Blockchain Papers

Ali Arı

This article develops Registration Regime Theory (RRT) by treating inscription and registration not as passive containers of memory but as infrastructures for governing social time. It distinguishes inscription—the external fixation of an event, claim, relation, or sign on a material or computational support—from registration, the institutional authorization that allows such a trace to produce rights, identities, debts, obligations, classifications, and decisions. The central thesis is that inscription objectifies time, whereas registration authorizes objectified time. On this basis, the article reconstructs a series of overlapping registrational thresholds: durable inscription and archival accumulation; portable documents and rule at a distance; canonical and typographic replication; standardized, transferable financial claims; bureaucratic classification and synchronized administration; digital capture and interoperability; cryptographic ordering; and predictive registration. These thresholds did not singly cause the state, empire, universal religion, capitalism, or the nation-state. They expanded the durability, scale, reproducibility, and temporal reach through which those formations could be institutionalized. The digital transformation intensifies rather than abolishes this history. Blockchain redistributes technical verification and hardens chronological claims about the past, while predictive artificial intelligence converts probabilistic futures into present grounds for intervention. Their convergence places the registrable person between an increasingly persistent past and an increasingly anticipated future. The article consequently redefines sovereignty as the capacity to orchestrate the layers of a registration architecture—production, storage, verification, recognition, interpretation, prediction, enforcement, and contestation—rather than as simple ownership of records. It also theorizes the negative space of registration: imposed non-registration, strategic opacity, erasure, and counter-registration. The concluding framework of temporal justice combines a right to recognition with rights to correction, expiry, opacity, reinvention, and an unpredicted future. RRT thereby offers a non-determinist, historically comparative framework for analyzing how power endures by organizing what may count as socially real across time.

Polina Ignatova, Ekaterina Markovich

Technological innovations are often perceived as something alien, terrifying, and monstrous. Blockchain technology that creates shared “blocks” of information, which are interconnected and verified by the network comes as no exception. Two main features of blockchain (1) the absence of a gatekeeper organisation controlling the data, and (2) the fact that the information is rather hard to corrupt and hack, makes the technology very attractive and versatile. It is also what makes it appear frightening, especially for the traditionally centralised and hierarchical disciplines like law. As there is no one to control the data and the access to it, blockchains open a whole world of new possibilities with cryptocurrencies being one of the most popular examples.Approaching blockchain technologies in the context of J. J. Cohen’s monster theory demonstrates that they can be perceived as modern monsters. Our inability to understand the technology and the way it works makes this particular monster both fearful and desired (thesis 6), and law reacts to the fears that circulate in the society. Thus, blockchain technologies are often banned by law in a similar way as in medieval narratives dragons were banished by saints and heroes. Building on Cohen’s thesis 7, which argues that monsters show how we (mis)interpret our surroundings, this article will employ the historical perspective upon the fear of the monstrous to create a better understanding of the legal policies surrounding blockchains. By comparing current legal decisions concerning blockchain technology with the strategies of dealing with monsters, offered by medieval chronicles and collections of wonders (including William of Malmesbury and William of Newburgh), we will analyse the modern way of controlling monsters – or controlling the fear of them.