Techno-legal principles of the Blockchain Revolution

One of the most powerful and least understood aspects of blockchain technologies is its potential to serve as a tool for social governance. A fundamentally new way to coordinate human activity, based on deterministic, automatized, code-based rules. Blockchain technologies facilitate the creation of autonomous systems governed by the unstoppable rule of code, uncensorable, independent from any government or institution, automatically enforced by the network. These algocratic systems are inherently in tension with current systems of societal governance, based on centralized institutions, nation states, ex-post compliance, top-down laws and regulations and social hierarchies. The consequences of this new governance approach for our legal and social order are staggering.

The groundbreaking Harvard University Press publication Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code by Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright, well known scholars from Harvard University and Cardozo School of Law,