The Private Governance of Identity on the Silk Road

Catalina Goanta

doi:10.3389/fbloc.2020.00004

Abstract

Long before the creation of blockchain platforms, the rise of personal computing, and Internet connectivity brought with it a digital, online dimension of the material world, leading to the socio-technical construct known as “digital identity.” After the online discussion boards and emailing lists of the early 1990s, individuals started socializing via the Internet more predominantly using social networks. One specific type of platform links this online socializing and transacting to blockchain-based spaces: dark web marketplaces. Identified as second-generation cryptocommunities, dark web marketplaces deployed cryptography for the use of pseudonymous identity, for communication, but also currency. This paper explores two questions in this fascinating space: what was the role of identity on the Silk Road, and what governance lessons can be drawn from this illustration for the purpose of applying them to more recent cybercommunities such as Ethereum? The paper is structured as follows. The first part describes the Silk Road and sketches its essential characteristics. The second part looks at how individuals could become platform users on the Silk Road, by analyzing the contractual relationship between the Silk Road and an individual user based on the rights and obligations enshrined in the Silk Road terms of service (ToS). The third part critically reflects on arbitrariness as the main pitfall arising out of the private regulatory framework created by the Silk Road, and contributes to existing narratives surrounding the regulatory nature of code by proposing a code-as-procedure perspective for analyzing this regulatory framework. Part four concludes.

Highlights

The inescapable interest in blockchain technology seen in the past years has ignited a lot of debate surrounding the decentralization of established legal concepts and institutions
The Private Governance of Identity On the Silk Road smart cities (McMillan, 2014; Biswas and Muthukkumarasamy, 2016; Ibba et al, 2017; Jaffe et al, 2017; Rivera et al, 2017; Sharma et al, 2017; Marsal-Llacuna, 2018) or the use of self-sovereign identity systems in development aid [e.g., the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) using blockchain to manage the identity of refugees] (Biometric Technology Today, 2017; Mears, 2018), the privacy issues posed by the use of public blockchains in the management of identity (Zyskind et al, 2015; Zhang et al, 2017; Yang et al, 2018), or the use of decentralization as a means of breaking socio-legal constructs that lead to, for example, global inequality (Freund, 2017; Michaels and Homer, 2017)
The third part critically reflects on arbitrariness as the main pitfall arising out of the private regulatory framework created by the Silk Road and contributes to existing narratives surrounding the regulatory nature of code by proposing a code-as-procedure perspective for analyzing this regulatory framework

Summary

Introduction

The inescapable interest in blockchain technology seen in the past years has ignited a lot of debate surrounding the decentralization of established legal concepts and institutions. This section analyzed and classified the various types of legal rules that can be extracted from the contractual relationship between the Silk Road as a platform and its users, to exemplify the rights and obligations undertaken within this transaction framework.

Results

Conclusion