons, often less tested, more centralized, or endowed with limited empirical traction. Starting from the two most stabilized, conflictualized and polycentric public networks instead allows us to test the question of the commons where it is most difficult. This is also why proof of work cannot be dismissed too quickly as a mere problematic anomaly: constitutive of Bitcoin and of Ethereum before its migration to proof of stake, and historically central to the formation of major public blockchains, it has been defended not only for its security properties, but also because it allowed, at least in principle, an initially open participation that did not presuppose prior ownership of units of the system.

The controversy lies precisely here: Bitcoin, as a pioneer, sits at the intersection of several lineages of the commons. It borrows from the first, that of open resources, through its source code, its public protocol and its consultable ledger. It interrogates the second, that of collective governance, through its mechanisms of coordination, its conflicts over updates, its forks and its distributed communities. It resists the third, more critical and political — but perhaps less than it appears.

This is why the rest of this series will examine these lineages separately. In the next post, we will return to blockchains as digital commons in the sense of open access and collective governance: what is really shared when we share a protocol, code or a ledger? And who governs that sharing?

Footnotes:

¹ Smith is less the author of this reading than the victim of a questionable translation: the self-love he mobilizes is not selfishness. A thinker of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he does not reduce human action to egoism; in his work, the market celebrates not so much indifference as the obligation to take others’ expectations into account. See « Adam Smith et le romantisme économique », *The Conversation ; * Gilles Raveaud, « Smith, pas égoïste », Alternatives Économiques.

2 These collectively organized pasture rights remained vivid in the memory of Lionel Jeannerat — a publisher and free software entrepreneur — whom I met during the debate “Bitcoin, Commun Numérique ou Appeau Politique?”, in Strasbourg.

3 The distinction between rivalry/non-rivalry and excludability/non-excludability makes it possible to differentiate private goods, pure public goods, common-pool resources and club goods. Developed from Paul Samuelson’s theory of public goods (1954), it aims to analyze situations in which markets poorly produce certain collective goods, notably because of problems of underproduction and free riding — a problem to which Mancur Olson would give a classic formulation in The Logic of Collective Action (1965).

4 Denis Dupré, Jean-François Ponsot and Jean-Michel Servet, “Le bitcoin contre la révolution des communs”, paper presented at the 5th AFEP Congress, Lyon, 2015.

5 Jean-Michel Servet, « Institution monétaire et commun(s) », Économie et institutions, 2017. Published in the same issue as Rolland and Slim (2017), this text shows that Servet’s critique of Bitcoin is embedded in a positive theoretical program. He also acknowledges that, for him, “the anti-common character of bitcoin obviously does not mean that crypto-currencies based on a system functioning as a blockchain — in other words, a technology for storing and transmitting information, transparent, secure, and operating without a central control body — could not appear and develop, provided that, unlike bitcoin, they supported projects of solidarity-based practices with democratic functioning. They would consequently be based on a logic of the commons.” He then lists cases that he sees as different: Faircoin, initiated in Catalonia; Impak Coin in Quebec; Hullcoin in the northeast of the United Kingdom; and the Léman in the Geneva region and neighboring France.

