key: cord-0656989-xksp9wv8
authors: Li, Zihao; Xu, Hao; Fang, Yang; Zhao, Boyuan; Zhang, Lei
title: Recordism: A social-scientific prospect of blockchain from social, legal, financial, and technological perspectives
date: 2022-04-02
journal: nan
DOI: nan
sha: d318a134824332879734482f0c7061098e432503
doc_id: 656989
cord_uid: xksp9wv8

Blockchain has the potential to reform the architecture of cyberspace and transform the storage, circulation and exchange of information through decentralization, transparency and de-identification. Meaning that ordinary participants can become traders, miners, retailers, and customers simultaneously, breaking the barriers and reducing the information gap between participants in the community, contributing to the futuristic metaverse with an open progressive and equal ideology. Such information transformation empowered by blockchain also profoundly impacts our methodological cognition, legal governance on cyberspace and financial and technological development. This study explores the main question: what are the implications of the blockchain-driven information revolution for society and social sciences? In order to answer this main question, this paper chooses four perspectives, which are methodological, legal, financial and technical. By analysis of these four perspectives, this paper is expected to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the blockchain-driven impact on society, social sciences, and technology to contribute to current scholarships. Additionally, regarding blockchain as an innovative methodological cognition, it grows on top of other technologies while helping advance other technologies. This paper concludes that although there are few frictions between blockchain and current social architecture, blockchain is so much more than the technology itself, that can be a representative of the community, acting as the source of trust, watcher of governance, law enforcer for virtual activities, and an incubator for future technologies.

The past few years have ushered in an enormous shift of digitization in our daily life, especially with the widespread of COVID-19. In the context of less in-person interaction and panic of the pandemic, the trust among individuals and society are more fragile than ever (Bootsma and Ferguson, 2007) . However, with the advent of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) (Underwood, 2016) , a.k.a., blockchain, it provides us with a cryptography-based trust mechanism. Due to its unique framework and mechanism, blockchain reforms cyberspace and transforms the storage, circulation and exchange of information through decentralization, transparency and pseudonymization (Tschorsch and Scheuermann, 2015) . These features deeply influence society from a centralized social world to a brave decentralized world. Such a decentralization mechanism through technology shakes the foundation of society, i.e., trust, where all the trust are secured by every one of us rather than any authority we know from reality. Therefore, the information transformation empowered by blockchain also have a profound impact on our methodological cognition, legal governance on cyberspace and financial and technological development (Sarmah, 2018) .

The first shift enabled by blockchain is methodological cognition. Blockchaindriven information revolution refreshes the cognition of the source of governance in the society and challenges the traditional centralized source of governance. By contrast, a blockchain-based framework provides a decentralized source of governance where anyone could be a part of the source to establish trust and governance. More importantly, if blockchain is viewed from a methodological perspective, it reshapes the world with its design philosophy. Blockchain can act as a panoptical instrument to boost the self-discipline of individuals. On the other hand, the governor is also restrained from abusing their power as any action will be recorded on the chain and be transparent to everyone (Hassan and De Filippi, 2017; Balázs, 2021; Shi, 2020) . Therefore, the blockchain-driven information revolution realigns the balance between individual and government. It may also change society where the source of power is ultimately bottom-up and no information asymmetry. This paper argues that such information transformation could lead to the new methodological cognition, called "recordism" (the term for the prescribed idea of attributing the significance of recording elements of individuals).

Secondly, the blockchain-enabled information revolution has a great influence on the legal governance of cyberspace (Hassan and De Filippi, 2017; Balázs, 2021) . Because of the decentralization of blockchain framework, trust among individuals and cyberspace is re-established through cryptography, which also alters the foundation of legislation (De Filippi and Wright, 2018) . Accordingly, there has been a corresponding shift in legal regulation (from the single regulatory body to multiple regulatory bodies) and changes in the approaches and methods to legal research (code as law). Furthermore, blockchain refreshes many legal notions (e.g. trust, transparency etc.), the forms of legislation (e.g. machine-readable Legislation), and alters the form of electronic evidence and the legal executions (e.g. the legal execution issues of data protection law) (Finck, 2018) . Apart from that, if blockchain is viewed as instrumentality from a philosophical perspective, a blockchain-based system has provided us with a new view of the law, that we make law as de-facto the product of consensuses and keep it to ourselves, independently. To further experience the magic of blockchain-law relationship, there is a vision from us that the blockchain native law lives longer than the community who made it especially in the private sector, as it is maintained, modified lively by the contemporary groups of stakeholders, and long live the blockchain native law.

Thirdly, the blockchain-enabled information revolution also enables many new applications in the business and financial area (Underwood, 2016; Tschorsch and Scheuermann, 2015) . As the market of bitcoin, the forerunner of blockchain application mined its genesis block in 2008 (Nakamoto, 2008) , keep growing in a formidable fashion, it has transformed the finance market and challenged the old world of centralization. However, bitcoin does not unleash the full power of blockchain, as the blockchain means so much more than just cryptocurrency (Tschorsch and Scheuermann, 2015) , which was already an earth-breaking application from the decentralization idea. Meanwhile, in the area of business and finance, blockchain brings more revolutionary changes (Shi, 2020) . For example, smart contract powered by blockchain could improve the efficiency of the financial market and optimize corporate governance. Also, the various central bank starting to establish digital currencies is another example to show the influence of blockchain on the financial sector (Cunha et al., 2021) .

Except for these already shown impacts of blockchain on society, we are expected to see blockchain deepening its impact in our day-to-day business, the way we think and the principle we trust. In fact, philosophy has predicted the world with the tools of similar functionality, in Foucault's work (Foucault, 1977) , namely the panopticon theory 1 . When the tool has finally become available to the general public, we are excited to describe the instrumentality of blockchain and how it widens our path to power and self-discipline.

