Financial technologies embody and shape notions of social, as well as financial, worth. New digital ‘alt-finance’ systems, including the blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin and similar ‘cryptocurrencies,’ are no exception: technology, rhetoric, imagined users and non-users, and a long history of sociotechnical, political, and cultural relations are all elements in a dynamic assemblage with wide-ranging consequences. This paper examines the rise and fall of one alt-finance system: MazaCoin, a Bitcoin variant intended to benefit the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The story of MazaCoin is one of an attempt to unite two apparently divergent sociotechnical assemblages: (1) a libertarian, elite technology of cryptocurrency, and (2) a richly traditional indigenous community with a deep desire for cultural survivance, bound up in a precarious economy left behind in the wake of more than a century of genocide.
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机译：金融技术体现并塑造了社会价值以及金融价值的概念。新的数字“替代金融”系统，包括比特币所基于的区块链技术和类似的“加密货币”，也不例外：技术，言辞，想象中的用户和非用户以及悠久的社会技术，政治和文化关系历史动态集合中的元素具有广泛的后果。本文研究了一种替代金融系统的兴衰：MazaCoin，一种旨在使Pine Ridge Indian Reservation的Oglala Lakota受益的比特币变体。 MazaCoin的故事是尝试将两种看似不同的社会技术组合结合在一起的尝试：（1）自由主义者，精英的加密货币技术，以及（2）富有传统的土著社区，对文化的生存有着浓厚的渴望，并陷入了不稳定的境地在一个多世纪的种族灭绝之后，经济仍然落后。
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