This is pretty great. UC Berkeley ethnography grad student turns his academic eye on the weirdness that is bitcoin culture. Here is a collection of his observations:

One common practice in which bitcoiners engage in is the in-person meetup.

Why, yes, I do engage in an in-person meetup every now and again! Splendid way to pass the time, is it not?

I was struck by how eager they were to accommodate me and tell me more about bitcoin.

Checks out. Guy really did go to bitcoin meetups!

The in-person bitcoin meetups that I attended were advertised as all-bitcoin meetings with no devotee of any other coin(s) allowed.

I wonder how he made this discovery.

In-person meetups themselves served as occasions for attendees to share the beliefs about the world, the symbolic memes, and the prescribed rituals of collective life that were first disseminated through bitcoin X.

I often find myself sharing a few symbolic memes at meetups. In fact, just the other day I was at a meetup and I said to a guy sitting next to me, "Would you care for a symbolic meme?" to which he replied, "Don't mind if I do." Don't get me started about the prescribed rituals!

Altogether, I compiled a sample of 148 Twitter accounts, which represented roughly the limit of accounts that I could exhaustively read in any given day

This fellow clearly was not listening to enough podcasts. If he was, he probably could have gotten much better at scrolling X. Gotta pump those numbers up!

But all this is just from his methodology section. Let's get to the findings!

Bitcoiners see the world as corrupted by the original sin of centralization.

I wish the guy would have defined centralization. I'm not sure that I'd say that is the thing that Bitcoiners see as the source of the societal woes we are trying to address, but it's possible.

Although bitcoiners apply the term “fiat” broadly to any type of authority-laden object or relationship, they are, of course, referring principally to money and to monetary authority—those central banks who have arrogated to themselves the responsibility of controlling the money supply, which they do in order to sustain the authority of the political elites.

He picked up on the usage of fiat, all right.

A common belief among bitcoiners is that when the Nixon administration dropped the dollar’s peg to gold in 1971, money became fiat, and everything that money touched became fiat as well. The whole world has been corrupted by fiat money, making the world in which we live “fiat” by definition—corrupt, unfree, fallen.

I'm surprised he didn't get any Creature From Jekyl Island talk, but I suppose we should make allowances considering he didn't fall down the rabbithole so much as go spelunking in it.

He did get a bit of an education on geographically distributed multisigs:

Nicholas, a 40-something software developer told me that he has residency in multiple countries and has set up wallets in each in order to diversify away the risk of state failure in any one.

And nodes:

It is these individuals which operate the network and ensure the validity of transactions on it, and indeed, it is a badge of devotion among bitcoiners to run one’s own node, that is, to validate transactions on the bitcoin blockchain using one’s own computing power. It is essential to them and to their identity, that bitcoin remain decentralized in this way.

As well as eating steak:

Robert, for example, claimed that his diet and exercise are much better after his having discovered bitcoin than before—bitcoin, he said, “makes me responsible for my own life because there is no one who I’ve outsourced my accountability to.”

The emergence of lifestyle markers that distinguished bitcoin from fiat, the sacred from the profane. Among these were weightlifting, the affectation of traditional gender roles, and the adoption by many of meat-exclusive “carnivore diets.” When I asked Jake at one meetup about the connection between carnivory and bitcoin, he said this was the ancestral diet “before fiat ruined us all,” connecting the bitcoiners’ search for value with meat’s nutritional density.

Meat is health, vitality, and freedom, and the modern diet is sickness, lethargy, and slavery.

And orange-pilling:

Whereas the market for cryptocurrencies is so often marked by hype-driven grift, orange-pilling is all about facilitating a non-bitcoiner’s coming-to-belief in the truth about the world and how bitcoin can save it.

But it really all comes back to memes. Though a good portion of this paper is about Bitcoin memes, I don't think the author truly appreciates their importance. He only gets glimpses it seems:

Bitcoiners are prodigious producers of memes, video clips, posts, anything to get other users to question the word of authorities and the value of fiat currency.

And hodling:

The injunction to “HODL,” then, serves as an invocation to faith—an exhortation to believe that whatever is happening in the market right now will not ultimately prevent the realization of bitcoin’s glorious destiny.

This glorious destiny is what bitcoiners specifically call “hyperbitcoinization,” which is the historical inflection point at which a critical mass of bitcoin users is amassed, and fiat currencies are demonetized and replaced by bitcoin.

I have to admit, I've never before heard "dollar cost averaging" imbued with such religious weight:

Bill, for example, a fairly recently orange-pilled bitcoiner once told me that he has started putting a set amount of his income into buying bitcoin, no matter what is happening in the market—a common practice I came to learn, that is called “dollar cost averaging.”

Joseph, too, who had just discovered bitcoin, told the meetup group that he is selling off absolutely everything that is unessential in order to buy more bitcoin, up to lamps and bookshelves in his house.

More evidence that the author didn't get as deep in Bitcoin culture as he thinks: no mention of chairs.

There is much more in this paper, but I was surprised at the lack of any real conclusion other than a surface-level observation that bitcoin is like a religion. Nonetheless, it makes for interesting reading if for no other reason than that the author sees bitcoiners with such foreign eyes. I wonder if he owns any bitcoin yet.