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My research assistant Daniil Rose and I have prepared an article, Blockchain RegulatorySystems—Conceptual and Operational Challenges, the revised and final version of which is scheduled to be published in 2027 by the Rutgers Computer and Technology Law Journal.
This article has argued, across its several analytical levels, that the common assumption organizing most contemporary blockchain discourse, namely that code can be understood as a "rule" analogous to law, mistakes the object of regulation for something considerably smaller and more tractable than it actually is, and that code is better conceived instead as a layered system, an environment, or an ecology of rule-production, within which the human, and human systemicity more generally, is not so much opposed or obeyed as it is progressively displaced, translated, and in the end only partially recoverable. The Sacher-Torte model developed above gives that displacement a structure rather than leaving it a metaphor: legal meaning, as it descends from statute and intention through compiler, bytecode, opcode, and consensus layer, loses something of its original semantic content at every translation, so that what remains available to human regulators by the time a transaction executes is not command over the system's lower layers, which have by then become a largely autonomous and self-referential language, but only a series of gates, positioned wherever the layered ecology happens to intersect with human legal and political institutions, at which regulators may decide, often belatedly and always incompletely, whether to admit what the system has already produced. The real conflict this article has sought to expose, then, is not the conflict ordinarily staged between the Rule of Law and the Rule of, or by, Code, as though these were two sovereigns contesting a single throne, but a conflict among distinct regulatory ecologies, each organizing meaning, authority, and now, as the discussion of blockchain's temporal architecture has shown, even time itself according to incompatible internal logics, so that the only task remaining to law is the comparatively modest but by no means trivial one of giving normative content to the gates at which those ecologies are compelled to meet.
Two further insights, developed at length above, sharpen that general claim and ought not be allowed to recede into it. The first is that every account of blockchain's purpose and proper governance, including the Sacher-Torte account offered here, is itself a species of interested, oracular speech: a claim, advanced by a party with something to gain, about a technological future that cannot yet be verified, calculated to secure one particular allocation of authority between human and machine under cover of describing a technical state of affairs. That reflexive recognition, borrowed from the broader contest among competing AI governance narratives surveyed elsewhere, requires that this article's own thesis be read not as a neutral description finally capable of settling the Rule of Code debate, but as one more entrant in that same contest, whose persuasiveness lies precisely in how plausibly it asks its readers to accept a particular ordering of human and machine authority as sufficient. The second insight concerns time, and it is in some respects the more fundamental of the two, because it shows that blockchain's most celebrated technical achievement, the production of an agreed, linear succession of validated states among nodes that share no common clock, sovereign, or physical present, is neither a timeless discovery about the nature of succession nor a metaphysical accomplishment to be either celebrated without qualification or dismissed as illusion, but rather an energy-purchased, continuously re-earned, and politically contested choice to enforce one particular and historically specific picture of order: a strictly serial, dialectical, one-block-at-a-time model of succession whose power is inseparable from its narrowness, and which has proven durable enough to survive, apparently intact, even its latest and most exotic proposed revision, the grafting of genuinely non-classical, quantum-entangled representations onto a ledger that still, for all that innovation, permits each new state to be built only out of the single state immediately preceding it. Blockchain, in other words, does not merely organize transactions; it manufactures, out of its own architecture, the very conditions of legitimacy, sequence, and historical truth that it then presents to its participants as discovered rather than made, and it is precisely this quiet substitution of manufactured order for discovered order that both the Sacher-Torte and the temporal analyses of this article have sought to render visible.
