Markets for Rules: The Promise and Peril of Blockchain Distributed Governance
13 Pages Posted: 15 Aug 2018
Date Written: July 31, 2018
Abstract
Classical liberals seek the paradoxical: government powerful enough to protect individuals from preying off each other, but limited enough to prevent it becoming a fierce predator itself. The emergence of blockchain technology heralds a potential revolution in our collective capacity to implement limited government. Blockchains offer a more secure and transparent way of implementing rules while permitting individual choice between rulesets that can co-exist at the same time and place. What this could ultimately mean is that a great deal of what we have traditionally conceived to be governance might be disintermediated from the territorially defined monopolistic coercive authorities that classically define states.
Keywords: Hayek, Buchanan, blockchain, cryptocurrency, bitcoin, private governance, new institutional economics
JEL Classification: B52, B53
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation