Métodos y Criterios de Inspección

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The previous sections outline three distinct notions of legitimacy at different levels of abstractions. To sum up, legitimacy from the perspective of moral philosophy seeks to understand when the exercise of power is morally justified. Legal legitimacy, or validity, conversely aims to distinguish valid legal acts from invalid legal acts according to the coding of legal/illegal. In this case legitimacy is a concept internal to legal systems. Lastly, legitimacy has been defined as a sociological concept that describes the basis on which a group of people obeys commands. At LoA(3) legitimacy is an empirical concept that helps to understand, descriptively, how system of rules are authoritative in the Weberian sense. In the current analysis of blockchains and distributed ledgers one perspective must be adopted going forward. I believe that, at the current stage of development of blockchain systems, the more appropriate level of abstraction is the sociological one. The reasons for adopting LoA(3) rather than LoA(1) or LoA(2) are the following.

First, chapter 3 and 4 have examined two core claims put forward to justify the adoption of blockchains so that it is a natural development attempting to understand how blockchains develop authority and on which basis current systems can be considered legitimate. Then, the sociological understanding of legitimacy appears to be best positioned with its empirical connotation to unravel how groups of individuals come to ‘obey’ these systems.

Along the same line, the sociological understanding of legitimacy allows one to deploy the methodological approach of Max Weber to examine different implementations. This is relevant for it appears that no such thing as the blockchain exists and that different systems seem to establish legitimacy on different grounds, and therefore develop distinct structures. The analysis of current blockchains with this methodology will be the subject of the next chapter.

Third, legitimacy at LoA(3) exposes an increasing trend in the reliance on algorithms to exert power, a phenomena which has been defined as algorithmic authority that appears to be best studied from the sociological perspective. In this sense, the normativity of blockchains might be illuminated under

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a different light. By examining blockchains with the sociological understanding of legitimacy it is possible to outline an understudied belief in the authority of computations captured by the notion of algorithmic authority (see chapter 7).

Fourth, a descriptive account of the structures and designs of blockchains appears necessary before an inquiry at the level of moral legitimacy. It seems that the sociological account is a precursor to the philosophical one. Without a descriptive understanding of blockchain systems a moral examination might incur in the categorical mistake of treating a single implementation, for example Bitcoin, as representative of the whole landscape. And this is undesirable, in particular if policy recommendations would be drawn on the basis of an incomplete understanding of the different mechanisms and structures that different blockchain systems give birth to. Then the risk of over- regulating the technology would be considerably high.

Fifth, as with other system of rules the sociological understanding of legitimacy allows one to examine the different structures and ideas on which systems are grounded. Therefore, it is possible to discuss the varying institutions or technical solutions adopted by different blockchains without the complexity of examining them from the moral perspective. In this sense, the Weberian account of legitimacy appears best positioned to explain the reasons why different blockchains appear to establish their legitimacy on different grounds. Further, by examining the belief that are left out when analyzing blockchains according to Weber’s pure types, it is possible to expose elements that do not belong to the classic pure types of legitimate authority (see chapter 7).

Sixth, to the extent of my knowledge, the study of blockchains with both their legal and technical structures has not been carried out from the perspective of legitimacy at LoA(3). Yet, I believe that this approach is conducive to a better understanding of the phenomena because it enables us to explore the underlying ideas that result in distinct technical solutions and in the understanding of the normative structures developed within blockchains and distributed ledgers. Then, once the core tenets

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of the blockchain movement have been exposed it is possible to explain what drives the adoption of these systems and how existing ones could leverage it to improve their legitimacy.

Seventh and final, the sociological notion of legitimacy is apt to expose the motives that drive the adoption of different systems, both technical and social. Hence, this perspective helps us illuminate the way in which normative structures are understood within blockchains. In other words, self- executing smart contracts, management of digital tokens and so on are all manifestation of the ideas on which the authority of blockchains hinges. This chapter set the stage for the analysis of blockchains from the perspective of sociological legitimacy. It has examined three main understandings of the essentially contested notion of legitimacy by adopting three levels of abstraction, namely, philosophical, legal, and sociological. Then, it defended the choice of the sociological one to analyze blockchains and their many different technical and social solutions. On this basis, the next chapters will study blockchains from the viewpoint of legitimacy developed by Max Weber. Accordingly, the next chapter examines real-world system via the Weberian pure types of traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal legitimate authority. It turns out that, among the many blockchains out there, some resemble a pure type better than others and, consequently, their structures both at the technical level, that is, governance by/with the network, and the social level - governance of the network – differ significantly. This chapter ends the first part of this work in which I examined the reasons commonly put forward for adopting blockchains. In chapter 3 the claim that blockchains remove trust from interactions, i.e. the trustless attribute of the technology, has been examined as a primary reason. Then, chapter 4 looked at the new modes of governance brought about by this class of technologies. The current chapter, instead, argued that an overarching reason why people adopt blockchain is because they are perceived as legitimate mean to a wide set of ends. Introducing the concept of legitimacy demanded justification, therefore an early section of this chapter was devoted to explain why I believe that studying the legitimacy of blockchains is desirable. The next part of this work applies the sociological methodology provided by Max Weber to study different blockchains in an

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attempt to establish why groups of people grant obedience to these systems of algorithmic rules. On this basis, the next chapter looks at existing systems through the three pure types of legitimate authority put forward by the German sociologist. This is a needed step toward understanding the core ideas on which the legitimacy of blockchains is established. It turns out that it is not clear if Weber’s typology is sufficient to account for why people obey blockchains.

6. The Legitimacy of Distributed Consensus