None of this, properly understood, counsels retreat from blockchain, nor does it counsel the kind of regulatory enthusiasm that would treat the technology as either a problem to be solved once and for all or a solution requiring no further human attention. Code can automate enforcement with a logical perfection no legal text can match, yet it remains constitutionally incapable of capturing the intent, judgment, and capacity for exception that law, however imperfectly, still embodies; law, conversely, can hold values, fairness, and flexibility within a single institutional frame, yet it moves too slowly, and too self-consciously, to govern a system whose defining achievement is exactly the speed and apparent neutrality of its own self-execution. Blockchain sits, uneasily, at the intersection of these two incommensurable competences, and whether one approaches it as technology, as ideology, or, as this article has preferred, as semiotic practice, it stands as an ongoing experiment in how a community projects value, order, and now even time onto what is, after all, an intangible and entirely constructed artifact; its significance lies not only in the transactions it settles but in the alternative architectures of accountability and collective governance it makes newly thinkable, for better and for worse. Automated, ledgered, sequencing systems of this kind, enriched by the layered languages of code and by their increasingly intimate interpenetration with human decision-making, are here to stay, absent some catastrophe this article does not predict, and the regulatory task is accordingly not to resist that permanence but to take its value seriously while remaining alert to the semiotically complete, and therefore semiotically self-justifying, logic of the virtual spaces it has built.
That alertness matters because the risk blockchain poses is less a function of the tool than of the all-too-human impulse to first build an instrument, then grant it the dignity of autonomous agency, and finally blame the instrument for the predictable consequences of decisions that remain, however many layers of code intervene, recognizably human; a bad worker, as the proverb has it, blames his tools, and the proverb's logic survives the worker's tools becoming self-referential, cryptographically secured, and globally distributed, a survival owed in no small part to the semiotics of internalization and externalization through which human agents project their own agency outward onto the instruments they build and then disclaim it. This is not merely a claim about the nature of symbols and symbolic representation in the abstract; it is a claim about how such representations come to serve, within the specific institutional and cultural setting this article has examined, a properly mythmaking function, converting a contingent, politically achieved, and continuously maintained ordering of authority into something that presents itself to its participants as natural, inevitable, and therefore beyond the reach of ordinary political contestation. Here, finally, one meets the deeper irony this article has traced from its opening pages to its last: that whatever humanity believes itself to be encoding when it builds systems in its own image, meant to represent an idealized version of itself, it will embed in that system, one way or another, the unmistakable markers of its own persistent failure to attain that ideal, because humans remain capable, and then only barely, of regulating themselves, whether through the explicit institutions of law or through the encoded, automated systems that treat discretion and judgment as matters of indifference precisely because humans have delegated those matters away.
Blockchain, understood this way, is less the closing of an era than the opening of another chapter in humanity's long and unfinished effort to govern, rationalize, and give coherent meaning to its own collective life, a chapter that will be written, as this one has been, by interested narrators each staking a competing claim to the authority that successful governance of the technology confers. The test of any account of blockchain's regulatory significance, including the one advanced in these pages, is accordingly not whether it wins the argument it stages, but, more exactingly, what ordering of human and machine authority it quietly asks its readers to accept as sufficient; and if this article has succeeded in anything, it is in making that question, rather than any premature answer to it, the proper starting point for whatever comes next.
The Abstract and Introduction may be accessed here. The full draft may be accessed here. The Draft is available in Chinese (中文版本请见此处) and Spanish (VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL).
