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Since the genesis of our species and all across our history, wherever we go as humans, we use and consume resources and grow our kind by extending our families and communities all the way into future generations.
To enable this growth, we scale by expanding our reach across lands and territories, but also by increasing our output using the same scarce resources that we tap along our journey.
To scale more efficiently we coordinate by cooperating and competing, which are the two main forces that drive our development.
To coordinate we developed several strategies including building platforms such as language, art, law, politics, navigation, communications, the internet, online marketplaces, social networks, digital money, and many other systems.
We distribute our efforts amongst us through division of labour, the price system, and conducting commerce globally. However, ‘coordination’ does not mean total uniformity nor lack of individuality or independence.
To the contrary, our coordination platforms serve us as efficient tools to align our incentives and be able to co-exist and work together by making our personal efforts and activities complementary. And in most cases freely and voluntarily.
This is why we need individual security to minimize the risks to our independence, local knowledge, and ability to conduct and implement our unique life plans.
For that we created basic rights such as property, freedom of contract, privacy, free speech, freedom of assembly, religion, and many more. Those basic rights are implicit, embedded, and distributed globally within blockchain networks.
Basic rights are represented on blockchains by means of ledgers with accounts, balances, assets, programs, and smart contracts, which cross all borders and reach everyone in the world regardless of their country, culture, ideology, beliefs, gender, race, or any other human condition.
Protecting those basic rights, sound blockchain principles, such as trust minimization, immutability, censorship resistance, and least authority, must exist as norms within public blockchains and their extended ecosystems to assure their integrity and continuity.
Public blockchains, as systems exposed to the environment with no protection other than their internal security – in the form of cryptography, game theory, extra-economic incentives, and the coordination problem – need to have especially a strong ethos of immutability at the protocol and social layers.
Immutability is not only about directly securing the integrity and continuity of distributed basic rights, but also includes all the parts and parameters of those blockchains that assure those rights.
Since no community can understand or manage the local situation of all humans and their specific geographies, the only way to make blockchains available and usable to everyone globally is to make sure the database, which contains the ledger with accounts, balances, assets, programs, and smart contracts, is neutral and unchangeable.
If blockchains were changeable by groups or authorities foreign or strange to them, people around the world would not be able to rely on them, nor deposit their wealth, or count on them for their agreements and other private and legitimate dealings.
To make blockchains immutable, the developers and their blockchain communities need to focus only on their technical development, upgrades and fixing bugs if any. These have global impact and are scalable.
But if communities spend time and effort solving local accounting problems that lead to arbitrary property restitutions and changes in programs and smart contracts, then they are intervening in the matters of specific users, which is a path to lack of integrity and security of the global public network environment.
Arbitrary intervention also opens blockchain developer teams, nodes, communities, and other participants and stakeholders, including the platform itself, to possible manipulation.
This manipulation can be performed through bribes, possible government coercion, legal liability, and other narrow interests and human vices in general.
This means that local issues, such as dapp bugs, hacks, and user funds losses, should be dealt with between the parties privately, but not using the general public blockchain network as a loss restitution and resolution device.
The above would make the blockchain an uncertain, rule changing environment, and thus not secure and not useful for unrelated, transacting strangers globally.
If it’s true that the community, developers, node operators, and all other constituents must not intervene arbitrarily to change the state to solve any particular issues or losses, then that means that dapp developers and users must deal with those things off-blockchain.
By ‘off-blockchain’, it is meant either through traditional systems, such as law enforcement or courts, friendly settlement, unfortunately bearing the loss if any, or any other possible or creative out-of-network solution.
Prioritizing sound blockchain principles that protect the integrity, continuity, and global distribution of basic rights is the most ethical mission and moral purpose that a blockchain developer team and the ecosystem at large may have.
Code Is Law
