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Blockchain Technology and Decentralized Governance: Is the State Still Necessary?

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Blockchain Technology and Decentralized Governance: Is the State Still Necessary? Journal of Governance and Regulation / Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY AND DECENTRALIZED GOVERNANCE: IS THE STATE STILL NECESSARY? Marcella Atzori * * Center for Blockchain Technologies, University College of London, UK Abstract How to cite this paper: Atzori, M. The core technology of Bitcoin, the blockchain, has recently (2017). Blockchain Technology and Decentralized Governance: is the State emerged as a disruptive innovation with a wide range of Still Necessary? Journal of Governance applications, potentially able to redesign our interactions in and Regulation, 6(1), 45-62. business, politics and society at large. Although scholarly interest in http://dx.doi.org/10.22495/jgr_v6_i1_p5 this subject is growing, a comprehensive analysis of blockchain Copyright © 2017 The Author applications from a political perspective is severely lacking to date. This paper aims to fill this gap and it discusses the key points of This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial blockchain-based decentralized governance, which challenges to 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) varying degrees the traditional mechanisms of State authority, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b citizenship and democracy. In particular, the paper verifies to which y-nc/4.0/ extent blockchain and decentralized platforms can be considered as ISSN Online: 2306-6784 hyper-political tools, capable to manage social interactions on large ISSN Print: 2220-9352 scale and dismiss traditional central authorities. The analysis Received: 28.12.2016 highlights risks related to a dominant position of private powers in Accepted: 05.02.2017 distributed ecosystems, which may lead to a general disempowerment of citizens and to the emergence of a stateless JEL Classification: G18, G28, E5 DOI: 10.22495/jgr_v6_i1_p5 global society. While technological utopians urge the demise of any centralized institution, this paper advocates the role of the State as a necessary central point of coordination in society, showing that decentralization through algorithm-based consensus is an organizational theory, not a stand-alone political theory. Keywords: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, Decentralization, Democracy, Ethereum, Encryption, Governance, Politics, State, Peer-To-Peer Networks “To push the antigovernment button is not to as a database that contains all the transactions ever teleport us to Eden. executed in a peer-to-peer network. It consists of a When the interests of government are gone, other permanent, distributed digital ledger, resistant to interests take their place. tampering and carried out collectively by all the Do we know what those interests are? nodes of the system. The formidable innovation And are we so certain they are anything better?” introduced by this technology is that the network is Lawrence Lessig open and participants do not need to know or trust each other to interact: the electronic transactions 1. INTRODUCTION can be automatically verified and recorded by the nodes of the network through cryptographic 1.1 The Blockchain Technology and the Era of algorithms, without human intervention, central authority, point of control or third party (e.g. Trust-By-Computation. governments, banks, financial institutions or other organizations). Even if some nodes are unreliable, In a white paper published in November 2008, dishonest or malicious, the network is able to Satoshi Nakamoto proposed Bitcoin as the first correctly verify the transactions and protect the electronic payment system based on a decentralized ledger from tampering through a mathematical peer-to-peer network, without the need for a trusted mechanism called proof-of-work, which makes third party. The core technology of this protocol, the human intervention or controlling authority blockchain, is widely acknowledged as a major unnecessary. breakthrough in fault-tolerant distributed The rationale for this protocol is the computing, after decades of research in this field. In decentralized trust or trust-by-computation and its overly concise terms, we can define the blockchain importance can hardly be overstated: indeed, it 45 Journal of Governance and Regulation / Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 represents “a shift from trusting people to trusting protect its own interests more effectively, by math” (Antonopoulos, 2014), with applicability that replacing the traditional functions of State with goes far beyond the creation of decentralized digital blockchain-based services and decentralized, open currencies. source platforms (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum). Driven by As an irreversible and tamper-proof public the enthusiasm for the new possibilities offered by records repository for documents, contracts, information technology, along with a profound properties, and assets, the blockchain can be used to dissatisfaction with the current political systems, embed information and instructions, with a wide they hence encourage citizens to be part of the range of applications. These include, for instance: blockchain revolution and self-create their own smart contracts, namely automatized, self-executing systems of governance, in which centralization, actions in the agreements between two or multiple coercion and socio-political hierarchies are replaced parties; multi-signature transactions, which require by mechanisms of distributed consensus. the consent of multiple parties for their execution; Broadly speaking, the advocates of smart properties, namely digital ownership of decentralization tend to have in common the same tangible and intangible assets embedded to the dissociative attitude towards centralized institutions blockchain, which can be tracked or exchanged on and the State in particular, questioning its capacity the blockchain itself. to create added value (Paquet & Wilson 2015). The In these cases, the advantage of the blockchain dominant discourse mostly emerged through the consists of removing the need of a trusted third media, and generally dominated by IT specialists party (e.g. a notary) and enforcing the execution of and financial operators, sees governments “as instructions by a cryptographic code, with somewhat of an encumbrance – too slow, too protection of participants against risks of fraud and corrupt, too lacking in innovation, and benefiting a significant reduction of management overheads. too few” (Paquet & Wilson 2015, p. 21). It is Because of the remarkable advantages related to important to note, however, that there exists a automation, transparency, auditability and cost- certain variety of positions towards to the role of the effectiveness, the blockchain may thus represent a State in the blockchain governance, and the dividing disruptive innovation for many varieties of contracts lines between disintermediation of government and business activities. services, free market and even anarchism are often Other important applications of the blockchain blurred. include for example (Swan, 2015): the creation of Many enthusiasts simply promote the decentralized domain name system resistant to top- blockchain as a more efficient, decentralized and level domains censorship (e.g. Namecoin); consensus-driven public repository, which can have decentralized voting systems for tamper-proof a number of applications in order to make citizens ballots and election results (e.g. Bitcongress, less dependent on governments, yet within a society followmyvote.com); decentralized autonomous that is ultimately founded upon the State authority. organization/corporations/societies Techno-libertarians and crypto-anarchists hold (DAOs/DACs/DASs), namely self-sufficient agents instead a more extremist position. They are derived from artificial intelligence and capable to generally inclined to consider the State as an execute tasks without human involvement, for which illegitimate, unnecessary and irremediably obsolete the blockchain can provide additional functionality. depository of power, and they openly encourage the The fields of application of the blockchain use of the blockchain as a liberating force against paradigm are potentially countless, since it allows the very concept of authority. According to this the disintermediation of any digital transaction at view, we are at a stage in history when individuals global level. Accordingly, all kinds of business and can gradually overcome any centralized political human activities are expected to be reconfigured, institution through algorithm-based distributed with a pervasiveness similar to that of the Web consensus and create the conditions for an idealistic (Swan, 2015). For this very reason, the blockchain society of equals, characterized by flat, rather than has been described as fundamental for human hierarchical, structures. progress as the Magna Charta or the Rosetta Stone Although the view about the role of the State (Swan, 2015), and it is often referred to as a “Black may differ, a growing category of political Swan” – namely an accident of major impact in technopreneurs and evangelists of decentralization history that cannot be anticipated, creates surprise have already developed projects for the creation of to the observer and can only be rationalized by cryptonations – namely stateless, do-it-yourself hindsight (Taleb, 2007). governance services entirely based on the blockchain (e.g. Bitnation). The aim of this paper is to critically 1.2 The Emergence of Blockchain-Based examine such proposals, which challenge to varying Governance. degrees the traditional mechanisms of State authority,
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