Blockchain not only has a great impact on society, but also demonstrates a great potential in combination with other technologies if it is regarded as an innovative methodological cognition (Xu et al., 2020) . For example, in the era of Big Data (Hassani et al., 2018) , blockchain can increase the size of big data and improve its security and value by structuring and preparing it for big data analytics. The focus of blockchain is on data storage, while big data is concentrated on data analyses and forecasts from the huge amount of data. Through the combination of both, data can be gathered and authenticated on the blockchain by large corporations, thereby adding value to the dataset and enterprises. Apart from that, the combination of blockchain and other technologies can unleash the greater potential of diverse other technologies and blockchain itself. For example, the combination of functional consensus and blockchain could make blockchain more environmental-friendly, and the extra thermal energy generated by the blockchain can be used as part of the room heating system. Also the conjecture of combination between revolutionary storage medium (e.g. biological genetic material, including DNA and RNA) and blockchain could provide new solutions to distributed storage and data handling.

Based on the above introduction, therefore, this paper focuses on two main research questions: (i) what are the implications of the blockchain-driven information revolution for the social sciences? (ii) how should the impact be positively harnessed by society and social sciences? In order to answer these two research questions, this paper mainly choose four perspectives, which are methodological, legal, financial and technical. By analysing these four perspectives, this paper is expected to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the blockchaindriven impact on society and social sciences to contribute to current scholarships.

The paper is structured as follows: a brief introduction to the definition of blockchain and its features that could greatly impact society and social sciences is presented. Then the paper investigates the details of how blockchain as a novel methodology and instrumentality transforms to the concept of the source of power, the discipline and the information inequality. Following that, the legal implications from the blockchain-driven information revolution will be discussed regarding theoretical (e.g. basic notion of trust, transparency) and practical impacts (electronic evidence, privacy and data protection). In addition to law, blockchain's financial and economic envisioning is discussed from both corporate governance and central bank and digital currencies. Lastly, the paper analyzes the potentials of blockchain-enabled scenarios with other technology from the scope of Big Data, functional consensus to futuristic biological genetic material.

2 What is the blockchain?

As for the terms 'blockchain', it is an old concept of chaining data together proposed from mid-1980s (Shi, 2020) . Now it appears to be the pillar of booming cryptocurrency technology, as it enables a trustless, decentralized and tamper-proof ledger (Nakamoto, 2008) . As its name suggested, the data are stored in the form factor of blocks (Nakamoto, 2008) , and then chained by the previous block's hash to ensure data integrity and security. Hence the later block can locate itself from the current block's hash value, which is a unique identifier based on the content in the block. In most cases, such distributed manner and consistency of blockchain is decided by consensus protocols, a.k.a., consensus algorithms, under which data processing and storage formation is embedded when each node runs.

Unlike the traditional centralized system, trust in the blockchain system is established through cryptography (Nakamoto, 2008) , and the blockchain can be roughly divided into public chains and private chains based on their access settings. In the case of a public chain, anyone is free to join and participate in the core activities of the blockchain network. Therefore, in the context of the public chain, blockchain allows any user to store a local copy of the blockchain and propose new blocks, which lay down the foundation for a trustless environment.

Another most appealing aspect of blockchain technology is the degree of transparency that it can provide (Shi, 2020) . From the design philosophy, blockchain is designed as a transparent framework in which anyone can join the network (especially in the public chain) and therefore, can see all information on the chain. In Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) mechanism, data is grouped into each block and bonded with the existing blocks through hash check and consensus algorithm. The data on the chain include different metadata, for instance, the hash of all transactions contained in the block, a timestamp and a hash of the previous block. Such hash-based cryptographic chain makes the records traceable and appendedonly characteristics and increases transparency and accountability. Through the traceability of information, blockchain could safeguard the transparency that nothing is unduly modified without recording the changes and, as a result, everything is transparent. Additionally, blockchain could enable self-tamper-proof and self-authentication applications (Nakamoto, 2008; Shi, 2020) . Due to every block being linked and verified through the hash algorithm, data integrity and security can be guaranteed. If necessary, the blockchain network could trace back to the history transaction without any third parties. Therefore, blockchain-based applications can achieve self-tamper-proof and self-authentication.

Blockchain has shaped the recording of humanity, with a new world that no records can be easily altered, erased, or disguised in every single transaction of blockchain participants. In the traditional thinking of power, information asymmetry can be regarded as one of the most important sources of power (Lightfoot and Wisniewski, 2014) , which people are classified based on their disclosure of information. The blockchain-driven information revolution has transformed it permanently, as the transparency opens up all possibilities for ordinary participants to outlook the society with no gaps or asymmetry, stepping forward from the paper-based medium and beyond the scope of the Internet, where the information is still held by a minority of users (Beshiri and Susuri, 2019) . The origin of the panoptic tower, which was first proposed as a prison model, (Foucault, 1977; Bentham and Božovič, 1995) provides analytical thinking of the utopia that everyone is watched by a surreal tower that knows all secrets of the member, which in fact, is not far away from daily political practice in a surveillance state. The blockchain can also regulate individuals, just like any centralized government. The panoptic tower is represented by the governors of blockchain, which see through the identities of blockchain network users and enforce the order based on their data. The blockchain has been given the instrumental way of power in terms of philosophy. The panoptic model can be resurrected to the reality, essentially helping develop the sophisticated cryptographically-safe panoptical instrument for everyone without tampering the much-concerned privacy, human rights, and freedom.

A panoptical instrument for personal behaviors is the tool to reach a society with better order, discipline, honesty and reality. During the progress of recording more behaviors on the blockchain, for instance, the daily transactions and interactions with civil services, commercial transactions, juries records, records of lawsuits, healthcare records, etc., the value carried by blockchain increases, and the enforcement of social order can be greatly eased. The transparency of personal data in certain fields related to the governor provides an opportunity to enrich the concept of surveillance (Lightfoot and Wisniewski, 2014) , discipline, and punishment (Foucault, 1977) . Meanwhile, being gazed by authority, individuals are motivated to self-discipline and behave responsively to society and community, embracing the new reality of transparent society.

