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Many of the words and concepts that form a blockchain sensibility can be traced to very specific experiences, reasoning and histories in network computation. Most of the concepts are, however, also broad enough to refer to and open up more general social and political imaginaries. This has effectively attracted a broad spectrum of people, discussed further below, but has also caused significant confusion. For example, ‘decentralisation’ can refer to a network type, but equally to what might be the assumed social and political effects of these. It is further complicated by the fact that decentralisation is not a stable condition. It can be contended to state for example that Bitcoin is decentralised, but it is nevertheless intended to be to such a degree that decentralisation operates as the main principle in the assemblage,

and is corrected for and addressed when not satisfied (cf. Meiklejohn, 2018). Whether strictly true or not in terms of the state of the network, decentralisation might operate effectively in a social sense, such that, for example, miners might hesitate to exert their rather centralised hashing power for fear of backlash (see 6.1.2). While the intention, as discussed in Chapter 4, has been to eliminate vague human interpretations by encoding conditions into immediately executing protocols that cannot be controlled, these principles and concepts nevertheless continue to operate, informing ongoing decision-making in the space and forming the rationale for different legitimacy claims (see Chapter 6).

Here, I attempt to clarify some of these confusions around the scope, claims, aims and ambitions of blockchain by doing three things: describing some of the main principles and concepts that form blockchain sensibilities; describing their particular meaning and operationalisation in terms of decentralised network protocols; and suggesting a distinction between general principles, particular desired properties and the hoped-for effects of Bitcoin and blockchain systems. These are in no way exhaustive, and the method for which I have arrived at the listed principles, properties and effects is far from structured or comprehensive. Instead, they are summations made on the basis of my involvement with the blockchain industry between the years 2014 and 2019 and should instead be read as navigational tools for the rest of the chapter, which will discuss some of the complexities and problems that come up when such a sensibility is generalised from a particular set of strategies in earlier histories of peer-to-peer structures to a generalised proposition (as well as the next chapter in which some of these sensibilities were severely challenged). What I here call blockchain ‘principles’ entail assumptions about what kind of systems and architectures will have certain properties and achieve different effects. These can be considered ‘first principles’ in the sense of that they are often used as indisputable, as a common understanding of generally desirable conditions in and of themselves. They are principles for which there is a vague albeit general consensus, and tend to form the fundamental reasoning and purpose of blockchain systems and that hold together the blockchain assemblage.

Decentralisation

Decentralisation is the main principle in blockchain and cryptocurrency efforts. While distributed systems imply that there is no single point of failure, the intention for decentralisation is to go further and ensure resilience against shutdown by authorities, censorship, influence or manipulation. The principle, defined in terms of resilience towards authority, also raises issues about whether not only the network, but also the developers who write the protocols, the distribution of bitcoin tokens in the network, hardware provisions etc. needs to be decentralised in order to satisfy the aims (Bonneau et al., 2015; Srinivasan, 2017; Azouvi, Maller and Meiklejohn, 2018). Decentralisation tends to be understood through ideas of network topology and

assuming social effects will follow, but these ideas are increasingly adopting social and political sensibility of decentralisation in response to internal crises in the communities (see Chapter 6).

Openness

In order to not have any ‘authorities’ in a decentralised system, strictly speaking the systems reference client code has to be open source, so that it can be peer-reviewed and checked. If not, the persons who have written the code would effectively have to be trusted; no one would be able to check whether the system operates as stated, whether there are security issues or otherwise. Bitcoin and other decentralised systems like BitTorrent take openness further, also implying that anyone can take part in running the client and participating as a peer. They are designed so that anyone can join or leave as and when they want. ‘In a decentralised system, no one entity can act to censor transactions or prevent individuals from joining the network (as is possible with traditional institutions...’ (Azouvi, Maller and Meiklejohn, 2018, p. 1). This form of openness has technical, social and political economic implications because if anyone can join then it also needs to be assumed that anyone might be an adversary and look to attack the system. This implies a ‘trustless’ security model that has gone on to also become a form of social, political economic approach to any manner of systems designs that also configures ideas of neutrality in particular ways.

Trust/trustlessness

Decentralised and open systems imply a certain level of trustlessness. Trust in the context of network computation refers specifically to a security threshold, namely which percentage of a network have to be trusted and are assumed to be ‘honest’ for any given system. The ideal is to reduce the amount of trust needed as much as possible, approaching complete trustlessness and security. Bitcoin and many other blockchain protocols consider 51% attacks, whereby if anyone controls 51% of the network, they would be able to determine which transactions are verified and compromising the neutrality of the network. This conception of trust, while effective in systems design and security modelling, meets severe contradictions when the systems are actually deployed, and the levels of trust required for their use and deployment (Vidan and Lehdonvirta, 2018)

Immutability

The Bitcoin blockchain would have to be immutable in order for it to be secure. Otherwise, anyone could change the record of accounts, rendering the system

useless. Immutability would secure that consensus on the state of the network, arrived at through the proof-of-work consensus protocol, and could not be arbitrarily modified. This idea of immutability was extended in Ethereum to the blockchain more generally and the idea of immutable code – code that would run exactly as written, that no one could change and that therefore would run and function ‘autonomously’ beyond the control of any human. Immutability was a main principle in blockchain systems until it became severely challenged after a series of hacks in 2016 and 2017 (see Chapter 6).