Blockchain Regulatory Systems—Conceptual and Operational Challenges
Larry Catá Backer[1], Daniil Rose[2]
Abstract: This article challenges one of the most persistent assumptions in contemporary blockchain discourse, the assumption that code can be understood as a "rule" analogous to law, and argues instead, across a series of interlocking analytical lenses, that code is better conceived as a layered system, an environment, or an ecology of rule-production in which the human, and human systemicity more generally, is progressively displaced rather than simply obeyed or defied. That displacement, the article contends, does not occur all at once or at a single site; it occurs serially, through a stack the article calls the "Sacher-Torte" of blockchain regulation, in which legal meaning descends through compiler, bytecode, opcode, and consensus layers of diminishing human legibility, losing something of its original semantic content at every translation, so that what remains available to human regulators is not dominion over the machine's lower layers but only a series of gates at which they may decide, after the fact and often too late, whether to admit what the system has already produced. The article situates this structural argument within a broader interpretive frame borrowed from recent debates over artificial intelligence governance, in which every account of a given technology's purpose and proper ordering is itself best read as an interested, oracular claim staked by a party with something to gain from the particular allocation of human and machine authority that the account implies; blockchain's own regulatory narratives, including the Rule of Code thesis this article interrogates, are no exception. It extends that argument, further, into the specific question of time, showing that blockchain's celebrated solution to the problem of distributed succession, by which an otherwise leaderless network of asynchronous nodes contrives to agree on a single, linear, hash-chained history, is neither a timeless discovery about the nature of succession nor a metaphysical accomplishment, but an energy-purchased, politically contested, and historically contingent choice to enforce one particular picture of order, a choice so deeply embedded in the technology's architecture that even the most recent proposals to graft genuinely non-classical, quantum-entangled representations onto the ledger leave its strictly serial, dialectical temporality intact rather than displaced. Read together, these arguments reorient the debate between the Rule of Law and the Rule of, or by, Code away from a contest between two neatly opposing sovereigns and toward a more unsettling recognition: that the real conflict is among distinct regulatory ecologies, each organizing meaning, time, and legitimacy according to its own internal logic, and that the task remaining to human regulation is not to choose between these ecologies but to give normative content to the gates, however narrow, at which they are made to meet.
Keywords: blockchain, rule of law, semiotics, systems, regulation, machine code, temporality
I. Introduction.
This article speaks to the interactions between the Rule of Code[3] and the Rule of Law[4] within the virtual spaces filled with automated data storage and sequential transactional mechanisms, and more specifically in its form as blockchain[5]. One may begin by noting a bit of absurdity in this quest, in the ancient sense of the term (from the Latin “absurdus”) suggesting harsh and clashing sounds (to the listener anyway) something and thus without sense from the perspective of expectations of order and structure.[6] Nietzsche famously mocked the English, and English attempts at philosophy, for its obsession with utility, that is for their “modernity.”[7] That obsession has now appeared to ooze into and fill the virtual world, and more specifically, the intelligences with which humans seek to populate that world without much of a thought about the organizing parameters of utility and its limits.[8] The cyberpunks of the 1980s might well have it right when they spoke to cyber anarchy rather than an Olympian ordering, and of a fracturing of the machine and human coding that may reframe the issue of the structural coupling if rules of code and law into something quite different.[9] It might then be useful to take a moment, to consider this obsession and its virtual manifestation for humans and for machines from the perspective of phenomena, of semiotics, language, and collective meaning making.
It has become almost a cliché that modernity[10] that some of the most profoundly interesting and foundational shifts in the management of human collective organization and, more importantly, its rationalization of the surrounding reality, can be projected from out of the smallest and most laterally irrelevant advances. So it might be said of blockchain—as technology, as a means of facilitating the structural coupling of individuals and their collective institutions, and at a fundamental level, as an ideology of managing human collectives and its manifestation of a peculiar and quite specific form of organizing reality.[11] At the same time, that cliché becomes a threat as well as a compulsion/temptation where modernity, having “lost the ideological drive of reason and progress, and confounds itself more and more with the formal play of change” and having been reduced “into a culture of daily events,” now finds that “[e]ven its myths turn against it (technology, once triumphant, is today full of menace).”[12]