On the other hand, blockchain also protects the user against the government. Because the governor is disciplined by all transparent records accumulated in history, refrain them from touching any individuals in the regime of blockchain social practice, as any actions against individuals will be seen on the blockchain by all communities. Therefore, it forms a balance between individuals and the governments. One does not want to leave the evidence of inappropriate records nor weaken the power by leaving bad records on actions to individuals. The longer the record exists within the community, reputations and deterrence are as strong as the record itself. It leaves us an open opportunity if the governances can be originated from the record rather than the political quorum of representatives. Whoever vows to provide the community with civil services shall commit to protecting records, as it is the source of power without any political interests.

The shift of power from the governing body to the records held by blockchain transforms the whole society. It reforms the community from the bottom to the top and reduces the information gap between them (Hassan and De Filippi, 2017) , which later will result in a reduced classes gap. New ethics emerges when the recordism populates the space and time of the society and lead to the new scale of power concentration, as there is no other reason to stop concentrating the power if the power is also gazed by the public and recorded in the public visible medium, i.e., Blockchain. Such concentration is a revelation of the new democracy that settles the dispute in no time.

Thanks to the nature of the distributed ledger, blockchain provides a new scope of power regulation. By recording the power in action, blockchain improvises the power in both the past and the future (auditing the enacted actions from the past and supervising the future legislation). The power also benefits from the records of all individuals that self-regulating themselves thanks to the transparency of records. There is no comparable feature in history that provides such functionality binding to the record in every individual and every action. The theory of recordism is becoming the principle of society in a foreseeable time, no matter how the adoption of blockchain is realized. In fact, the modern world has long been an informationbased society, but blockchain provides a clearer direction to freedom and democracy where privacy, trust and transparency can be preserved by design, embedded in the infrastructure of society .

The advent of blockchain alters the cyber framework and transforms information storage, circulation and exchange through decentralization, transparency and pseudonymization. This transformation has accordingly posed new opportunities and challenges to how law normally regulates online information-related areas. This section will discuss the key question of the impact of the blockchain-enabled information revolution on the law. It will analyze the theoretical impact from blockchain to law, including the cyber law theory, the foundation of trust and online transparency from a data protection perspective. From a practical side, it analyses the blockchain-based machine-readable legislation, the impact of blockchain-based electronic evidence systems and, most importantly, the influence of blockchain on data protection law.

As Lawrence Lessig put forward in his book Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, the regulation of the Internet is not only about the legislation but also include social norms, market forces and particularly the architecture, which is so-called "pathetic dot theory" (Lessig, 2006) . In the pre-Internet era, the world was normally regulated and affected by four main factors: legislations are enacted by the government to regulate behaviors directly; social norms are shaped by community gradually; market regulates rational individuals and architecture subtly influences behavior (Lessig, 2006) . This phenomenon has been deepened in the Internet age. Online giants, as an intermediary, has directly influenced users' behavior. They can set rules, code of conduct and even enforce penalties. This is because architecture, the coder, as a kind of way that shapes both the physical and digital worlds are, easily influences the users' behavior and choice by default.

The emergence of blockchain technology presents new opportunities and challenges (Sun et al., 2019) . On the one hand, the blockchain-based mechanism can increase the legal regulation by default, which means that code can be a kind of manner to achieve legal objectives. On the other hand, a blockchain-based legal system causes certain problems as traditionally, the law is woven by natural language rather than machine-readable code. It leads to the issues of how to translate the legal language to machine-readable code, which contains the spirit of the law in a less flexible context (De Filippi and Wright, 2018) 

From Lessig's theory, the answer to the machine is the machine. In other words, 'the best way to regulate a code-based system is through code itself' (De Filippi and Wright, 2018) . In the context of a blockchain-based legal system, it can indeed set up a new framework of code-based regulation to regulate people, companies, and machines. Through blockchain technology and relevant smart contract, legal rules can be interpreted simply as machine-readable rules that could be automatically executed by architecture. To this extent, code-based technical rules could achieve the legal function and play the same role as legislation. In the same vein, computer code not only can be a complement to law, but also it can be another form of law in cyberspace. Filippi and Hassan describe this tendency as from 'code is law' 3 to 'code as law' 4 (Hassan and De Filippi, 2017).

In the traditional world, trust among individuals, entities and government is normally established and maintained by law. One of the important reasons law can maintain trust is that legislation represents the consensus that citizens have reached in the democratic mechanism . Legislation is endorsed by the trust and trustworthiness of the state. However, when it comes to cyberspace, legislation cannot establish trust as effectively as it does in the physical world. Especially, the ongoing COVID pandemic has brought again the complicated trust dilemma between citizens, government, large private entities and emerging technologies. People may always ask similar questions: can we trust the online news regarding the pandemic? Can we trust the man who said he is vaccinated and does not wear facial masks? Can we trust the COVID contact tracing app that does not leak users' sensitive data to third parties, although the government developed the app? Those are all emerging but long-standing issues. Generally, if people want to trust something or someone, there should be multiple trust sources to prove one fact. People, for example, can listen to the public service broadcaster, scientists, friends or online gossip networks for information on vaccines and masks. However, the internet and digital technologies have broken this balance.

On the internet, multiple news sources are emerging every day, but users cannot distinguish the truth. Many transactions are conducted without authenticity, as Sztompka and Balázs argue that we normally rely on communal trust, public trust and private trust to establish the trust before the Internet era. However, these three important trust infrastructures are becoming unreliable in the online environment (Sztompka, 1998) . For example, the familiarity that consists of ethnic or religious relations, the community with shared location or shared past is becoming unreliable to establish the communal trust (Balázs, 2021) . By the same token, public trust infrastructures such as public education, public service media and public press are challenged and undermined by a flow of online key opinion leaders (KOL) and online news platforms. Regarding the private trust infrastructures, it often establishes the trust through their services or commodities on the market. The independent entities, for example, banks, insurance companies and other independent companies, establish trust for a service fee. However, with the emergence of Internet giants, few oligarchies occurred. Because of the prominence and monopoly in the industry, if the trust could be established remain doubtful. 5 (BBC, 2021) However, blockchain and similar systems create a restrictive and prescriptive technical environment that establishes trust through embedded traceability.

