Part 1: Introduction: The vision of Lawrence Lessig and the quandry of Blockchain as law

In this introductory piece to my multi-part analysis of ethics and future of the blockchain as a self contained, decentralized regulatory system, I would like to share a quote from Lawrence Lessig's book all the way back from 1999, CODE and Other Laws of Cyberspace

But the architecture of cyberspace is power in this sense; how it is could be different. Politics is about how we decide, how that power is exercised, and by whom.

If code is law, then, as William Mitchell writes, “control of code is power”

"For citizens of cyberspace, . . . code is becoming a crucial focus of political contest. Who shall write that software that increasingly structures our daily lives?”

As the world is now, code writers are increasingly lawmakers. They determine what the defaults of the Internet will be; whether privacy will be protected; the degree to which anonymity will be allowed; the extent to which access will be guaranteed. They are the ones who set its nature. Their decisions, now made in the interstices of how the Net is coded, define what the Net is.

How the code regulates, who the code writers are, and who controls the
code writers—these are questions on which any practice of justice must focus in the age of cyberspace. The answers reveal how cyberspace is regulated. My claim in this part of the book is that cyberspace is regulated by its code, and that the code is changing.

Most importantly,

Its regulation is its code, and its code is changing.

In future parts of this series I will introduce some of the ideas set forth by Lessig in his books Free Culture as well as CODE and tie these legal and ethical concerns into the development of the blockchain, as well as outline some challenges I could see in the future as we begin to integrate the technology into our traditional regulatory structures of power.

The blockchain eliminates the need for trust, but at what cost?

Lessig's book CODE is freely available here: http://codev2.cc/
Free Culture is freely available here: http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf
PDFs offered under Creative Commons license