The core of the cognitive cage that emerges as blockchain, one manifested in real space through digitized bits of data that are significant[13] to participants and then ordered chronologically, is deceptively simple: the creation of a digital ledger. That digital ledger, as its name implies, is a space in which something is recorded—something of interest or value to those who would expend time and effort on its creation. From the perspective of semiotics, one encounters here the mimesis of a discrete object (temporally and spatially) which acquires signification through its virtual representation, which is then itself made real by its effects beyond the digitized ledger.[14] In the beginning one recorded transactions and developed something like a self-referencing currency (and all currencies whether digital or analog are by definition self-referencing in the sense that their value is a function of collective belief in their value through use).[15] And yet there is nothing to prevent the recording of any collection of bits of data to which one or more providers might attach significance—subject, perhaps, only to the limits if temporality built into the fundamental structures of sequentially ordered streams of transactions and memory.[16]
Nonetheless, that signification is of little value when the self-referencing unit is the autonomous individual.[17] One speaks here to identity, that is to the constitution of an object as other than itself as such, but as the vessel for meaning that is an aggregation of its constituents parts (data) but autonomous of them as its own thing—effectively perhaps something like a machine/process version of “identity” which has been the central semiotic problem of the last century.[18] That act of recording becomes more interesting for the ordering of social relations when such digitized ledgers then acquire collective significance and are distributed across many digitized spaces (computers or other holders of virtual “memory” in mimetic form).[19] Here one encounters not just memory but trust management in blockchain.[20] It follows that one creates, in virtual form, transparency, and trustworthiness of the “memory” recorded in the ledger in the sense that such memories are harder to contaminate or otherwise be tampered with. They might be appended but not overwritten; [21] consequently their existence in virtual time and space is unalterable as such. That inalterability provides a powerful basis for utility—in the sense that it populates the cognitive spaces for which it was created, and it itself becomes an object of consumption, use, negotiation, or judgment, which can then be consumed in the construction of other objects without losing its historical facticity.[22] Those other objects could encompass virtually anything, from rewards and punishments grounded on ledger entries of behaviors, to the accounting for wealth grounded in the meaning, the significance, of both the ledger entry and its deployment.[23]
At the same time, the collectivization of signification of ledger entries acquires an internal collective aspect—and again a means of organizing its cognitive signification, by organizing multiple ledger entries together into “blocks”. The cognitive signification becomes more profound as the internal collective signification manifested in and as the block then is put in motion, creating a cognitive “flow” in and through collections of blocks linked in a chronological “chain” (and here time becomes an element of code, and of cognition).[24] All of this, however, produces a cognitive system that is not self-aware. Something else is necessary—and that something are the “nodes” in the networks that host copies of the ledger in its blocks.[25] Nodes are also objects, but they are objects outside the “chain” of “blocks” around which data is organized through digitized records of whatever object has been selected for such virtualization. In a sense, the nodes were the physical user interface that constituted the members of the collective within which self-referencing systems of ledger entries of data in blocks, temporally chained, could be “activated” by producing consequences or actions (and thus additional blocks along the chain). The nodes are both the guardians and the beneficiaries of the realities created within temporal “block”—“chains” by protecting the integrity of the “past” and providing a consensus-based protocol for validating activation consequences in the form of new blocks along the chain (it need not be so but nodes also mimic the more fundamental ordering ideologies from which they emerge).[26]
It is here that digitalization[27] occurs, through the incorporation of digital technologies to automate tasks, including the retention of data. Nodes are themselves, for the most part, computers or servers—that serve as their physical bodies. These physical bodies then operate through a meta-operating system and more specifically with respect to the blockchain, from software that sets out the operating rules applicable to each node and limiting their actions in communion with all other nodes admitted to the congress of nodes that constitute the blockchain collective. Software is itself a set of human-readable, and sometimes human written,[28] instructions in a programming language, also traditionally devised by humans and for their pleasure (utility), that provides the basis for computers to perform certain tasks with and on available data, the digitization of which is also a product of