Censorship-Resistant Immutability

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Discussion

Crypto-Based Censorship Resistance as Law and State Resistance

Toby Shorin, Sam Hart, Laura Lotti:

"While the state is still the only social body to claim the exclusive legitimacy of its regulatory power, a host of competing interests, technologies, and economies of scale encroach on the supposed sovereignty of law. International commerce is increasingly mediated through private dispute resolution centers instead of through international agreements. Meanwhile, the alliance between global finance and software challenges state regulation of markets altogether; when Elizabeth Truss' plan to cut $50bn in taxes caused the UK bond market to implode, she was forced to resign from the prime ministership after only 44 days. But if international finance has proliferated new regulatory bodies, its twin in power and influence is the internet.

Since its inception, the “architecture” of the world wide web has made the landscape of contemporary governance yet more complex. More than a medium for communication, the internet is a transmission layer for new regulatory powers. Networked computation enables the creation and expansion of new norms, markets, and architectures, implemented at multiple levels of abstraction. Social media platforms, for instance, have their own semi-automated free speech policies ignorant of the state’s, while the content of social media includes distinct normative regimes, including e-ideologies and morally coded diets. Remote work introduces new affordances for citizenship arbitrage, while internet-disseminated subcultures create imagined communities as strong as any national identity. The law of the state, even in regions like China where law is tightly coupled with the internet, is usually left playing catch-up.

15 years ago, a new contender entered the arena: cryptocurrencies. In some ways, cryptocurrency protocols recapitulate the regulatory innovations of the internet. But they also generalize the censorship-resistant properties of previous networked technologies like BitTorrent and PGP. Crypto protocols cannot be tampered with by middlemen or higher authorities. And while the long arm of the law can force Facebook to open our DMs for inspection, or seize a pirated e-book host, as long as there are miners out there running nodes, Bitcoin and Ethereum assets are accessible and inalienable; computed state is irreversible. In other words, these protocols have no regard for the law. Cryptocurrency protocols are monetary and contractual media without the need or validation of state authorities. They have created a new sort of regulatory institution, one which is not only resistant to censorship but resistant to law itself.

This is not to say that crypto protocols are just technologies for criminal, lawless activities. Law-resistance is also what fuels the positive vision of improving legacy organizations and confronting social coordination problems by designing ground-up credibly neutral institutions—money systems, banks, and commons. By “law-resistant,” we therefore mean to say that Bitcoin and subsequent crypto protocols are resistant to the regulatory base framework that, in Lessig’s model, operates as a pervasive totality. As blockchains resist the state’s law, they also institute a regulatory regime of their own. And without law able to intervene, the remaining three forces are free to regulate the institutional ecosystem of crypto protocols without a unifying arbiter. Let’s look some of the novel institutional dynamics that protocols make possible."

(https://otherinter.net/research/three-body-problem/)


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