As the distributed architecture underpinning the Bitcoin anarcho-capitalist project, blockchain entered the imagination and the vocabulary of many people only recently. But as a largely unregulated phenomenon, it is set to impact the lives of billions of people in ways that may not benefit all, but instead simply line the pockets of a few elites.

Robert Herian is based in the Law School at The Open University. His teaching and research focus on private law, psychoanalysis, social, economic and political philosophy, and cultural theory.

Introduction

Part I Regulating blockchain

1 Blockchain

Interlude I: Supplementing the memory economic: ... Wampum, memex, transcopyright, blockchain ...

2 A regulatory conundrum

3 Regulatory tradition

4 Blockchain the regulator

Interlude II: Regulatory technology: Louis-Sebastien Mercier's tax trunk

PART II Critical perspectives

5 Setting the scene

Interlude III: Anarchic technologies for anarchic economies: the 'yellow trade' of the Yorkshire coiners

6 Blockchain as an ethics of neoliberal political economy

7 The psycho-politics of blockchain

Interlude IV: A dangerous lack of law: man with machine in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano

8 Critical regulation

Index