Archaeologists of the future trying to understand computer network technologies of the early 21st century may stumble upon something called blockchain. By that time, far from now, blockchain will have either revolutionized all computational systems and become the basis of digital identification, or it will have faded into obscurity, leaving barely a trace in the techno-archaeological record. Or maybe it will have the status of the ARPANET today - we all sort of know it was something important that laid the foundations for the Internet, even if we don't know how, or why, or what the TCI/IP protocol is that packages, transmits and receives electronic communications on the computer networks we use every day.

Although blockchain is associated with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, this project revealed it as an accounting technology that is inserted into conversations in the technology and business worlds about automation and "disintermediation." This project focused on the implications for law and justice, because one thing blockchain developers seek to automate is legal reasoning. In their view, if blockchain can begin to automate various kinds of decision making in the physical world, and in the world of communication among connected computational devices, then it has the potential to disintermediate law. Think of a digital system for tracking the provenance of digital or physical goods in a supply chain, and executing "contracts" based on confirming data gathered at critical points along that supply chain.

This project brought a deeper understanding of blockchain to the PI's main disciplinary communities: sociolegal studies and anthropology. The research demonstrated that blockchain has opened up a public conversation over the politics of infrastructure. At stake is the control over the infrastructures at the foundation of economic and communicative relations. Insofar as blockchain helps illuminate these political positions, it is a useful case study to illuminate the political and economic transformations taking place since the global financial crisis of 2008.

The project illuminated developers' legal consciousness and understanding of contracts. This is significant because these understandings are now being baked into computational systems doing the some of the work of private governance (as in the supply chain model above) - whether blockchain-based or otherwise. Developers used the word "contracts" because they associated contracts with their binding force, not with their breach or negotiation. Smart contracts are similarly binding, or, rather, bound by the preconditions programmed into them. When these preconditions are met, they instruct the network to execute the code. A simple example is a smart contract that instructs a payment to be made from one party to another when electronic sensors detect that a shipping container has arrived in port and still weighs what it did when it left its origin point. A simple digital switch could perform the same operation. A blockchain-based smart contract has the advantage - at least, in theory - of permitting anonymity among transacting parties with a trusted system for authenticating the state of the shipping container and the transacting parties, and validating the funds transfer, without the need for any intermediaries to carry out these functions, possibly eliminating additional costs and time. A blockchain-based system also has the virtue of being decentralized and thus more resistant to hacking, without requiring a central monitor or auditor. It would also (again, in theory) carry out its instructions automatically, as soon as the pre-set conditions were met. For these reasons some developers also have attempted to develop blockchain-based voting systems.

Social scientists have long pointed out that corporate relations and contracts themselves are bound together by non-contractual forms of communication and commitment. But blockchain proponents tend to reduce the corporation to the contractual structures animating it, and to understand the contract, again, in terms of its binding force, its determinism, over the future contingencies that lead people to make contracts in the first place.

In addition to academic presentations and publications, the project included numerous presentations to government, industry, and nonprofit bodies, including a particularly deep engagement with the Filene Research Institute, which supports the credit union industry. It resulted in a database of academic research on blockchain (in collaboration with Quinn DuPont, https://www.blockchainresearchnetwork.org/) including research guides. A Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) supplement permitted the PI, over two years, to train 11 computer science undergraduates from diverse background in social science methods and the ethics of computer science. One group compiled a database of blockchain startups, coding for platform used, industry sector, country of incorporation and country of operations; another focused on community organizations, data, justice and law. The latter developed a paper under review for the journal, Computer Science Education.

The broader impacts of the project thus include bringing deeper understanding of blockchain and the assumptions built into automated decision systems to government and industry, as well as broadening the pool of talent in computer science and engineering.

Last Modified: 07/30/2020
Modified by: William M Maurer