Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology Volume 19 Issue 1 Article 2 2018 Blockchain's Struggle to Deliver Impersonal Exchange Benito Arruñada Universitat Pompeu Fabra Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/mjlst Part of the Science and Technology Law Commons Recommended Citation Benito Arruñada, Blockchain's Struggle to Deliver Impersonal Exchange, 19 MINN. J.L. SCI. & TECH. 55 (2018). Available at: https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/mjlst/vol19/iss1/2 The Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology is published by the University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing. Blockchain’s Struggle to Deliver Impersonal Exchange Benito Arruñada* The paper identifies what value blockchain adds to the contractual and property processes, exploring its potential and analyzing the main difficulties it is facing. It argues that, contrary to naive conceptions that proclaim the end of intermediaries and state involvement, blockchain applications will rely on a variety of interface, completion, and enforcement specialists, including standard public interventions, especially for property transactions. Without these interventions, blockchain applications will at most enable trade in in personam claims instead of in rem rights, therefore facilitating personal instead of truly impersonal—that is, asset-based—transactions. Keywords: property rights, enforcement, transaction costs, impersonal exchange, blockchain, distributed ledgers, smart contracts. JEL: D23, K11, K12, L85, G38, H41, O17, P48. I. Introduction ............................................................................ 56 II. A Brief on Blockchain and “Smart Contracts” ..................... 58 A. The Nature of Blockchain ........................................... 58 B. Smart Contracts .......................................................... 61 © 2018 Benito Arruñada * Pompeu Fabra University and Barcelona GSE. E-mail:
[email protected]. This work has greatly benefitted from exchanges with Fátima Antelo, Winston Featherly-Bean, Luis A.