Table Of ContentRegulating Blockchain
As the distributed architecture underpinning the initial Bitcoin anarcho-capitalist,
libertarian project, ‘blockchain’ entered wider public imagination and vocabulary
only very recently. Yet in a short space of time it has become more mainstream
and synonymous with a spectacular variety of commercial and civic ‘problem’/
‘solution’ concepts and ideals. From commodity provenance, to electoral fraud
prevention, to a wholesale decentralisation of power and the banishing of the
exploitativepracticesof‘middlemen’,blockchainstakeholdersarenothingshortof
evangelical in their belief that it is a force for good. For these reasons and more
the technology has captured the attention of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists,
global corporations and governments the world over.
Blockchain may indeed offer a unique technical opportunity to change cultures
oftransparencyandtrustwithincyberspace,andas‘revolutionary’and‘disruptive’
has the potential to shift global socioeconomic and political conventions. But as a
yetlargelyunregulated,solutionist-drivenphenomenon,blockchainexistssquarely
within the boundaries of capitalist logic and reason, fast becoming central to the
business models of many sources of financial and political power the technology
was specifically designed to undo, and increasingly allied to neoliberal strategies
withscantregardforcollective,politicalordemocraticaccountabilityinthepublic
interest. Regulating Blockchain casts a critical eye over the technology, its ‘eco-
system’ of stakeholders, and offers a challenge to the prevailing discourse pro-
claiming it to be the great techno-social enabler of our times.
Robert Herian is based in the Law School at The Open University. His teaching
and research focus on private law, psychoanalysis, social, economic and political
philosophy, and cultural theory.
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Regulating Blockchain
Critical Perspectives in Law and Technology
Robert Herian
Firstpublished2019
byRoutledge
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©2019RobertHerian
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BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData
AcataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary
LibraryofCongressCataloginginPublicationData
Names:Herian,Robert,author.
Title:Regulatingblockchain:criticalperspectivesinlawandtechnology/by
RobertHerian.
Description:Abingdon,Oxon;NewYork,NY:Routledge,2019.|Includes
bibliographicalreferencesandindex.
Identifiers:LCCN2018027455|ISBN9781138592766(hbk)
Subjects:LCSH:Blockchains(Databases)--Governmentpolicy.|Blockchains
(Databases)--Socialaspects.|Blockchains(Databases)--Economicaspects.|
Internetgovernance.|Databases--Lawandlegislation.
Classification:LCCQA76.9.B56H472019|DDC005.75--dc23
LCrecordavailableathttps://lccn.loc.gov/2018027455
ISBN:978-1-138-59276-6(hbk)
ISBN:978-0-429-48981-5(ebk)
TypesetinGalliard
byTaylor&FrancisBooks
For my father.
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Contents
Introduction 1
PARTI
Regulating blockchain 11
1 Blockchain 13
InterludeI:Supplementingthememoryeconomic:…Wampum,memex,
transcopyright, blockchain … 31
2 A regulatory conundrum 34
3 Regulatory tradition 52
4 Blockchain the regulator 76
Interlude II: Regulatory technology: Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s tax trunk 97
PARTII
Critical perspectives 101
5 Setting the scene 103
Interlude III: Anarchic technologies for anarchic economies: the ‘yellow
trade’ of the Yorkshire coiners 119
6 Blockchain as an ethics of neoliberal political economy 124
7 The psycho-politics of blockchain 139
Interlude IV: A dangerous lack of law: man with machine in
Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano 157
8 Critical regulation 159
Index 171
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Introduction
A report on the 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by the
FinancialTimescarriedthesimpleheadline:‘blockchaincannolongerbeignored’
(Arnold, 2018). Global economic elites at Davos pulling sharper focus on block-
chainisa signarguablyofitsemergencefromthedarkerrecessesoftheWeb,and
corresponding emergence into the light of the mainstream. Yet there is far more
totheunfoldingstoryof the‘blockchainecosystem’ andtheso-called‘disruption’
it heralds than a few nervous bankers contemplating the threats, challenges and
opportunities it poses for legacy systems, networks and institutions of power and
the control they have over the world’s financial resources and services. The
‘blockchain ecosystem’ at the centre of global activities is a broad if, I argue,
somewhat univocal community engaged in developing blockchain concepts and
practices. As Melanie Swan argues: ‘There is a need for a decentralized ecosystem
surrounding the blockchain itself for full-solution operations’ (2015, p. 20). To
paraphraseMichaelPower:blockchainisanideaasmuchasaconcretetechnology
or technical practice and there is no communal investment in the technology
without a commitment to this idea and the social norms and hopes which it
embodies (1997, p. 4). Like much of the vocabulary and many of the terms that
will be covered by this book, ‘ecosystem’ ought not to be considered neutral or
apolitical.Insteadtheblockchainecosystemhasemergedfrompre-existingsitesof
techno-solutionist ideology (à la Pierre Machery and Louis Althusser) that are
programmed at the level of entrepreneurs, corporations and other likeminded
stakeholdersofinnovationism.Iftheecosystemhasanethositisthat‘it’sallabout
the blockchain’ (Robinson and Leising, 2015; Tapscott and Tapscott, 2016). But
what does that really mean?
This book takes blockchain seriously as a boon for private commercial and cor-
porate self-interest and a corresponding threat to public interest, non-competitive
forms of co-operation and the potential for expanding community generosity that
extends beyond the closed circuits of entrepreneurial ecosystems. With respect to
public interest regulation and political oversight, a meaningful counterbalance to
prevailing modes of private and commercial self-regulation which engender
narrow economic affordances (‘blockchain for good’ as a euphemism for block-
chain being good for business) must find a place in the ongoing development of
blockchain. In the present moment self-regulation and ‘rule by entrepreneur’ are