Without the endorsement of a third party or state, blockchain also can establish trust among individuals. Such trust is not built from legislation but from the cryptography and architecture of blockchain. With such cryptography-based trust, blockchain can act as a complement to law to establish trust that is embedded in cyberspace by design. Blockchain allows any user to store a local copy of the blockchain and propose new blocks, which lay the foundation for a trustless environment. In contrast, nowadays, trust is built in a trusted third party. In the physical world, trust is realized through personal reputation, social norms or government endorsement, for instance, the legislations and contract (Hoelting, 2017) . For example, the reason why clients trust their bank is that their bank as a legitimate organization is not worthwhile to harm clients' interests (Balázs, 2021) . More importantly, such trust is also built partially on the previous experience and mostly based on the recourses when something bad happens. Such recourses include immediate response and guidance, regulatory intervention, and private legal action. However, legal compliance would generate expensive transaction costs from a law and economic perspective when both parties are strangers. Similarly, in cyberspace, users need an online intermediary to establish the trust to trade. However, such centralized architecture causes various issues regarding the online gatekeepers, including data privacy, anti-competition etc. By contrast, blockchain can overturn the traditional architecture and redefine online trust by design. This a trustless environment can be established through three overlapping dimensions in the blockchain: users, nodes and miners.

In a permissionless blockchain, for example, the Bitcoin system can allow anyone to generate a public, private key pair and a Bitcoin address through open-source software. The software broadcasts the users' transactions over the network, and miners will incorporate the transactions into blocks. Meanwhile, anyone, including users themselves, can be a node via relevant software and store the blockchain archive. Nodes store a local copy of the whole chain. Full nodes store a complete copy of the chain, and the light nodes will only store the partial record to verify transactions. Nodes will be connected and maintained with each other through a P2P network. It also checks the previous transactions to ensure the current transaction is valid. After the new block is valid, a node will add it into the copy of the chain and broadcast it to the whole network. Through this mechanism, the whole procedure of the transaction will be recorded in a decentralized manner. Miner works to distribute the transactions into a block and broadcast blocks across the chain while rewarding with a new cryptocurrency, for instance, Bitcoin. Of course, such distributed manner and consistency of blockchain is decided by consensus protocols under which the rules are embedded when each node runs.

Because the records on the blockchain cannot be duplicated, manipulated or faked, it increased visibility in every user. Such immutable and timestamped records of transactions endow blockchain with the ability to promote trust through each other because of the 'endorsement of code.' Therefore, blockchain can establish trust without third parties in cyberspace since all transactions are verified and recorded across the whole network.

One of the most appealing aspects of blockchain technology is the degree of transparency that it can provide. From the design philosophy, blockchain is designed as a transparent framework in which anyone can join the network (especially in the public chain) and therefore, can see all information on the chain. As discussed early, such hash-based cryptographic chain makes the chain traceable and appended-only characteristics and increases the whole transparency and accountability.

However, as some scholars argue, the transparency that blockchain could provide is conditional (Filippi, 2016) . To some extent, it scarifies the user's privacy to achieve transparency, although users' data are encrypted by asymmetric cryptology. Indeed, some degree of sacrifice of privacy in the blockchain is unavoidable, allowing the network to reach a decentralized consensus. However, such a sacrifice of privacy can be limited only to the blockchain's basic layer. For instance, just like the Internet framework, there are multiple layers to transfer data. In the blockchain, the additional layer of encryption and obfuscation also can be built to conceal personal data (Finck, 2018) . Furthermore, permissionless blockchains are often more public, permissioned ledgers are frequently more specific and privacyfriendly. These two forms also can be hybrid. When the actions of others need to be overseen and verified, the chain can be designed as a permissionless ledger so every user can verify the transaction. When parties want to have a degree of autonomy, for example, making the smart contract, then the chain can be designed as a permissioned ledger.

Therefore, some scholars argue that it is better to describe blockchain as a type of ideology rather than a single technology (Finck, 2018) . Trust in the world is achieved through cryptography rather than institutions or third parties. However, currently the convergence between law and distributed ledgers is lacking. For example, to what extent should the transparency or accountability of these concepts stipulated in our constitution be translated or transplanted to the context where the law is expressed and enforced through code? By the same token, is the concept of transparency in the technology field equal to the legal one? Therefore, we should scrutinize both law and technology to see if the concept of transparency in law is equal in technology, particularly in the blockchain.

Transparency, as required by General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Voigt and von dem Bussche, 2017) 6 , is one of the key elements in protecting users' data privacy rights as only if the data subject know who is processing their data for which purpose, they could exercise their data privacy rights. According to the Recital 58 of GDPR, the principle of transparency requires that "any information addressed to the public or to the data subject be concise, easily accessible and easy to understand, and that clear and plain language and, additionally, where appropriate, visualization can be used." Because, in EU data protection law, transparency is the ground of users' rights to information and access to personal data (Art. 13 and Art. 14). Data subject needs such transparency to identify the data controller/processor to exercise their data rights. Therefore, the transparency in GDPR implies that any data related to the data subject should be (i) concise, (ii) easily accessible and easy to understand, and (iii) that clear and plain language, (iv) additionally, where appropriate, visualization can be used (Voigt and von dem Bussche, 2017) . From this perspective, blockchain may be hard to achieve legal obligations. Because it deploys a decentralized framework, to the most extent, it is hard to distinguish the role of data controllers, processors and even users. This point will be discussed further in the following section regarding blockchain and GDPR.

From another angle, transparency in GDPR also indicates that data subject should be aware of certain risks regarding their personal data processing (Voigt and von dem Bussche, 2017) . It connects the principle of transparency to the principle of accountability. It obliges the data controller to demonstrate that personal data is processed transparently. If the data subject anticipates any potential risks, they could withdraw their consent at any time. According to Article. 29 Working Party (hereinafter: Art. 29 WP), the concept of transparency is quite user-centric rather than legalistic (Article 29 Working Party, 2016). From this perspective, blockchain-based technologies could assist data protection law to achieve its goal. Since blockchain is designed as a transparent and decentralized mechanism, every user and node could be involved in data transactions. Therefore, data subject on the chain can see how their personal data are used and processed.