software coding. Coding, source coding, is itself the process of writing software in human-readable form; it was the way that humans communicate with virtual intelligence (in their hardware bodies), but not necessarily the way that virtual intelligence communicated among themselves. To those ends, virtual intelligence communicates with each other using machine language—a series of binary codes that can be utilized by a computer processor to execute commands, including, eventually, the command to write their own code and execute their own machine language instructions. It also includes object coding (machine-readable output of source code compiler), and executable code (computer operational programs sometimes in the well-known.exe format that are one’s program files). Humans can read source code, but not machine and object coding.[29] Source coding is for programming (at least at the start), and machine coding is for execution (including execution that permits machine coding to undertake its own source coding). Here lies both the independence of rules of code from rules of law—built into the language of these systems that both constitute a regulatory order and erect walls against the projection inward of other regulatory rule orders.[30]
In a sense, then, blockchain involves the alignment of three languages—human-to-human (and with it its own semiotics of meaning making), human to machine language (and with it a transposition of more personal value semiotics translated for machine intelligence), and machine to machine language, the semiotics of which is a function of the possibilities written into its own language. And it is in this alignment of language—and with it, its semiotics and phenomenology of disciplining collective meaning and enforcing command—that one can, at last, speak to the rise of collective legalities beyond that of their traditional manifestation in physical power asserted through action, text, and institution.[31] We focus on two in the context of blockchain—the well-known law of code and the law of regulation. Both embrace the notions of the rule of law to the extent that they are encoded within its language meaning structures, and from there applied in ways that reinforce or at least manifest meaning and values onto regulatory objects. And now one encounters a Sacher-Torte of languages—at least five, across which these three alignments are distributed—dense layers of cake separated by a jelly that serves as the medium of connection between them, and all to produce what appears at first blush to be a straightforward and efficient system.
And it does! The elegance of this form is irresistible. It is democratic and anti-hierarchical in ways that only technology enhanced participation can make possible (at least for those who can afford the technology and the cost of the training in it).[32] It provides an enhanced security against corruption (the limits of which remain to be tested), and it provides an equalizing transparency that protects the immutability of facts—that is of the recording of data that is widely shared and thus much more difficult to “remake” to suit the times or the inclinations of power. Its decentralization provided a virtual pathway to strong tendencies that were already largely visible in the world of human organizational regulation—from a revived federalism in the United States[33], to the rise (more or less) of the principle of subsidiarity in the European Union[34], to selective centralization and decentralization within Chinese Marxist-Leninism[35]. And its efficiencies were unparalleled. It appeared to solve the great challenge of law making—one in which its essence as command (*.exe) was an exogenous projection onto the bodies of those who were to comply.[36] That produced the great procedural jurisprudence of law: to figure out of means of naturalizing the principles of legal text in its subjects and to develop mechanisms for external policing. Blockchain automated the process of regulation and compliance, embedding internalization within the language of its own coding. The languages of programming, then, were normative, regulatory, descriptive, and procedural, creating the subject of compliance and its methodologies simultaneously.
The same technology, in other words, becomes a different governance object depending on who is doing the governing and toward what end. The point recurs wherever a single infrastructure is read simultaneously as an instrument of internal constitutional reform, as a resource in external geopolitical competition, and as a threat whose containment legitimates the authority of whichever actor claims to manage it; recent accounts of artificial intelligence governance make the same move explicit, treating one technology as four distinct governance objects depending on the narrator and the audience addressed.[37]
[1] W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar; Professor of Law and International Affairs, Pennsylvania State University | 239 Lewis Katz Building, University Park, PA 16802. My thanks to Primavera De Filippi and the other participants and organizers of the International Symposium: Blockchain Gov: Present and Future of Block Chain Governance, held 25 September 2025, Panthéon Assas, Université Paris II at which an earlier version of this article was presented, and for the challenging comments and perspectives of Arianna Backer (Symetra).
[2] Pennsylvania State University (BS in Computer Engineering, BS in German, MIA expected 2027 (School of International Affairs)).
