Blockchanging Trust

Abstract

By cutting transaction costs and streamlining agreements' execution via “smart contracts,” blockchain technology (BT) turns decentralization into an economic advantage and an antidote against politically harsh decisions that can obliterate privacy, freedom, and democracy. Although BT's ethical bottom line is still uncertain, its use can smooth out the trade-off between privacy and convenience, reconciling both. BT can also help reconfigure the compromise between intellectual property rights and the common good, opening more ethical routes to the diffusion of innovation. BT's data security can be translated into straightforward access to information. On the one hand, this signals new inclusion routes for “identityless” and unbanked people, and on the other, it releases society from biased information and fake news providing access to trusted data. BT guarantees contents precision, distributing a consensual tamper-proof “hyperledger” proving transactions' authenticity and data's integrity. As consensus should be plural, BT's decentralization is thought to be a must in ethical terms.