The idea of machine-readable legislation is to replace rules written in a legal language with computer code to achieve legal regulation in cyberspace (Micheler and Whaley, 2020) . Unlike the traditional legislations, machine-readable rules can directly alter the environmental architectures to enforce the law. Legislators could state exactly which behavior is forbidden or encouraged to shape cyberspace without extra work. If laws need to be modified or adapted as social development, legislators can also adapt legislation quickly through machine-readable laws and implement them rapidly in cyberspace. Meanwhile, because no intermediaries are needed, execution costs will be reduced. The efficiency of execution will also be increased thanks to mathematical consensus algorithms instead of bureaucratic mechanisms.

Represented by smart contracts, blockchain technology has the potential to enable machine-readable laws (Rahman et al., 2020) . Smart contracts work by following simple "if/when. . . then. . . " conditional statements that are written into code on a blockchain. When predetermined conditions have been met and verified, the code will automatically execute the action (De Filippi and Wright, 2018) . In a such smart contract, there can be as many provisions as necessary to satisfy the participants' requirements to complete the task. All parties or participants must determine how the transactions and their data will be represented on the blockchain in the "if/when...then. . . " form to establish the terms and conditions. Also it is necessary to explore a few possible exemptions and dispute resolution frameworks. In machine-readable contracts, blockchain offers a convenient portal for all parties signing the contract with an immutable and auditable archive. The sophisticated encrypted identification can also help signee to identify the legit parties. By appointing a certain contract towards a specific address of blockchain records, a machine-readable contract can be pointed to the address, hence readable when the address is identified.

There are many potential application scenarios. For instance, it could be used for registration service, refund, and ticket purchase. The blockchain will be updated to record the transaction when it is completed. It guarantees the integrity of the transaction, which means no one can change or modify it. Therefore, if there may be a dispute in the future, such a record can be directly used as electric evidence in court. This point will be detailed discussed in the later sector.

However, blockchain as a form of machine-readable laws also poses different challenges. Unlike translation from one language to another language, translating natural legal language into computer code language is not easy. Because of the interpretability of legal language, the natural legal language usually needs a lawyer, judge or third party to interpret it when it applies to real case (Micheler and Whaley, 2020) . Meanwhile, different provisions, articles of the legislation normally follow the principles and aims of the different laws. Any excessively mechanical interpretation of a particular legal word or provision may lead to a misinterpretation of the law by making that particular law contrary to the principles and purposes of the original law as a whole (De Filippi and Wright, 2018) . Additionally, as discussed above, before coming into a smart contract, every party should list possible exemptions. However, the exceptions cannot be exhausted by enumeration. More or less, there will be other new exceptions. In this case, machine-readable laws are hard to recognize the new exceptions. Therefore, a dispute resolution framework is required.

From a more general viewpoint, blockchain-based machine-readable rules may deprive citizens' right to choose to obey or disobey the law. From economic legal theory, the reason why the law is deterrent is that there is a cost of breaking the laws. In other words, so long as the cost of breaking the law is low, illegal behavior will thrive. However, from another perspective, if the illegal cost can be tolerated, people can choose to break the law in some specific situation. In the context of machine-readable laws, however, it ultimately changes the architecture of cyberspace, which lacks flexibility and implies that one can no longer choose to break the law in a particular situation.

To conclude, similar to other technologies, blockchain-based machine-readable laws bring both opportunities and challenges. It is clear that the machine-readable laws are easier to execute, and the cost of implementation will be reduced. Meanwhile, once the dispute occurs, the data on the blockchain can be directly used as electronic evidence thanks to the immutability of DLT. The law enforcement process will be more transparent because every data is verified through every relevant party. However, the drawbacks of machine-readable rules are also apparent due to a lack of flexibility. Therefore, further research should focus on exploring the circumstances in which machine-readable laws can be advantageous and in which circumstances such laws do not apply. A case-by-case analysis may be required to explore the function of machine-readable laws in different sectors. For example, in criminal law or the case of extremist crimes, these behaviors have to be prohibited so that they can be forbidden by machine-readable rules through the architecture of cyberspace.

With the burgeoning development of Internet industries, traditional forms of evidence and forensic methods have been challenged, and electronic evidence (eevidence) is gradually being used and admitted (Rice and Cooper, 2005) . In order to be legally recognized, the e-evidence normally needs to satisfy three conditions: objectivity, relevance and legality (Rice and Cooper, 2005) . Moreover, compared to traditional evidence, most e-evidences are time-sensitive vulnerable to tamper, deleted and unstable. Without a quick and easy way to lawfully obtain and preserve e-evidences, it will be significantly more difficult to recover the evidence (Wu and Zheng, 2020) .

Currently, the two most common methods to obtain and store e-evidence lawfully are: (i) obtained and stored by the individual through taking photos, downloading or taking screenshots; (ii) obtained through notarization. The advantages and disadvantages of both methods are clear. The first method is easy and inexpensive to operate, but the evidentiary capacity and probative force are weak as it is insecure and easy to be tampered. As a result, it leads to the less inadmissibility in the court. Regarding the e-evidence obtained by notarization, it largely solves the problem of the authenticity and legitimacy of e-evidence due to the high credibility of the notary. However, it requires a high time cost. In the process of notarization, it is necessary to make an appointment for notarization, commission a notary, go to the notary office, communicate with the notary about the details of the operation, etc., which all cost time. Due to the easy tampering of e-evidence, high time cost is likely to lead to the loss of evidence. Also, the cost of notarization might be high. The cost of e-evidence forensics can be thousands of dollars, which makes it more difficult to defend individuals' rights.

Another emerging approach is that verifying e-evidence through timestamp technology to ensure authenticity. For example, in Article 11 of Chinese Provisions of the Supreme People's Court on Several Issues Concerning Trial of Cases by the Internet Courts 2018 (Chinese Supreme People's Court, 2018), it recognizes that the Internet Court shall confirm the authenticity of electronic data submitted by the parties, if it can be proved by technical means of evidence collection, such as electronic signature, trusted timestamp, hash value verification, blockchain, etc. Currently, the common timestamp is that the service provider issues a certificate to prove the authenticity and integrity of e-evidence without access to its content.