To appreciate the specificity of these principles, it can be helpful to compare them with what such notions might refer to in other contexts. For example, social and political understandings of decentralisation might aim at bringing control and decision-making closer to those who are affected by a given decision, while in the case of aspects of blockchain decentralisation, the systems are designed specifically so that they are beyond the control of any given person, whether or not they affect them. Equally, social and political understandings of trust might consider more trust to be a good thing, while for anyone looking to model and develop secure network systems, any trust required in the network represents a potential attack vector and a weakness. Because of this, the kind of openness that is implied is of a particular nature, where, in terms of social life, one might associate openness with a trustful relationship to others. In decentralised systems, openness is based on precisely calculated security threshold, implying and assuming that anyone might be an adversary. This concern of first and foremost with security and the security properties of different design principles, when generalised, tend towards securitising and militarising of how relationships are modelled and determined more generally. They are intended to withstand attacks from any potential source. The provenance of these concepts in network security concerns were to go on to affect the ways in which neutrality is understood in relation to political difference (expanded on in section 5.2.1).

These principles are, in turn, associated with particular properties that are generally considered desirable in blockchain systems. Such properties are specific to a given systems design and can be achieved, but are not necessarily guaranteed, by following certain design principles. The ones described here are some of the more general properties that different blockchain projects try and ensure for people using them. Again, these are not exhaustive in any way, but are intended to give an overview of the types of concerns that blockchain systems designs tend to take into account, which also gives a sense of what matters in blockchain assemblages in terms of use-cases and needs. They are therefore often seen as the reasons for what are called forks of existing projects (see 6.2.1) or the development of

entirely new projects, cryptographic or mathematical tools that suggest new and better ways of achieving such properties.

Privacy

Privacy is one of the most prevalent properties and concerns in early decentralised systems designs and in Bitcoin. It is a politicised field of computer engineering that tends to be the focus of activists’ development efforts in the realm of information security (cf. Rogaway, 2015). It is a property of systems designs that became the focus and reasoning of what is called Cypherpunk, a political movement and subculture that seeks to use cryptography as a counter measure against authority. Cypherpunk is, in many ways, the political and cultural backdrop to Bitcoin. From very early on in the development of the internet, a network of engineers and developers were concerned with the ways in which the system would fundamentally alter power relations between governments and citizens. Privacy was considered a crucial point and the focus of two manifestos that came out of Cypherpunk movements: a Cypherpunk manifesto by computer programmer and founder of the Cypherpunk mailing list Eric Hughes, stating for example, ‘Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age’, ‘Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world’ and ‘We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.93’94 Another contributor to the Cypherpunk mailing list, Timothy C. May wrote the crypto-anarchist manifesto that begins with ‘A spectre is haunting the modern world, the spectre of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner.’95 These concerns predicted what has since become more a prevalent understanding of the internet as having become a mass surveillance infrastructure. On a more technical level, the intention is that peer-to-peer technologies intersect with privacy properties by eliminating third party intermediation that would otherwise have full oversight of behaviour and data. In some peer-to-peer designs, however, third party intermediation is replaced with a different kind of decentralised intermediation in the shape of the protocol itself. And so in Bitcoin, in order to have a peer-to-peer payment system, instead of a third party holding a record of transactions, the whole network holds it, making all transactions fully public. In order to preserve privacy in such a

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See archive here: http://mailing-list-archive.cryptoanarchy.wiki/ 94

radically transparent system, the accounts themselves remain anonymous. Privacy is a desired property of decentralised systems, but its design is never absolute, instead entailing decisions around selective revealing and concealing of relevant information and very careful modelling of potential systems weaknesses.

