The 11 blockchain tenets: towards a blockchain bill of rights

Author: Prof Aggelos Kiayias

First published on October 11, 2024, on iohk.io

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Designing blockchain systems is a challenging endeavor. It is also a continuous process, as these systems are long-lived and aim to capture requirements that evolve during their lifetime. It follows that a blockchain project’s community often faces difficult decisions that ‘fork’ the future of a blockchain system in different ways, with consequences that are hard to fully anticipate. Community decision-making frequently requires assessing highly technical proposals that can be mutually conflicting and impactful in various ways.

To meet the above challenges for any blockchain project and its community, it can be useful to follow a first principles approach that evaluates whether a specific improvement proposal aligns well with a handful of general principles (or tenets) that are widely accepted by the community and reflect the basic rights the community members expect to enjoy as users and contributors to the system. This methodology provides a common ground and frame of thinking that the community can use to deliberate, categorize, and prioritize different improvement proposals based on how well they align with their fundamental expectations from the system.

To showcase this way of thinking, discussed herein are 11 tenets that aim to offer a comprehensive cover of how blockchain systems are supposed to operate and engage with their users and contributors. These tenets are meant to capture the natural desiderata of these systems and the rights of their users. Note that they are not expressed in a way that makes them necessarily mutually compatible or algorithmically enforceable — this is inevitably so, as it can also happen in constitutional and human rights law where experts have to weigh between different and sometimes incompatible rights and their appropriate interpretation to find the best possible balance on a case-by-case basis. It can be expected that no realizable system can offer a perfect embodiment of all 11 tenets simultaneously. Ultimately, it is up to the community to decide at a specific point in time what is the most appropriate tradeoff and interpretation in the context of a given improvement proposal.

We list the 11 tenets next. Each tenet is followed by a short explanation.

Tenet one (T1) - Transactions cannot be slowed down or censored and will be expediently served for their intended purpose. The parallel that can be made here is to freedom of speech. In this sense, transactions express the ways the users wish to engage with the system, so users should be free and able to do so in a manner proportional to their intent. This excludes censorship but also mandates expediency in processing.

T2 - The cost of a transaction should be predictable and cannot be unreasonable. While it is expected that the system will impose costs to post a transaction, such costs cannot be unreasonable given the purpose of the transactions, and the costs should be predictable, enabling the users to plan for long-term system use.

T3 - No one should be prevented from developing and deploying their application as they intended it. The system and its development environment and ecosystem should support users with different backgrounds and skill sets to launch applications that truly capture their intent and offer access to the functionalities and features needed by these applications to operate properly.

T4 - Everyone’s inputs and contributions to the system will be recognized, recorded, processed and assessed fairly. While the system inevitably requires the expenditure of resources to support all its operations, the value that different system contributors offer in terms of maintenance, development, or transaction processing time should be fairly accounted for, so eg it can be rewarded as necessary and in an appropriate manner. Similarly transactions should be fairly processed without allowing some users asymmetric influence in the way their inputs are treated.

T5 - The value and data users contribute and/or create will not be locked or processed without their consent. A useful parallel here is the right to data portability in the context of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation. Users should be allowed to transfer their private data to any system or platform they desire to engage with. In the case of a blockchain system, the same should apply to the assets the users possess or create. Similarly, it is critical that the system operates with the users’ consent and full understanding of the actions it takes regarding how it processes users’ assets and data.

T6 - The system will safely preserve the value and information stored in it. Safety here can be interpreted in two ways: (i) integrity of the information recorded. For example, anticipating the possibility of quantum attacks that can potentially violate the security of user keys, it should be ensured that these can be mitigated. (ii) value preservation. For example, anticipating a volatile market, users have the option to use mechanisms such as stablecoins to preserve the value of their assets.

T7 - No resources will be unnecessarily spent. One should understand this as a resource minimization objective. That is, finding the best algorithm for the given task is important for this tenet. We do not want the system to waste more resources than necessary for a given task.

T8 - The system will treat users fairly and will evolve according to their collective will aiming at its long term sustainability and viability. This tenet refers to the right of the users and contributors to the system to participate in its governance and development in a fair and representative manner.

T9 - Users’ privacy, both in terms of their actions and their data, should be preserved. This tenet is also best understood in parallel to the privacy requirements present in relevant data protection laws, e.g., the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”). A useful parallel in this context is the data minimization principle that asks for the minimum disclosure of information needed to accomplish a certain objective that the user has consented to.

T10 - The system will offer users ways to engage that do not require them to break local laws and regulations. Given that blockchain systems are global in nature, it is expected that they span many jurisdictions that may impose varied and complex regulatory requirements. To accommodate this state of affairs, the users should be offered tools to engage with the system that do not require them to violate laws in the jurisdiction they operate.

T11 - The system’s operation should be transparent, predictable, verifiable, interpretable, and without asymmetries. This tenet mandates that the system should operate in a manner that users can observe, verify, predict, and understand. This suggests that system software should be open source and the binaries offered are publicly verifiable. But it also mandates that the services the system offers must accommodate similar levels of transparency and verifiability despite the fact that an individual user cannot completely verify or trust all the actions performed by other participants. Moreover it should not be the case that certain users are at an unfair vantage point and enjoy privileges that others do not have access to.

This completes the set of 11 tenets.

Conclusion

One way to put the above tenets to use is to assess how a blockchain improvement proposal aligns with them. Given a proposal, assessors may for example ask: if it is implemented, will it improve the system’s behavior with respect to some tenets? Moreover, they can ask whether the improvement is tangible and significant, given the resources required to implement it. Furthermore, it could be the case that the improvement proposal will leave the system worse off with respect to some other tenets. In such a case, one can ask whether the tradeoff offered is preferable for the system’s future compared to its current state.

It can be expected that, on some occasions, such deliberations will not be simple or straightforward, and communities can become polarized around specific proposals along the way. Debate is inevitable – and important – given the breadth and scope of blockchain systems.

Should they choose to follow this approach, we anticipate different blockchain communities to interpret and enshrine the above tenets in a way that best reflects their values and objectives. For instance, these tenets are currently being actively debated by the Cardano community as part of a series of constitutional workshops taking place across the globe, prior to the refinement, finalization, and approval of a Cardano constitution text at a constitutional convention in Buenos Aires, Argentina at the end of the year. Hopefully these tenets will act as beacons in the far horizon that will pull Cardano and other blockchain communities to where they intend to travel to, ultimately making it feasible to reach their destination.

Want to dive deeper into these tenets and join the conversation on Cardano? Join a special X space on Wednesday October 30 at 16:30 UTC with Prof. Aggelos and Charles Hoskinson, hosted by Intersect. Follow on X to learn more.

Here is a downloadable graphic of the 11 blockchain tenets: