An engaging and comprehensive exploration of how fundamental ideas in political and legal
thought shape the governance of blockchain communities and are in turn shaped by blockchain
technology. How can digital cash truly be “trustless”? What does it mean that blockchain
offers a new paradigm of the “rule of code”? How are decisions made when a blockchain system
faces an emergency and who gets to make those decisions? In Blockchain Governance Primavera
De Filippi Wessel Reijers and Morshed Mannan offer answers to these questions and more in an
accessible critical overview of legal and political issues related to blockchain technology
now the foundation of a multi-billion-dollar industry. Moving beyond the hype they show how
blockchain offers fertile ground for experimentation with radically new ways to govern people
and institutions. Blockchain-based systems like Bitcoin Ethereum Tezos and countless
others offer new ways of organizing digital cash “smart” contracts to execute transactions
non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to collect art and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to
coordinate humans and machines. What these applications have in common is that they govern the
behavior of people and artificial agents through distributed systems. Drawing from their
extensive experience in researching blockchain technologies and communities the authors
discuss the origins of Bitcoin in cypher-anarchism and extropianism spectacular events like
the million-dollar theft of the DAO Attack and the hostile takeover of the Steem platform.
While engaging with political and legal thinkers such as Hobbes Kelsen and the Ostroms these
narratives explore how blockchain governance problematizes fundamental concepts such as rule of
law sovereignty legality legitimacy and polycentric governance.
