Post-Decentralization G; Self-Referential Governance and Meta‑Constraint Security-The Security Foundation of Decentralized Systems

Abstract

A decentralized system faces a fundamental governance tension: its governancerules are themselves amendable, which means that the meta‑rules stipulating howrules are modified are also at risk of being revised. Starting from the paradox ofself‑amendment uncovered by legal philosopher Peter Suber, this paper argues thatthis logical dilemma is not a purely philosophical speculation but a structural difficulty that repeatedly arises in the practice of blockchain constitutionalism. Underthe tenet that“code is law,”code‑based rules bear the meta‑governance functionsthat in a constitutional structure ought to be carried by constitutional provisions,yet code logically cannot set an insurmountable boundary for its own amendmentauthority. In response, this paper proposes a layered meta‑constraint security architecture: meta‑constraints are divided into an unmodifiable layer of logical constants, a layer of cognitive virtues formulated through community constitutionalprocedures, and a layer of value homeostasis adjusted through public deliberationand evolution; the trustworthiness of meta‑constraints is anchored in the logicalphysical isolation provided by trusted hardware roots. Through the institutionalization of procedures for identifying and attributing meta‑constraints, this paperdemonstrates how fork‑exit‑based social verification, cognition‑testing through independent auditing, and physical anchoring through multi‑key witness mechanismstogether constitute a mutually independent multi‑layered defense system. By examining the 21‑million‑coin supply cap of Bitcoin, the Ethereum EIP governanceprocess, and the constitutional crisis of The DAO incident as case studies, thispaper reveals the partial instantiation patterns of the three‑tier meta‑constraintarchitecture in existing systems and their failure boundaries. The paper concludesthat the long‑term security of a decentralized system ultimately depends not on theByzantine‑fault‑tolerance strength of its consensus algorithm, but on the completeness of its meta‑constraint architecture–that is, the existence of a set of boundariesthat are hierarchically protected in procedure, isolated and verified in hardware,and socially anchored in consensus, such that the combined cost of breaching themis raised to a level that no actor can afford within the expected life cycle of thesystem.