🔲Stances on crypto policy can usually be measured through their alignment with three words: “code is law.” The phrase has become an omnibus in debate, its functions including:

• a literalist reminder of how transactions cannot be altered after recording on a blockchain

• an aspirational mantra for increasing automation and decentralization in blockchain-based systems

• a pithy retort against those who would seek to yolk that movement with regulation

However it’s intended, “code is law” proclaims that the immutable architecture of blockchain-based systems has been, is, and will be what governs activities using those systems. It becomes a premise in the context of those systems being both maintained and built (“governed”) by unknown human actors across the world–no individual or subgroup of whom may be properly accused apart from the whole of “running” the systems.

A conclusion arises that, because there is no intelligible hold of place or person on the controlling end of blockchain-based systems, they theoretically exist beyond sovereign control. In a digital world where machines are the only traceable constant, man has no power. There is no room for his regulations, the constraints they impose on liberties, or the subjective values from which they are born; only clean, crisp code.

That last characterization of “code is law” is considered way too radical in most lawyerly circles. Other versions of the phrase get caught in its shadow. #codeslaw is considered a stance for the naive, the uninducted; something only to be met with a scoff and a shutdown. It is the outsider stance.

Here’s the twist: “code is law” not only originates within the legal world, its creation is credited to hyper-influential internet law scholar Professor Lawrence Lessig who used it as a keystone in his 1999 book, “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.”

At the time, Prof. Lessig was writing about the internet itself steeped in a climate of high regulatory pressure rather like the one condensing around blockchain technology today. Lessig’s observations remain similarly pertinent, but their contours seem to have been weathered away by time.

In the blockchain era, both proponents and detractors of “code is law” encounter a dulled form that promotes schism between those seeking respect for legal rule in the decentralized digital realm and those seeking respect for digital mechanisms in the legal realm, when really the phrase should promote unity among these factions.

“Code is law” does not mean, “because a system has final rules and its governance is dispersed among a collective, it is beyond regulation.”

“Code is law” means, “the final rules and collective governance of a system are its regulation.”

Said differently, more in-line with Lessig’s original intention: the architecture formed by code stems from values and constrains liberties in kindred fashion to man’s law and its regulations. The means may be different, but the causes and effects are the same. It’s not just that code is law; law is also code.

In Lessig’s internet era, the symmetry of law and code took the form of “East Coast Code” and “West Coast Code.” The former was code established by Washington D.C., built in the halls of its Congress and exported through the network of its executive agencies. The latter was code established by Silicon Valley, quibbled about on whiteboards in glass-walled offices then evangelized through patches and protocols.

Both coasts produced controlled systems that empowered and disempowered participants relative to preconceived values and notions:

• the East Coast through its regulation,

• the West Coast through its architecture.

Either had their pros and cons:

• the East Coast encountered difficulty in clearly invoking values because of corruptive interference upon regulations but was able to precisely address uncertainty with its organic, judicial methods of redress;

• the West Coast achieved greater clarity invoking values through the rigid logic demanded by digital architecture but was unable to precisely address uncertainty because of that same rigidity.

Thus, to consider an intersection of the legal world and the digital world would not impose order upon chaos, rather it would observe a dialogue between two living systems of order. “Code is law” does not express rejection or rebellion, it is an invitation to talk.

Can there be such thing as a “West Coast” in the decentralized nebula of the blockchain era? There is architecture present now as there was then; but in this era, development comes from across the world instead of glass houses in The Valley. Without an identifiable governing body, with whom will the East Coast Code converse?

Reflection on the brief history of blockchain technology allows us to find that special someone: a phantom born from the discourse of a collective as it builds and maintains its brave, new world. Consider the Blocksize War chronicled by Jonathan Bier. From 2015 to 2017 the Bitcoin community feuded over whether to allow more transactions to be recorded per block on their blockchain network. “Large blockers” claimed the increase would allow Bitcoin to become more competitive as a means of exchange. “Small blockers” claimed such an increase would make participation in the network prohibitively expensive–only allowing the richest to record transactions–thus ruining the systemic decentralization that the community held so sacred.

The raging war showcased prideful figureheads, multiple splinter-parties jockeying for community favor, and scandals involving impersonators of the legendary Satoshi Nakamoto. Bier’s firsthand account amounts to a tale that competes with any “East Coast” drama.

Still, from all the intrigue and dirty humanity that many #codeslaw espousers insist is beneath their world, the Blocksize War concluded decisively in the small blockers’ favor. From the collective dispersed across all that digital architecture, an ordered system arose with its rainbow of differently-interested factions uniting to make one, momentous, principled decision. The ghost in the machine spoke.

The voice that spoke at the end of the Blocksize War is one of many that may be heard among the various chains and the decisions their collectives make. Their chorus is what stands for the “West Coast Code” of Lessig’s internet era, yet East Coast Coders seem hellbent on deafening their ears to it. This manifests in East Coast enforcement actions and in the legislation they propose. Without respect for the reasoned order that exists within blockchain-based systems, legal imposition has had the net effect of colonizers tracing squares on unknown territories. Truly effective policy will embrace the deeper meaning of “code is law,” knowing that both are born from human intent for the sake of order. 🔲