6 Denis Dupré, Jean-François Ponsot et Jean-Michel Servet, « Le Bitcoin, une tragédie du marché », 2015.

7 This ecological critique was later extended in Jean-Michel Servet, « Le bitcoin, mirage monétaire et désastre écologique », Institut Rousseau, July 2021 — an updated version of a text published in Les Possibles (Attac). Servet notably criticizes Rolland and Slim (2017) for failing “to provide statistical information on its issuance and the distribution of mining, as well as on its actual uses and their possible evolution” (note 4). This criticism is legitimate on its own terrain, but it belongs to another level of analysis than mine — governance, power, coordination. In a sociology of controversies, I conform to the principle of symmetry, which requires being “impartial with regard to the arguments put forward by the various actors” and “privileging no point of view” (Callon 1986, p. 8): the point is to restitute the controversial character of the energy question, not to settle it from above. My starting point is a question of governance by and over the infrastructure: how does a currency without a central bank or issuing state maintain itself, transform itself and settle its disagreements? In this framework, proof of work (PoW) could not be treated as a mere external cost or technical aberration: it constitutes one of the institutional cores of the device, articulating network security, monetary issuance, miner remuneration and the distribution of validation power. This dimension is itself the object of an internal controversy within the crypto field, opposing proof of work and proof of stake (PoS). Proponents of proof of stake attribute to proof of work “significant overheads […] borne by the users through a combination of inflation and transaction fees” (King and Nadal 2012, p. 2), while its defenders reply that distributed consensus requires the verifiable consumption of a resource external to the system — “Intuitively, it seems impossible to obtain distributed consensus without provably consuming some resource outside of the system” (Poelstra, A Treatise on Altcoins, 2016) — whereas proof of stake, mobilizing only resources internal to the ledger, would depend on the very history it seeks to secure (Poelstra, On Stake and Consensus, 2015). The controversy therefore concerns not only a quantity of electricity, but the nature of the constraint on which security rests: exogenous and physical for PoW, endogenous and patrimonial for PoS. My approach was therefore not to settle this technical debate in place of the actors, but to understand miners as one of the central groups in the governance of the infrastructure. This is precisely where the empirical difficulty arises: location of machines, energy mix, hardware lifespan, electricity costs, actual market shares — all are data that are rarely available or robust. I prefer not to produce figures when the data do not allow it, nor to select the estimates that would best serve the argument, either for or against. Yet the public debate long relied on highly alarmist estimates — especially Digiconomist — whose methodology has been contested. Bitcoin’s consumption is real and considerable; but an empirical controversy should not be converted too quickly into moral evidence, especially since the claim that Bitcoin “consumes too much” always presupposes a comparison — too much compared to what? — that is rarely made explicit. Finally, the attribution of energy responsibility itself needs to be specified: miners do not alone define the energy frameworks within which they operate, and the consumption of PoW systems depends closely on the energy source mobilized, market rules, and public policies that shape the electricity mix. Recent literature further complexifies the diagnosis. Bruno, Weber et Yates (2023) show, in a model applied to the Texas electricity market, that miners’ demand can increase renewable capacity while also increasing emissions, but that this effect is largely attenuated when miners provide demand-response services. Dasaklis et al. (2025), for their part, review several models in which mining serves to monetize surplus, stranded or wasted energy resources — renewable surpluses, flared gas, waste heat — and can, under certain conditions, contribute to grid flexibility. These works do not make Bitcoin ecologically neutral or virtuous by nature; they simply require us to treat proof of work as a technical, energy and institutional controversy rather than as a fault already fully judged.

8 In terms of territorial localism, “its best-known and most visible form” is “state territorial localism” (national legal-tender currencies), which coexists with “infra-state territorial localism” (currencies specific to sub-national spaces) and “community localism” (Blanc 2002, p. 6). In the same text, Blanc shows that the organizational constraints and resources of these complementary currencies concern questions of scale and objectives, in which four different rationalities are articulated: capturing seigniorage revenues for the issuing entity; protecting the social space against income leaks and external interference; energizing local activity; and transforming the nature of exchange. Articulated together, these rationalities form the basis of a multitude of currencies which, to varying degrees, contest and seek to improve the existing monetary system.

⁹ Jean-François Ponsot, “Monnaies numériques, confiance et souveraineté”, Banque & Stratégie, no. 400, March 2021. This text also illustrates the problematic ideological homogenization of the Bitcoiners’ community, asserting that enthusiasm for Bitcoin can be explained in part by users’ adherence to an imaginary and to “anarcho-libertarian” values.

10 Dupré, Ponsot and Servet (2015) sustain the “troika of confusions” regarding property rights that Hess and Ostrom combat: confusion between the nature of the good and the property regime, between “resource system” and “resource unit”, and between “common property” and “open-access regime” (Hess and Ostrom 2007, p. 119). Stating that “the idea of the ‘commons’ differs […] from that of the ‘private good’ and that of the ‘public good’” (Dupré, Ponsot and Servet 2015, p. 3) sustains the first confusion, whereas these authors affirm that there is “no correspondence between categories of goods and property regimes” and that “common-pool resources” may be held by governments, communal groups, private individuals or firms (Hess and Ostrom 2007, p. 119).

11 Adrian McCullagh, on the SegWit episode and the application of the notion of anticommons to blockchains; see https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3362100.