Topic: [Paper] Political implications of blockchain technology (Read 814 times)

Hi everyone,

I am thinking about writing my master's thesis about the "political implications of blockchain technology". Here I would like to share some of my ideas with you and see whether this topic has enough substance. Your ideas are very welcome.

Where do you think lies the biggest potential of this technology to change how social interaction and the resolution of conflict among humans is arranged?

What would you say is the core of the innovation that changes how humans get along with each other? My take: Being able to control (hold private keys) assets that are tracked on a distributed ledger that is maintained based on public rules (open source software defining the rules to update the ledger).  

Any ideas you have help! Especially those that are very specific or are substituted by an example or embedded in sociological / political theory.

Here are my thoughts up to this point:
1. Less overall influence of the state due to the increasing difficulty of collecting taxes, imposing capital controls.  

2. A new form of governance: Continuous voting, voting for representatives in specific areas (vote for a health politician etc.).

3. In my opinion libertarian solutions don't work without the according political culture, not without certain norms and not without social enforcement of these norms (outlawing that is not only based on the interests of the individuals that practice the outlawing but on a social norm they follow that does not increase their personal profit). In a global society where the individual does not depend as much on "its" group like in Rothbard's ancient Ireland the cultural basis for a state free society is at least more difficult to establish. Blockchain technology can help here in two ways:

a) Less trust necessary among anonymous individuals: The lack of reputation and trust based on personal relations and on being known in today's relatively anonymous society with its global markets is compensated these days by government regulations (customer protection etc.). Blockchain technology would allow to write the customer protection and the "regulation" into the open source software that defines the business rules that can not be changed by any one party. Further any change to the self enforced "terms of conditions" would be public. Example: Collateral rules for blockchain based derivatives.

b) Bringing back trust and reputation to otherwise anonymous individuals: Blockchain technology would allow an unforgeable reputation system that creates "local liability" on a global scale. Unforgeable rep. system means: No identities with an arbitrarily high repuation can be created and no identities can be destroyed by  a system administrator that does not exist with decentralized databases.
What other problems with rep. systems can blockchain technology solve?

Smart contracts should be very helpful in the sense described under 3a and 3b. In what other sense would "smart contracts" have political implications?

I find 3) the most interesting part and might focus on that.

If you have any scientific literature you think I should read let me know! If you know someone that would like to collaborate let me know.

I find libertarian theory and austrian economics very valuable in that they widen the narrow view of many mainstream theories about the existence of the state and it's relation to the economy. I am also critical of libertarian and austrian theory and think it has a few blind spots. But I think blockchain technology could help to relativise them substantially. The potential implications of this can not be underestimated. It is a challenge thought to make them understood.
Therefore I would attempt to embed the use cases of blockchain technology described above in the discourse about political theory and the state and help to mediate between social sciences and computer sciences.