[3] Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright, Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code (Harvard University Press, 2018). One must go back a quarter century for the genesis of the term in the context of systems theory and governance. “E very age has its potential regulator, its threat to liberty. . . Ours is the age of cyberspace. It, too, has a regulator. This regulator, too, threatens liberty. . . This regulator is code--the software and hardware that make cyberspace as it is. This code, or architecture, sets the terms on which life in cyberspace is experienced.” Lawrence Lessig on the increasing regulation of cyberspace, Harvard Magazine (January 2000); available [https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html] discussing Lawrence Lessing, Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books, 1999) Any yet what one speaks to here is not code as some sort of equivalent of law, but of systems grounded in the language of code and coded architectures the way that traditional systems were grounded in the language and sensibilities of law and legal architectures.
[4] Cf., Jeremy Waldron, The Rule of Law and Procedural Fairness, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (22 June 2016); available [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rule-of-law/].
[5] See Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (Aug. 21, 2008), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3440802 (defining “blockchain”).
[6] Oxford English Dictionary, absurd, etymology, available [https://www.oed.com/dictionary/absurd_adj?tl=true&tab=etymology]. There is a semiotics to absurdity that will play a role in this article as well. See, e.g., George V. Zito, Toward a Sociology of Heresy, 44 Sociology of Religion 123-130 (1983); Paolo Heritier, Understanding Legal Semiotics, in Research Handbook on Legal Semiotics (Anne Wagner and Sarah Marusek eds, E Elgar, 2023).
[7] See, e.g., Raymond Furness, Nietzsche’s Views of the English and his Concept of a European Community, 17(4) German Life and Letters 319-325 (1964); Jonny Anomaly, Nietzsche’s Critique of Utilitarianism, 29 J. Nietzsche Studies 1-15 (2005).
[8] Cf., Moez Krichen, Meryem Ammi, Alaeddine Mihoub, and Mutiq Almutiq, Blockchain for Modern Applications: A Survey, 22(14) SENSORS 5274 (2022); available [https://doi.org/10.3390/s22145274].
[9] Timothy C. May, The Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto (1988); available [https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/crypto/cypherpunks/may-crypto-manifesto.html]. See, generally, the Cyphernomicon (ver. 0.666, 1994); available [https://cdn.nakamotoinstitute.org/docs/cyphernomicon.txt].
[10] Cf., Peter Wagner, Modernity: Understanding the Present (Polity Press, 2012) (origins and foundation of modernity as the expression of the Enlightenment project made manifest through the combination of structures of human autonomy and technological progress grounded in production as a function of welfare, ibid., chp. 1).
[11] Generally, Pierangelo Blandino, Semiotokens, Algorithms, and Blockchain Networks: New Possible Patterns in Legal Thought, 38 International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 327-362 (2025); essays in Martin Shapiro (ed.); Crypto Crowds (Berghahn Books, 2024).
[12] Jean Baudrillard, Modernity, 11(3) Canadian Journal of Political & Social theory/ Revue canadienne de théorie politique et sociale 63- 72, 72 (1987) (“The prodigious expansion . . . of science and technique, the rational and systematic development of the means of production, their management and organization, marks modernity as the era of productivity” Ibid., p. 66).
[13] Here the term is used in its semiotic sense of privileging a specific understanding, value, character, etc. that is inserted into the observed or constituted object, in this case specific bits of data designated to represent something that as value, the value of which will be measured in its (also constructed) use.
[14] Antero Karvonen et al., Fundamental Concepts of Cognitive Mimetics, 82 Cogn. Syst. Res. 101166 (2023); See generally Jan M. Broekman, Signs In Law - A Source Book: The Semiotics of Law in Legal Education III (Larry Catá Backer ed., 2015).
[15] G. C. M. Teubner, Autopoiesis and Steering: How Politics Profit from the Normative Surplus of Capital, in Autopoiesis and Configuration Theory: New Approaches to Societal Steering 127 (Roeland J. In ’T Veld et al. eds., 1991), http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-94-011-3522-1_11; Niklas Luhmann, Essays on Self-Reference (1990); Larry Catá Backer, Private Actors and Public Governance Beyond the State: The Multinational Corporation, the Financial Stability Board, and the Global Governance Order, 18 Indiana J. Glob. Leg. Stud. 751 (2011).
