different epistemic communities have formed their own ideas about what blockchain is, some with very strong political and social views around open source, sharing, and autonomy.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/7/17091766/blockchain-bitcoin-ethereum-cryptocurrency-meaning
This paper examines data protection on blockchains and other forms of distributed ledger technology (‘DLT’). Transactional data stored on a blockchain, whether in plain text, encrypted form or after having undergone a hashing process, constitutes personal data for the purposes of the GDPR. Public keys equally qualify as personal data as a matter of EU data protection law. We examine the consequences flowing from that state of affairs and suggest that in interpreting the GDPR with respect to blockchains, fundamental rights protection and the promotion of innovation, two normative objectives of the European legal order, must be reconciled. This is even more so given that, where designed appropriately, distributed ledgers have the potential to further the GDPR’s objective of data sovereignty.
Source: Blockchains and Data Protection in the European Union by Michèle Finck :: SSRN
In a global economic landscape of hyper-commodification and financialisation, efforts to assimilate digital art into the high-stakes commercial art market have so far been rather unsuccessful, presumably because digital artworks cannot easily assume the status of precious object worthy of collection. This essay explores the use of blockchain technologies in attempts to create proprietary digital art markets in which uncommodifiable digital artworks are financialised as artificially scarce commodities. Using the decentralisation techniques and distributed database protocols underlying current cryptocurrency technologies, such efforts, exemplified here by the platform Monegraph, tend to be presented as concerns with the interest of digital artists and with shifting ontologies of the contemporary work of art. I challenge this characterisation, and argue, in a discussion that combines aesthetic theory, legal and philosophical theories of intellectual property, rhetorical analysis and research in the political economy of new media, that the formation of proprietary digital art markets by emerging commercial platforms such as Monegraph constitutes a worrisome amplification of long-established, on-going efforts to fence in creative expression as private property. As I argue, the combination of blockchain-based protocols with established ambitions of intellectual property policy yields hybrid conceptual-computational financial technologies (such as self-enforcing smart contracts attached to digital artefacts) that are unlikely to empower artists but which serve to financialise digital creative practices as a whole, curtailing the critical potential of the digital as an inherently dynamic and potentially uncommodifiable mode of production and artistic expression.
This special issue introduces the study of financial technologies and finance to the field of philosophy of technology, bringing together two different fields that have not traditionally been in dialogue. The included articles are: Digital Art as ‘Monetised Graphics’: Enforcing Intellectual Property on the Blockchain, by Martin Zeilinger; Fundamentals of Algorithmic Markets: Liquidity, Contingency, and the Incomputability of Exchange, by Laura Lotti; ‘Crises of Modernity’ Discourses and the Rise of Financial Technologies in a Contested Mechanized World, by Marinus Ossewaarde; Two Technical Images: Blockchain and High-Frequency Trading, by Diego Viana; and The Blockchain as a Narrative Technology: Investigating the Social Ontology and Normative Configurations of Cryptocurrencies, by Wessel Reijers and Mark Coeckelbergh.
Source: Towards a Philosophy of Financial Technologies | SpringerLink
This paper discusses the intersection of environmentalism and cryptoanarchism, in the form of Gridcoin, a cryptocurrency which aims to mitigate the environmental impact of cryptocurrency mining, through the implementation of two methods: a Proof-of-Research scheme and a Proof-of-Stake protocol. This raises questions about the need for an environment-friendly consideration of the costs of cryptocurrency mining.
Source: Environmentalism in Cryptoanarchism: Gridcoin Case Study by Usman Chohan :: SSRN
If your requirements are fulfilled by today’s relational databases, you’d be insane to use a blockchain.
So am I saying that blockchains are useless? Absolutely not. But before you embark on that shiny blockchain project, you need to have a very clear idea of why you are using a blockchain. There are a bunch of conditions that need to be fulfilled. And if they’re not, you should go back to the drawing board. Maybe you can define the project better. Or maybe you can save everyone a load of time and money, because you don’t need a blockchain at all.
Source: Avoiding the pointless blockchain project | MultiChain
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Decentralization vs Incoordination – Tadge Dryja (MIT DCI)BPASE ’17, January 26th 2017, Stanford UniversityStanford Cyber Initiative
The conference will explore the use of formal methods, empirical analysis, and risk modeling to better understand security and systemic risk in blockchain protocols. The conference aims to foster multidisciplinary collaboration among practitioners and researchers in blockchain protocols, distributed systems, cryptography, computer security, and risk management.
Source: Blockchain Protocol Analysis and Security Engineering 2017 | Cyber Initiative
The fact that Bitcoin was designed to confound human decision-making is a feature, not a flaw. The core protocol is tasked with enforcing the single rule most crucial to the cryptocurrency’s value: no counterfeit spending. By contrast, the U.S. dollar is burdened with effecting monetary policy, enforcing sanctions, fighting crime and much more. The more functions a currency has, the more things there are to argue over, and the more likely the community will be to fracture. Bitcoin’s uncompromising focus allows it to serve a broader user base.In blockchains, anarchy is the worst form of governance except for all the others. That said, it’s still possible that Bitcoin didn’t get things right the first time around. As more people get involved, coordinating decisions will become even more difficult, and Bitcoin’s inflexibility may prove too limiting. 1 Even Ethereum, which once executed a $55 million loss recovery on three days’ notice, is finding it difficult to repeat the procedure 18 months later. Any decentralized cryptocurrency has a limited window in which to coordinate decisions. So let the creative experiments begin.
Source: Bitcoin Blockchain Demonstrates the Value of Anarchy – Bloomberg
Indeed, the same innovations that power crypto-assets can also help us regulate them.
To put it another way, we can fight fire with fire.
Regulatory technology and supervisory technology can help shut criminals out of the crypto world. More broadly, we are seeing crypto-asset exchanges in some countries that are subject to know-your-customer requirements.
https://blogs.imf.org/2018/03/13/addressing-the-dark-side-of-the-crypto-world/
