Constitutions and Blockchains: Competitive Governance of Fundamental Rule Sets

Cryptocurrency Constellations Across the Three-Dimensional Space: Governance Decentralization, Security, and Scalability

“…Governance refers to the structure that supports transactions inside an organization, indicating the framework within which transactions are conducted (Williamson, 1979). Other researchers have interpreted cryptocurrencies governance as "constitutional" regimes, which encompass the rules and the rules about making rules (Alston, 2019;Berg, Berg, and Novak, 2020).…”

“…Validators record and verify transactions, obeying to a specific consensus mechanism. Some researchers see developers and validators as belonging to the same group (Alston, 2019). These two groups overlap as validators tend to have technical and functional knowledge about the protocols, voting, proposing, debating, accepting, or rejecting suggestions to upgrade the code, being often developers (Pereira et al, 2019;Berg et al, 2020).…”

Blockchain Governance: What We Can Learn from the Economics of Corporate Governance

“…The distribution of bargaining power determined by the former voting system is endogenous and the latter exogenous. Both endogenous and exogenous governance processes are subject to evolutionary pressure as technical developments (such as ASICs) and entrepreneurial innovation (such as mining pools) reshape the relative bargaining power of stakeholder groups [8,64].…”

“…While those governance systems vary in their effectiveness [7], governance itself is a descriptive, rather than a normative, attribute. Blockchains can be thought of as competing constitutional rule sets, where they compete on rules for making rules [8]. In this way, blockchain governance relates to the way decisions are made, not the decisions themselves-who chooses and how choices are made, rather than what is chosen [9,10].…”

Blockchain and Public Record Keeping: Of Temples, Prisons, and the (Re)Configuration of Power

“…While individuals may choose to use a public blockchain to record their marriage certificates, land titles, or other documents rather than a traditional public registry, the problem is that this may be where choice ends. Once relying upon these systems, there may be no opportunity for individuals to remove their documentation to another platform or to exercise a "right to be forgotten" (Gabison, 2016), particularly if they disagree with the rules of governance (Alston, 2019). These solutions lack both the means to give users portability-the notion that information and services about identity [or personally identifiable information (PII)] must be transferable-or support for systems interoperability-the notion that individuals' identities (or PII) must be as widely usable by them as possible.…”