Although compared with the notarization, the timestamp is quite cheaper, and there are many uncertainties and drawbacks. Firstly, the validity and admissibility are inferior to that of the notarization. This largely depends on the judge's discretion to decide whether such e-evidence can be accepted (Wu and Zheng, 2020) . Additionally, if there is any inconsistency between the notarized evidence and the timestamped evidence, the judge is more likely to accept the notarized evidence. Secondly, the scope of the use of the timestamp is limited. For example, it requires that websites must be static and operated by PC.

Overall, currently there is no unified approach that can be applied across all scenarios and circumstances. In the face of the dilemma of e-evidence's authenticity and integrity, because of the characteristics of blockchain, it can effectively eliminate the vulnerability of e-evidence to tamper and greatly reduce the necessity for judges to have relevant technological knowledge because blockchains are appendonly digital databases where information can be added to ensure the integrity of data (Li, 2020) . One good example of Non-fungible Token (NFT) has come into the practice of copyright and has been accepted as a major reference and copyright certificate for the ownership of the data and content, which effectively prevents hacking and other activities that may destroy evidence (Bodó et al., 2018) . Unlike the traditional complex and costly copyright legal regime (Li, 2019) , NFT can enable digital asset trading accompanied by the deed of copyright license. Therefore, blockchain inherently makes e-evidence self-tamper-proof and self-authentication endorsement to ensure its authenticity and integrity (Wu and Zheng, 2020) .

Moreover, blockchain not only can serve as a repository to store e-evidence but also it can act as a platform to generate e-evidence, store e-evidence and notarization of e-evidence (Chen et al., 2020) . Such a combination of generating, preserving, and notarization platform is a better reflection of recordism. For example, the Chinese Hangzhou Internet Court has already employed such a system where a consortium blockchain-based system connects courts, notarial agencies, forensic institutions and all users (Wu and Zheng, 2020) . The application also can be used for daily transaction services for enterprises or individual users. When a dispute occurs, the enterprises or individual users can directly use the application to show the e-evidence with a notarial certification. Therefore, it can avoid the issue of authenticity and integrity essentially.

However, a blockchain-based e-evidence system also challenges the legal system. Because not every jurisdiction currently recognizes the e-evidence generated and stored by blockchain. It may lead to a new legal amendment of current evidence forensics laws in the EU or China. Thus, the law must keep pace with technological developments to ensure that, on the one hand, the law can still regulate technology and, on the other hand, technology could more easily achieve legal objectives. Meanwhile, the design stage of blockchain-based evidence systems also requires the combined efforts of technical staff and legal practitioners to ensure that blockchain e-evidence is also fully compliant with the requirements of legal practice.

Blockchain as a new way to store and process data has posed both positive and negative sides to privacy and data protection. On the one hand, blockchain could achieve legal objectives (especially data protection law) to realize transparency, privacy protection, zero-trust mechanism and decentralization. However, on the other hand, it interferes with the data protection legal regime. Because the data protection law is designed for the concept that there is at least one data controller and data can be deleted through the data controller. However, under the circumstance of blockchain, it is tough to comply with these legal principles and rights (Klaine et al., 2021) . This sector will focus on what advantages the blockchain could bring to data protection law and how to mitigate the potential conflicts between blockchain and data protection law.

One of the advantages of blockchain is that it can enable trust and auditable transactions through a decentralized network (Li, 2021) . In the identity-sensitive sector, blockchain could provide a secure and transparent record of who shared sensitive data with whom while protecting the content of the data itself. Blockchain is premised on mathematically derived pseudonyms for verification of distributed ledger. Such a mechanism can de-identify the users' data and achieve privacy protection.

Although GDPR regards pseudonymous data as personal data since it can be linked to the individual by combination, the design of the blockchain is inherently a privacy-friendly framework. Because it uses asymmetric encryption as a safeguard to protect users' identification. Also according to Recital 28, it states that "The application of pseudonymization to personal data can reduce the risks to the data subjects concerned and help controllers and processors to meet their data-protection obligations"(European Parliament, 2016) . Meanwhile, it is also encouraged that pseudonymization should be incentivized (European Parliament, 2016) . The GDPR also considers pseudonymization of data as a means of data protection by design and data protection by default (European Parliament, 2016) . Therefore, the use of pseudonymization in blockchain should be considered as a privacy-friendly measurement.

The blockchain mechanisms also challenge the data protection laws represented by the GDPR. Compared with the strict requirement of anonymization, pseudonymization is easier to achieve, but the law does not provide enough incentives (Voigt and von dem Bussche, 2017) . Data protection law should incentivize the proportional use of pseudonymous data when pseudonymization can provide enough protection to users' privacy in the different context-based environments. Because of the improvement of big data, the distinction between anonymous data and pseudonymous data becomes blurred. The dichotomy between anonymization and pseudonymization becomes unpractical. By contrast, a dynamic approach demonstrates flexibility and pragmatic and sometimes, even more, privacy friendly. According to data protection law's definition, although some data is pseudonymous, it can achieve a similar effect as anonymous data. Such dynamic de-identification can reveal different levels and types of data to different parties at different times, for different purposes, at different places. Therefore, the law needs to be revised to cater to the technologies represented by blockchain.

One of the legal objectives of GDPR is to boost personal data free flow. Just like oil, the value of data lies in its free flow and use. Therefore, many jurisdictions are dedicated to establishing such digital data marketplace where personal and nonpersonal data can be shared, traded and free flow. For example, European Commission considers that the data marketplace can be used to unlock the value of data for the Digital Single Market and also render the EU more competitive in the context of artificial intelligence (European Comission, 2017) . Similarly, in China the data trade marketplaces are booming. Many data marketplaces, for example, Shanghai Data Exchange Centre (Shanghai Data Exchange Corp, 2018) and Guiyang Global Big Data Exchange Centre (Guiyang Global Big Data Exchange Centre, 2015), are taking shape. Data marketplace powered by blockchain can offer users confidentiality and convenience for data sharing by listing their data on the marketplace. Potential buyers are eligible for using the data with authentication records from data providers when the trade has been secured by the marketplace (Klaine et al., 2021) .

