Blockchain Governance Bibliography

What follows is a non-exhaustive kernel bibliography on blockchain governance.

There is no objective inclusion or exclusion criteria. The organizational heuristic was prompted by

Vlad Zamfir

’s publication of Blockchain Governance 101 (BG101). That is when we started building this list. Since then, we have taken the liberty of ascribing sequential numbering to publications that followed and related back to BG101 (even when authors did not do so).

• BG 89 (Finlay) — forks as governance
• […]
• BG 101 (Zamfir) — mapping the field
• BG 102 (CleanApp) — critiquing cartographers
• BG 103 (Zamfir) — self-governance
• BG 104 (Buterin) — immutability as governance
• BG 105 (CleanApp) — int’l law & governance
• BG 106 (Zamfir) — good faith
• BG 107 (Zamfir, Wood, Breitman) — Web3 debate
• BG 108 (Wood v. Zamfir) — on-chain v. off-chain
• BG 109 (CleanApp)— analysis of Wood v. Zamfir
• BG 110 (Zamfir) — crypto law
• BG 111 (Zamfir v. Szabo) — maximalism
• BG 112 (Walch) — decentralization
• BG 113 (Ulrichs) — formal v. informal
• BG 114 (Korhonen, Dogot, Leiter) — bc global governance
• BG 115 (Anuj DG) — immutability fraud
• BG 116 (Danny Ryan) — asymptossification
• […]
• Blockchain Governance 117 (you) — [ ??? ]

Our goal is not to catalog every contribution, but to provide a rough debate map. Each of the links above builds on (and references) a sizable body of related work. Please read these interventions, and their supporting documentation, for yourself.

We recognize the need to index important blockchain governance work published prior to BG101. We also owe a debt of gratitude to existing governance indeces, such as

Max Semenchuk

’s excellent curated bibliographies.

Simultaneously, there’s a clear need to map parallel governance debates playing out in other linguistic traditions. Please help us add learnings from blockchain governance debates outside Anglophony. Comment ↓