Regulation through Governance
summary
Argues that blockchain code both enforces rules and can evade law, showing concrete failures and levers: a smart‑contract exploit drains about $60M in the DAO $60M exploit and a multisig bug leaves roughly $300M frozen in the Parity $300M freeze, forcing a community fork rather than court remedy. Identifies practical intervenors—ISPs, miners/mining pools, exchanges, custodial wallets—and tools like cryptographic proofs of reserves, verifiable credentials, and protocol forks as functional equivalents for regulatory goals, noting forks sometimes work and sometimes fracture trust.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction to blockchain
- 2:05Code as law paradigm
- 4:35Theories of internet regulation
- 7:08Regulatory challenges
- 9:16The DAO attack case study
- 14:01Intermediaries in blockchain
- 19:00Alternative intervention
- 21:42Market-based regulation
- 26:03Blockchain governance
- 43:56Centralization and power
- 51:13Blockchain as regulatory tech
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