Blockchains and the Commons

Abstract

Blockchain phenomena is similar to the last century gold rush. Blockchain technologies are publicized as being the technical solution for fully decentralizing activities that were for centuries centralized such as administration and banking. Therefore, prominent socio-economical actors all over the world are attracted and ready to invest in these technologies. Despite their large publicity, blockchains are far from being a technology ready to be used in critical economical applications and scientists multiply their effort in warning about the risks of using this technology before understanding and fully mastering it. That is, a blockchain technology evolves in a complex environment where rational and irrational behaviors are melted with faults and attacks. This position paper advocates that the theoretical foundations of blockchains should be a cross research between classical distributed systems, distributed cryptography, self-organized micro-economies, game theory and formal methods. We discuss in the following a set of open research directions interesting in this context. This position paper is based on the homonymous ERC Advanced submission [80].1 Transaction is used here as a generic name to be adapted to a broad class of use cases. For example, a transaction in Bitcoin [72] or Ethereum [85] can be a transfer of digital money or assets.