[16] Cf., Aleida Assmann, Memory, Individual and Collective, in The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis 210-224 (Robert E. Goodlin and Charles Tilly (ed), OUP, 2006); Moritz J. Kleinaltenkamp, The Future Is Now: Non-Linear Temporality in Blockchain Organizing (Spring 2022) (unpublished PhD dissertation, Hertie School) available [https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-hsog/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId/4498/file/Dissertation_Kleinaltenkamp.pdf].
[17] See Jordan Zlatev, Meaning Making from Life to Language: The Semiotic Hierarchy and Phenomenology, 11 Cogn. Semiot. 20180001 (2018); Cf. Rodrigo Antunes Morais & Carlos Miguel Lopes Rosa, Design and Collective Cognition: A Semiotic-Theoretical Framework for Understanding Shared Meanings, 14 Int. J. Des. Creat. Innov. 26 (2026).
[18] See, e.g., Jürgen Straub, Personal and Collective Identity: A Conceptual Analysis, in Identities: Time, Difference, and Boundaries 54-76 (Heidrun Friese (ed), Berghahn Books, 2002) (identity as constructs designating commonality, the specification of which is realized in their “practical relationship to itself and to the world, as well as in the individual members’ relationship to themselves and the world” ibid., 71).
[19] For foundational approaches, see, e.g., Peter J. Dennning, Virtual Memory, 2(3) ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 153 – 189 (1970) ; available https://doi.org/10.1145/356571.356573; for contemporary issues see, e.g., Ciprian Pungilă, Otilia Muntean, Andreea-Rebeca Tonu, BRIDGE: A memory-efficient blockchain-agnostic layer for chain topology representation in heterogeneous architectures Author links open overlay panel, 733 Information Sciences 122911 (25 April 2026); available https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2025.122911.
[20] See, e.g., Kamran Ahmad Awan, Ikram Ud Din, Ahmad Almogren , And Byung Seo-Kim, Blockchain-Based Trust Management for Virtual Entities in the Metaverse: A Model for Avatar and Virtual Organization Interactions, IEEE Access (30 November 2023); available 0.1109/ACCESS.2023.3337806.
[21] Direct overwriting does not occur in a functioning blockchain. Once a block has been validated and added to the chain, altering it would break the cryptographic link to every later block, and the altered copy would be rejected by the other nodes. The ledger is better described as append-only. Errors are not erased but corrected by later entries, so that the original transaction and its correction both remain visible.
That inalterability is nonetheless contingent rather than absolute. An actor controlling a majority of a network’s computing power or stake can rewrite recent history by producing an alternative chain, a so-called “51% attack,” which is costly enough that it is most plausible against smaller networks. The community running a chain can also agree to depart from its recorded history, and the cryptography on which the chain relies rests on hardness assumptions that quantum computing may erode. Both possibilities are taken up in Part V.ii, infra.
[22] Larry Catá Backer, Trust Platforms: The Digitalization of Corporate Governance and the Transformation of Trust in Polycentric Space, 19 Regul. Gov. 806 (2025).
[23] Consider Chinese social credit systems in that respect. See, e.g. Chuncheng Liu, Multiple Social Credit Systems in China, 21(1) Economic Sociology 22-32 (2019.,
[24] See Larry Catá Backer, The Soulful Machine, the Virtual Person, and the “Human” Condition: An Encounter with Jan M. Broekman, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversion (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023), 37 Int. J. Semiot. Law - Rev. Int. Sémiot. Jurid. 969 (2024); 8 Jan M. Broekman, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversion (2023), https://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-031-23001-1; Niklas Luhmann, Sign as Form, in Problems of Form 46 (Dirk Baecker ed., 1999), https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781503617698-005/html; Vladislav Valentinov, Wiener and Luhmann on Feedback: From Complexity to Sustainability, 46 Kybernetes 386 (2017).
