Blockchain Constitutionalism
Description
Michael Zargham, Eric Alston, Kelsie Nabben et al. :
"The function of a constitution is to delineate the boundaries of a particular organization or entity, entrenching elements of its composition relative to that organization’s regular processes of decision-making, as well as against the broader array of legal, social, economic, and environmental forces that make up its context(s). This constitutive function operates to reinforce the coherence of that entity in the face of both internal and external pressures, such that it can dynamically evolve through its interactions with both its members and its environment while nonetheless retaining its identity."
(https://blog.block.science/what-constitutes-a-constitution/)
Characteristics
Michael Zargham, Eric Alston, Kelsie Nabben et al. :
"The elements that make up an organization’s constitutive infrastructure will, by definition, contribute to the process of constituting that organization’s internal and external boundaries. This process, however, can be further broken down into subsidiary processes: Determining which people are (and by extension, are not) subject to the organization’s governance, mapping the environment that the organization operates within, and defining the purpose that animates the organization, motivating the ways that its people interact with its environment.
People refers to an organization’s internal context — who it includes, how it structures the interactions between members, and the pressures that these elements exert on the organization’s boundaries from within. The organization in question draws an external boundary separating its constituent members (or “body politic”) from outsiders, by defining criteria for citizenship, membership, and/or participation. At the same time, the diversity of values, desires, and skills found among the constituent members of a given organization exerts an influence on the shape of an organization’s internal boundaries — a well-constituted organization is one with a constitutive infrastructure that adequately and accurately embodies the values and wants of its members.
Environment, on the other hand, refers to an organization’s external contexts — that is, everything that remains distinct from an organization once it is constituted. An organization’s environment exerts various forms of pressure (i.e. regulatory, legal, economic, cultural, etc.) on the shape of an organization’s boundaries from without — and, to the extent that the external environment influences how the organization chooses to conduct itself, it is able to exert pressure on the shape of the organization’s internal boundaries, as well.
Finally, an organization’s Purpose can be thought of as its mediating context — that is, as the set of attractors that orient the exercise of the various mechanisms through which the organization mediates the relationships between its internal and external contexts. When information flows from that organization’s environment to its people, its purpose informs its interpretation of that information; when information flows from its people to its environment, the organization’s purpose informs its choices (which may in turn affect its environment), and the manner of its transmission. An organization’s purpose is temporally mediating, as well; an organization moves towards its purpose through time.
People, Environment and Purpose collectively define the circumstances in which an organization constitutes itself. A constitutive infrastructure manifests and entrenches a boundary between People and Environment, mediating activity pursuant to purpose. Infrastructures by their nature enable a set of other activities, and they evolve on a slower timescale than the activities they enable⁷. Different kinds of constitutive infrastructures may have markedly different modalities for change. For example, written constitutions have “secondary rules” — the rules governing governance and its procedures — while software products have version control⁸ and Continuous-Integration Continuous-Deployment (CI/CD) frameworks. What is important to recognize about both of these mechanisms for change is that they are entrenched more deeply than the infrastructures they modify. Mechanisms for adapting constitutive infrastructures may also be referred to as Governance Surfaces."
(https://blog.block.science/what-constitutes-a-constitution/)
Discussion
By Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson and Jason Potts:
"Blockchains are constitutional orders — rule-systems in which individuals (or firms, or algorithms) can make economic and political exchanges.
In this sense, blockchains look a lot like countries. They have currencies (tokens), property (digital assets), laws (protocols), corporations (DAOs), and security systems (proof-of-work, or proof of stake, or delegated byzantine fault tolerance, etc.).
And like countries, blockchains have systems of governance.
Satoshi built one system of governance into Bitcoin: how the network comes to a consensus when miners announce two equally valid blocks to the network. The protocol (the constitution) resolves this problem by incentivising nodes to prefer the chain with the most work.
But this is a tiny fraction of the governance questions that just surround Bitcoin. How should the Bitcoin network be upgraded? Who decides? How should the various interests be accommodated — or compensated?
In these blockchain governance debates — disputes about whether governance should be on-chain or off-chain, who writes the rules, who can be a node, the role of voting, and the relative position of protocol developers, miners, block producers, HODLers and third party applications — we’re seeing the history of thinking about political economy being rediscovered.
Happily there exists an enormous body of thinking on governance, constitutions, the function and efficiency of voting and voting mechanisms, and how power is allocated in a political and economic system.
Historically, experimenting with new constitutions has involved things like civil war, secession, conquest, empire, and expropriation. The English fought civil war after civil war to limit the power of the monarch to tax. Expanding the franchise involved protest and violence.
In the real world, constitutional experimentation is costly and slow: limited by the rights and preferences of real populations and the real endowments of physical land and property.
By contrast, blockchains offer a space for rapid, hyper-experimentation. New constitutional rules can be instantiated by a simple fork. New protocols can be released in months or weeks.
Blockchains are an environment for institutional innovation — a place to apply hundreds of years of thinking about political governance."
(https://medium.com/cryptoeconomics-australia/crypto-constitutionalism-c25d0c503ac)
More information
* Article: What Constitutes a Constitution? By Michael Zargham, Eric Alston, Kelsie Nabben, and Ilan Ben-Meir. Blockscience, April 06, 2023
URL = https://blog.block.science/what-constitutes-a-constitution/
"With a rapidly-growing number of blockchain communities in the process of drafting formal, written constitutions for their projects, it is becoming apparent that an advanced understanding of the structure and function of constitutions is not being adequately applied. The ways that the common conceptualization of constitutions falls short in effectively guiding blockchain governance, however, highlight the precise places where this conceptualization is most in need of revision.
This article outlines how we can re-apply these concepts to questions of governance unique to the context of blockchain communities — and will see how the more robust understanding of the structure and function of constitutions offered in this article can provide novel answers to the unique set of questions posed by the governance of distributed networks."