Journal Title

Regulating Blockchain: Techno-Social and Legal Challenges

Volume

N/A

Issue

N/A

First Page

59

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Information

2019

Abstract

A decade into Bitcoin's existence, governance questions around it and other public blockchains abound. Do these 'decentralized' structures even have governance? If so, what does it look like? Who has power, and how is it channeled or constrained? Are power structures implicit or explicit? How can we improve upon the ad hoc governance structures of early blockchains? ls ‘on-chain governance,’ like that proposed by Tezos and others, the path forward?

In August 2016, in the aftermath of the DAO theft and resulting Ethereum hard fork, I argued in American Banker that the core developers and significant miners of public blockchains function as fiduciaries of those who rely on these systems and should, therefore, be accountable as such. The DAO episode provided a gripping real-world demonstration that certain people within nominally decentralized public blockchains were making decisions about other people's money and resources, yet this power was largely unacknowledged, undefined, and unaccountable. In this chapter, I explore in greater depth my claim that certain developers of public blockchains act as fiduciaries, as events since the DAO continue to point to the exercise of power within these systems without corresponding accountability.

Recommended Citation

Angela Walch, In Code(rs) We Trust: Software Developers as Fiduciaries in Public Blockchains, in Regulating Blockchain: Techno-Social and Legal Challenges, 58-81 (Philipp Hacker, et. al, eds., 2019).

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.