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

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.