Blockchain as a digital database that is shared and synchronized, maintained through a consensus algorithm and stored on multiple nodes can offer considerable advantages to build up such data trade marketplace while providing extra protection to data privacy. Firstly, blockchain is a decentralized framework, which means that the data exchange can be operated without a central trusted intermediary. Because blockchain could enable the zero-trust mechanism (Dhar and Bose, 2021) , it can be used for the transaction of data and make data free flow. Such a mechanism can allow participants to provide proof of a statement without disclosing identity information. For example, the blockchain-based system can reveal whether a transaction has occurred without revealing the public key and the transaction value.

Furthermore, the blockchain-based data governance tool can establish a smart contract, which can automate data sharing and reduce transaction costs. With the support of blockchain technology, it is apparent that the data marketplace is easier and safer to build up and stimulate data sharing and the digital economy. Meanwhile, such a system also can be used to achieve legal objectives of users' data rights.

Due to the characteristic of blockchain, it could give users more control over their personal data (Filippi, 2016) . As stipulated in Recital 7 of GDPR, informational self-determination is one of the principles of GDPR. It implies that data subject shall have the ability to determine their personal data. Therefore, GDPR vests various data rights to the data subject, for example, the right of access (Article 15 GDPR) or the right to data portability (Article 20 GDPR).

With the assistance of blockchain, it is easier and safer to achieve these data rights. On the one hand, blockchain could enable users with more access to their data in accordance with Article 15 GDPR. With such a mechanism, data subjects can easily know who accessed their personal data and for what purpose, as well as at what time and how the personal data is processed (Finck, 2019) . It satisfies the requirement by GDPR and provides extra user accessibility with their data.

Apart from the user's right to access, another advantage of blockchain is that it is easier to achieve data portability in practice. The right to data portability is a new type of data right which empowers users to move, copy or transfer their data from one platform to another (Voigt and von dem Bussche, 2017) . However, data portability is often difficult to achieve due to low interoperability between platforms in practice (De Hert et al., 2018) . Blockchain technology is capable of addressing the issue by mitigating the transfer costs as it can facilitate direct relationships and transactions between an individual and multiple organizations. Because the user's data can be cryptographically secured by a private key, the data subject can grant or revoke third-parties access to that data anytime. If the user would like to switch the data to a new service provider, they only need is to grant the new service provider permission to access the data and revoke the permission from the old one. Therefore, blockchain could make it easier for data subjects to smoothly transfer their data without relying on any organization to port it, guaranteeing data integrity and security during the data transfer.

Furthermore, blockchain could render data subject monitoring their data porting process while exercising their right to portability (Finck, 2019) . Because the data subjects do not know the procedure of porting, they would face the dilemma of identifying lapses and mistakes, and if necessary, taking the further requisite steps to correct these situations. Blockchain-based data management tools can provide data subjects oversight of the porting process without the need to impose obligations on platforms.

However, it is worth noting that blockchain and DLT must never accomplish these goals automatically. Rather, they must be intentionally designed through interdisciplinary collaborations between engineers and lawyers. Otherwise, there are many potential conflicts between blockchain and law.

A Legal Interpretivism Required

As aforementioned, there are many potential conflicts between blockchain and data protection law. It is mainly because the GDPR is designed based on legislators' past experience in cyberspace. However, blockchain inaugurates a new type of data storage. It subverts many traditional cognitions to cyberspace. For example, there is no central data controller/processor, and the data is tough to modify or delete to guarantee data integrity and transparency. Therefore, the data protection law should respond to such challenges to offer legal certainty for the development of emerging technologies. Broad legal interpretivism may be helpful.

In terms of the right to erasure and rectification, although GDPR stipulates that data subjects shall have the right to ask the controller to erase their personal data, there is no specific definition on the meaning of erasure, rectification or deletion (Voigt and von dem Bussche, 2017) . It leaves room for data deletion on blockchain and requires a further legal amendment to explain this issue. By using legal interpretivism and teleological approach, erasure not only can be explained as the completely erasing or deletion of the data itself but also means that it makes data content inaccessible to others and eliminates subsequent impact on the data subject. Therefore, de-link to data should also be seen to exercise the right to erasure. In Google Spain case (Court of Justice of the European Union, 2014), the judge also confirmed that de-listing of information from research results could be considered to amount to erasure. Although the de-list was requested by the claimant, who did not request Google to delete the original data, it is still inspiring for the practical application of the right to erasure in other cases. Because in cyberspace, complete deletion of data is not an easy task. If nobody can access the data and no subsequent impact on the data subject, it should be amount to erasure from a teleological interpretation. Therefore, in the context of blockchain, the right to erasure can also be applied in this way. Although deletion is hard, removing the link and destroying the private key, making data inaccessible is not tough. Thus, legal interpretivism and teleological approach are necessary to explain such issues.

Regarding the data controller and processor, in the context of DLT, lots of entities could be qualified as (Joint-) controllers, but some of them may not have full ability to control over the data (Finck, 2019) . For instance, nodes in principle only see encrypted and hashed data where data has been modified when put on the blockchain. However, a single node cannot exercise the request of the data subject. By the same token, the definition of data controller and processor must be interpreted teleologically. Otherwise, it is impossible to distinguish the responsibility of each participant. According to the explanation of Article 29 Working Party (Article 29 Working Party, 2010), data controllers normally can determine the purposes and means of processing. It means that data controller(s) has the ability to determine respectively the 'why' and the 'how' of certain processing activities. Therefore, in the private chain or consortium chain, the participant who can determine the why and how data is processed is the data controller(s). Similarly, in the context of the public chain, the participant who initiates the chain and can determine the data processing manner satisfy the definition of the data controller and in some circumstances, miners and nodes also can be the joint-data controller. In this case, miners and nodes must follow the main data controllers' requirement to undertake their own responsibilities.

