Digital Ethics and the Blockchain

Dan Blum
ISACA, Volume 2, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Integrity and Transparency

Integrity and transparency are core values for delivering trust to prosperous markets. Blockchains can provide immutable land title records to improve property rights and growth in small economies, such as Honduras.6 In smart power grids, blockchain-enabled meters can replace inefficient centralized record-keeping systems for transparent energy trading. Businesses can keep transparent records for product provenance, production, distribution and sales. Forward-thinking governments are exploring use cases through which transparent, immutable blockchains could facilitate a lighter, more effective regulatory touch to holding industry accountable.

However, trade secrets and personal information should not be published openly on blockchains. Blockchain miners may reorder transactions to increase fees or delay certain business processes at the expense of others. Architects must leaven accountability and transparency with confidentiality and privacy. Developers (or regulators) should sometimes add a human touch to smart contracts to avoid rigid systems operating without any consumer safeguards.

The info is here.

The Ethics of Contentious Hard Forks in Blockchain Networks With Fixed Features

Tae Wan Kim and Ariel Zetlin-Jones
Front. Blockchain, 28 August 2019
https://doi.org/10.3389/fbloc.2019.00009

An advantage of blockchain protocols is that a decentralized community of users may each update and maintain a public ledger without the need for a trusted third party. Such modifications introduce important economic and ethical considerations that we believe have not been considered among the community of blockchain developers. We clarify the problem and provide one implementable ethical framework that such developers could use to determine which aspects should be immutable and which should not.

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3. A Normative Framework for Blockchain Design With Fixed Features

Which features of a blockchain protocol should or should not be alterable? To answer this question, we need a normative framework. Our framework is twofold: the substantive and the procedural. The substantive consists of two ethical principles: The generalization principle and the utility-enhancement principle. The procedural has three principles: publicity, revision and appeals, and regulation. All the principles are necessary conditions. The procedural principles help to collectively examine whether any application of the two substantive principles are reasonable. The set of the five principles as a whole is in line with the broadly Kantian deontological approach to justice and democracy (Kant, 1785). In particular, we are partly indebted to Daniels and Sabin (2002) procedural approach to fair allocations of limited resources. Yet, our framework is different from theirs in several ways: the particular context we deal with is different, we replace the controversial “relevance” condition with our own representation of the Kantian generalization principle, and we add the utility-maximization principle. Although we do not offer a fully fledged normative analysis of the given issue, we propose a possible normative framework for cryptocurrency communities.

Beyond Crypto — Blockchain Ethics

Jessie Smith
hackernoon.com
Originally posted February 4, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

At its roots, blockchain is an entirely decentralized, non-governed transactional system. It is run through many nodes that all together, result in a blockchain network. Each network contains a ledger. This ledger acts as the source of truth; it stores all of the transactions that have ever happened on the network. Similar to how a bank will store a user’s withdrawal and deposit transactions, a blockchain ledger will store every transaction that has occurred on a network. The ledger is publicly available to all of the nodes in the network.

Bitcoin miners can run their own nodes (computer hardware) in hopes of obtaining a bitcoin through the combination of processing power and a little bit of luck. The difference between a bank’s ledger and a blockchain ledger is that a bank can make changes to their ledger at any point in time, since they hold all of the power. A blockchain ledger on the other hand doesn’t belong to any central entity. It is accessible and owned by every node in the network, and is entirely immutable.

Without a central governing entity over a network, every transaction needs to be verified by a majority of the nodes. Transactions can include transferring cryptocurrency between two people, reversing old transactions, spending coins, and even blocking miners from using their own nodes. For example, if someone wanted to transfer their bitcoins to someone else, they would need their transaction to be verified by at least half of all the nodes in a network.

The info is here.