Cryptocurrencies: a new system of trust

• Grant number: 18/12340-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: January 01, 2019
• End date: September 30, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Law
• Principal Investigator: Jose Eduardo Campos de Oliveira Faria
• Grantee: Marcelo de Castro Cunha Filho
• Supervisor: Susan Silbey
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Direito (FD). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 17/10098-9 - Institutional analysis of cryptocurrencies and their monetary potential in the Brazilian context, BP.DR

Abstract

The research project aims to evaluate how legal regulation influences the process of acquisition or loss of trust in cryptocurrencies. Although the so called cryptocurrencies have been created to escape state regulation and self-regulation imposed by large corporations, the scarce literature on the subject matter and recent media reports confirm the hypothesis that the ecosystem suffers considerable influence either from state regulation and from market regulation. However, it is not the mere existence of a state or private rule (law on the books) that provides the social conditions for the increase or the decrease of trust in the assets. Based on the culturalist conception of the law developed by Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey, it is assumed that the construction of the conditions that establish the granting of trust in the cryptocurrencies derives significantly, among other aspects, from the way in which the community, based on settled preconceptions in the social sphere, interprets, invokes and uses images of legislation and regulation as reasons for decision making. Based on an empirical research methodology, which aims to solve the research question by means of interviews with users of cryptocurrencies, the present project is part of a tradition of studies in law and society that intends to find the law and its effects through the analysis of the spaces where it is effectively produced and articulated, namely, in everyday life.