Anonymity

Anonymity is closely related to privacy, but slight different in terms of systems design. A given user or node might be anonymous but still engage in open and non-private communication. This is also a major aspect of Cypherpunk and network culture with a fascination and use of pseudonyms and ‘nyms’ conveying the possibility of multiple identities and the ability to selectively reveal or conceal oneself. Bitcoin was initially understood to be anonymous, and infamously became the means of payment for the ‘Darknet’ and online black markets (cf. Pagliery, 2015). The anonymity and subsequent disappearance of Bitcoin inventor(s) Satoshi Nakamoto was in the meantime also a symbol of the disappearance of authority. The author of the system receded into the shadows, the ‘nym’ had served its purpose and instead of coherent fixed identities, the only fixed thing was the blockchain itself. All else would be fluid, multiple, and could exist ‘in the dark’, shielded from the prying eyes of authorities. This intention easily and quickly flips into its opposite. Research and testing has shown several different ways that anonymity can be compromised (Meiklejohn et al., 2013). A given transaction can be traced all the way to an exchange and de- anonymised at this point. Anonymity nevertheless matters to blockchain ‘sensibilities’ and so there are continuously new techniques and protocols being developed to improve both anonymity and privacy features (cf. Narayanan and Möser, 2017) – for example, coin mixers that ‘mix’ transactions so that they cannot be traced directly to specific owners. Mix nets and advanced cryptography, called zero-knowledge proofs, have also been added to the arsenal for the development of different cryptocurrencies with much stronger anonymity, like Z-Cash, Moneroand more recently Nym, which have been developed specifically for anonymity purposes (Blum, Feldman and Micali, 1988; Dwork, Naor and Sahai, 2004; Saberhagen, 2013; Ben-sasson et al., 2014).96

97 98

Techniques like Attribute Based Credentials (ABC) selectively reveal only the minimum necessary information in order to cryptographically prove something about oneself and gain access to a system; it is a network of ‘nyms’ to engage freely rather than of coherent identities to be targeted. In response to those aspects of blockchain that tend towards complete determinacy, fixed identities and defined property, the fluid interactions of anonymous systems remains one of the more explicitly politically

96 See https://z.cash/ 97 See https://www.getmonero.org/ 98 See https://nymtech.net/

aware aspects of blockchain projects and development. These are two differing tendencies in the field of blockchain that tend to either prioritise formalising and having blockchain systems adopted within existing legal, commercial and economic frameworks, or continuing its trajectory as primarily an anti-authoritarian tool.

Transparency

Transparency is, to some degree, ensured through principles of openness and trustlessness: the code of decentralised systems is open and transparent and can be reviewed, as can transaction data and the state of the Bitcoin network overall. However, there is a tension between the principles of transparency and privacy/anonymity that remains unresolved. In the Cypherpunk subculture the general ideal of transparency for the powerful and privacy for the powerless (Hughes, 1993; Assange et al., 2012) was adopted, but this distinction between powerful and powerless beyond references to governments and corporations becomes less clear as when decentralisation becomes a generalised idea. In relation to specific and well understood authorities, the formula makes sense, but in terms of the Bitcoin network as a proposition in its own right, it remains unresolved because there are as of yet no agreed-upon methods to name ‘the powerful’ from ‘powerless’ in what are supposed to be decentralised systems. For example, are people with large holdings of bitcoin the ‘powerful’ and should they therefore have some form of transparency and accountability structures put in place? For those looking to establish accountability methods for the emerging ‘authorities’ amongst and within blockchain systems, I would like to suggest that although politically and ethically unresolved, the aim of systems having transparency properties can be leveraged. Indeed, the culture of anti- authoritarianism and leaking can provide a context for developing more refined accountability structures.

Capacity (scalability, speed, throughput)

Less explicitly ideological but an important property for most blockchain systems has been the question of sufficient capacity, including scale, understood in terms of volume, speed and the throughput that a network can manage. Chapter 6 discusses how a seemingly neutral technical issue such as capacity, scale and speed of a system can become hugely politicised and debated. Capacity of the network can serve different purposes and be mediated in different ways. (Bitcoin itself came out of network engineering research that sought to use price mechanisms to throttle networks in order to reduce spam and waste of network resources (Dwork and Naor, 1992; Back, 2002)). Capacity at different layers and for different purposes is therefore a fine-grained design question that tends to benefit certain types of uses over others, rather than being an absolute measure. It is nevertheless an important property in

protocol designs and the basis for many forks and new protocols looking to improve on Bitcoin. Capacity is addressed, for example, on the basis of being able to compete with existing digital payment systems, but also from a network security standpoint of achieving large enough networks for decentralisation to function effectively as a security property.

Autonomy

There is an underlying tension in blockchain systems designs between questions of autonomy as ‘automation’ and systems beyond control, or in the sense of self- determination and indeed bringing more control back to people using a given system. The provenance of early peer-to-peer strategies of decentralisation brought with it a very particular understanding of autonomy. Early peer-to-peer systems were built with the intention of making their shutdown impossible by ensuring that the network was not controlled by any single node, server or person, but instead run in a decentralised manner. Such ambitions understand the construction of a system that is autonomous from control to be the basis of a form of political autonomy for those that use it. As these ideas became generalised, this evolved into a particular understanding of the system itself as autonomous from human control more generally, with the aim of ensuring that various functions would execute automatically and regardless of human will or influence (see Chapter 4). Autonomy came to mean a form of automation in systems design rather than necessarily self-determination in the political sense, while the concept still maintained the social and political insinuations of empowerment in relation to authority.

These principles and properties are intended to serve particular purposes and to have certain effects. I consider such effects to be hopes and claims about what blockchain systems do, but