[25] Not every node serves this purpose, that is of hosting copies of the ledger. There are 3 types of nodes now in use. Full nodes: store the entire blockchain history and validate all transactions; light nodes: store only partial data and rely on full nodes for verification; Mining nodes: propose & add new blocks (proof of work/stake comes into play here).
[26] Built around hash coding—digital fingerprint of input data sets.,
[27] J. Scott Brennen & Daniel Kreiss, Digitalization, in The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy 1 (2016), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect111.
[28] A caveat here: most blockchain software is human written; the protocols (Bitcoin Core/Ethereum, Solana) and languages (Solidity, Rust) were all designed/implemented by humans. As such one can indeed assume the very human foundation of blockchain. However, there are already parts of the ecosystem that are AI-assisted – smart contract templates, formal verification & compilers -- machine-checked code to prove security properties etc.)
[29] In rough order of declining human legibility: (1) source code (e.g., Python, Solidity, Java); (2) assembly code (e.g., MOV, ADD), which trained humans can read with effort; (3) bytecode for virtual machines (e.g., JVM or EVM bytecode); (4) machine code, the binary instructions of a processor’s instruction set; (5) microcode, through which some processors implement their own instructions; and (6) hardware description languages (e.g., Verilog, VHDL), which describe the circuits themselves and are compiled into silicon at design time rather than executed at run time. Part V, infra, consolidates these into five layers.
[30] Georg Trogemann, Code und Maschine, in Code: Zwischen Operation und Narration 41 (Andrea Gleiniger & Georg Vrachliotis eds., 2012), https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783034609333.41/html; Karen Yeung, Algorithmic Regulation: A Critical Interrogation, 12 Regul. Gov. 505 (2018).
[31] Jan M. Broekman & Larry Catá Backer, Lawyers Making Meaning: The Semiotics of Law in Legal Education II 93 (2013).
[32] See, e.g., Silvia Semenzin, ‘Blockchain for good’: Exploring the notion of social good inside the blockchain scene, 10(2) Big Data & Society (2023); available [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/20539517231205479]; Melinda Dooley and Anna Comas-Quinn, Access to Technology and Social Justice, in Technology-Mediated Language Teaching: From Social Justice to Artificial Intelligence (Javier Muñoz -Basols, Maria Fuertes Gutiérrez, and Luis Cerezo, Luis eds., Multilingual Matters, 2025) 21-42
[33] Karl Kössler, Federalism, in Constitutional Interpretation 201 (Sujit Choudhry, Catherine O’Regan, & Carlos Bernal-Pulido eds., 2025), https://www.elgaronline.com/view/book/9781800371743/chapter10.xml; See also Eugénie Brouillet & Tom Mullen, Constitutional Jurisprudence on Federalism and Devolution in UK and Canada, in Constitutional Politics and the Territorial Question in Canada and the United Kingdom 47 (Michael Keating & Guy Laforest eds., 2018), http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-319-58074-6_3.
[34] Carlo Panara, Subsidiarity v. Autonomy in the EU, 28 Eur. Public Law (2022), https://kluwerlawonline.com/api/Product/CitationPDFURL?file=Journals\EURO\EURO2022014.pdf.
[35] Franklin Allen et al., Centralization or Decentralization? The Evolution of State-Ownership in China (Oct. 20, 2024), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=4283197.
[36] Michel Foucault, Governmentality in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality 87-104 (Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds), (University of Chicago Press, 1991); generally Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979 (Picador , 2010); Cf., Lauren B. Edelman, Overlapping Fields and Constructed Legalities: The Endogeneity of Law, in Private Equity, Corporate Governance and the Dynamics of Capital Market Regulation 55-90 (Justin O’Brien ed, Imperial College Press, 2007).
[37] Larry Catá Backer, Lecture Seven: AI Narratives and the Future of AI–Human Regulatory Structures (unpublished course lecture materials, Pennsylvania State University, 2026) (on file with author).
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