Blockchain has recently joined a long line of technological innovations that have been characterised as disruptive to, and possibly even subversive of, fundamental legal principles. This article looks behind the hype to examine how blockchain might – or might not – be compatible with established legal and regulatory models. Data protection is discussed as an example of an area of law that some have claimed cannot be reconciled with blockchain. Various other conflicts are also identified and concerns about blockchain are placed in the context of wider historical debates about new technologies vs law.

The history of technologies, not least information technologies, is replete with claims that a particular development will be highly ‘disruptive’ and will render obsolete established legal norms and regulatory frameworks. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration is the enthusiastic reception that cyberlibertarians gave the public Internet in the mid-1990s. At the time, some forecast not merely that specific legal constructs would be challenged, but that nation states would become obsolete. In that debate, the most famous example was the late John Perry-Barlow’s 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’.۱ This included assertions that: “Governments of the Industrial World… You have no sovereignty where we gather…. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, and there is no matter here.” This rallying cry was wildly popular and many early web sites reproduced the full text or at least linked to it. Reports of the death of sovereignty were, however, exaggerated. When asked in 2004 to comment on his revolutionary tract, Barlow responded simply: “We all get older and wiser”. In fact, there has long been evidence that ‘online’ activities are likely to be subject, at least nominally, to more legal rules, and broader regulatory oversight, than comparable ‘offline’ activities.2 Admittedly, new technologies do not always fit easily into existing legislative and regulatory paradigms, and enforcement may be challenging, but lawmakers, regulators, and courts have so far managed to adapt, albeit with a time lag, to each wave of innovation. A recent technological development that is provoking agitated debates, and attracting a lot of media attention, is blockchain. Most of the current hype about blockchain relates to crypto-currencies, especially Bitcoin, and related financial products such as Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). Concerns have been raised that, like the early Internet, blockchain-based financial systems may be unregulated, and possibly even ‘unregulatable’. Less visibly, but probably far more importantly in the long run, a great deal of investment is going into the development of a broad range of blockchain applications in contexts ranging from asset registration (including land) to self-executing (‘smart’) contracts. Notwithstanding widespread confusion about what exactly blockchain is or might become, blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT) have caught the imagination of governments, businesses and private investors, and they are increasingly a focus of attention for legislators and regulators worldwide.