Blockchain brings a new revolution in information processing, storage and exchange, enabling many new applications in finance, corporate governance and digital currencies. For example, it could contribute to community governance and collaborative production without revealing the roles of participants, which means that ordinary participants can become a trader, a miner, a retailer and a customer simultaneously, hence breaking the market barriers and reducing the information gap between participants in the community, as all records are clearly visible to each other.

Meanwhile, blockchain-enabled business applications can easily achieve transparency and trust the tamper-proof records. These new features empower the traditional business model with new meanings and promote the evolution of the new business model. This section concentrates on analyzing such impact that blockchain brings to financial and business industries. It will analyze how the blockchainenabled information revolution influences corporate governance and central bank digital currencies.

Smart contract is the critical technology to improve the efficiency of financial markets. 7 Simple extensions enable blockchains to keep self-executing transactions. Regarding the automaticity and time-saving feature, using blockchain could resolve several long-standing issues originating from corporate governance area (Kahn and Winton, 1998) . Even more important, blockchain has the potential capability to yield unparalleled transparency, identifying the ownership proportion of debt and equity by investors or senior management and minimizing the risk of malfeasance on the part of listed companies, exchanges, and regulators. For market participators, the execution of blockchain allows for faster, economic acquisitions of shares, but with far less confidentiality than under the centralized system (Yermack, 2017) . Financial records would become far more transparent, reducing the chances for profits manipulation and other accounting tricks, and related party transactions such as shadow banking would be far more accessible. The execution of blockchain also promotes the speed and cost of trading in the financial market. In the United States, stock trades typically take three business days to settle and transfer ownership from seller to buyer. Market attendees such as brokers, individual and institutional investors are engaged, involving direct and indirect fees (via commissions and the bid-ask spread separately). However, a blockchain-based stock transaction would be instantaneous and erase the existence of these middlemen. While stock exchanges will likely continue to connect buyers and sellers in some other form, liquidity would skyrocket, owning to cheaper costs and fast trading time. Based on the existed literature (Amihud, 2002; Bhide, 1993; Ma et al., 2020; De Santis, 2014) , liquidity is a critical threshold with the funding flow and caters to the interest demand of fund managers and investors. It has a high likelihood of generating high-frequency trading generally through the low cost of trading under the blockchain application.

Besides transparency and low trading cost, blockchain technology has been presented as a voting platform for all sorts of the election. Numerous studies, including (Brav and Mathews, 2011; Nenova, 2003; Villarreal, 2019) have shown the existing difficulties with corporate elections, including inaccurate voter lists, limited ballot distribution and even chaotic vote counting. In a blockchain system, the token can be regarded as a valid ticket to record the choices by voters. As claimed by (Kshetri and Voas, 2018; Wright and De Filippi, 2015) , voting under blockchain could encourage shareholders to engage actively in corporate governance and vote on a broader range of issues more frequently. Under a similar spirit, election fraud, especially the 2020 US president election rumor, can effectively be avoided under the blockchain-based voting system.

Central banks and global financial regulators are debating how blockchain will affect their own technology underpinnings, and the underlying technology of commercial banks and financial institutions. Because representative cryptocurrency Bitcoin is undertaking a recognized part of the financial landscape, worldwide central banks are becoming more interested and taking seriously the potential application of digital money. Feared by the possible risk of losing sovereign currency issuance, central banks in the UK, the US, the EU, New Zealand and elsewhere are considering whether it is possible to establish their own central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). And the extensive discussion and conception are published in a flood of white papers (Bank of England, 2020; Reserve Bank of New Zealand, 2021; European Central Bank, 2020; Board of Governors of Federal Reserve System, 2022) .

Although CBDC is commonly connected with Distributed Ledger Technology, the majority central bank attitude towards such linkage is disapproval, considering the centralized payment system is the foundation of absolute control of currency. However, a blockchain-based ledger has several potential breakthroughs that can be utilized independently, allowing the author to discuss the particular features of the blockchain system that are most relevant and useful in a CBDC setting. Smart contract can be independently implemented over a number of different kinds of ledgers, including a centralized system. Further, it could achieve security and efficiency targets through restricting the broad function accessible inside a smart contract programming language. Besides that, cryptography could also be employed to strengthen the CBDC system. Based on the white paper from (Bank of England, 2020) , it is necessary to upgrade the cryptographic approaches since particular cryptographic functions can be weak over time and vulnerable to high-turnover cyber attacks. In a nutshell, an indisputable fact is that the innovation of blockchain technology triggers the revolution of the financial system and boosts the invention of CBDC. Although it is still in the early development phase in a majority of countries, the People's Bank of China completed salary payouts in the digital yuan utilizing blockchain technology in 2020 and plan to popularize in the forthcoming Olympic Winter Games (Kharpal, 2021) .

Blockchain not only has a great impact on society but also demonstrates great potential in combination with other technologies if it is regarded as an innovative methodological cognition. In other words, blockchain can not only benefit the advancement of other technologies, but the development in other technologies can also promote the development of blockchain. This section analyses how blockchain could be positively harnessed more sustainably through combination with other techniques.

The integration of blockchain technology and big data has the potential to provide a slew of fascinating opportunities (Meijer, 2019) . Although blockchain has not been widely investigated in big data management, it should be seen as two sides of the coin. As (Fedak, 2018) states, blockchain not only increases the size of big data but also improves its security and value by structuring and preparing it for big data analytics. While blockchain is focused on storage data, big data is concentrated on data analyses and forecasts from a large amount of data. Alternatively, it can be regarded as quantity for Big Data and quality for Blockchain. Therefore, the data gathered and authenticated on the blockchain by big companies will add value to enterprises (Hassani et al., 2018) .

There are multiple blockchain-based big data analytics enhancements that benefit corporate governance and eliminate exposure. More specifically, the exposure contains fraud prevention, agency cost, information asymmetry and reverse causality. As blockchain technology enables to implement the real-time accounting, the business' entire ledger would then be available to interest parties like a shareholder, lender, creditor or others (Yermack, 2017) . The instant accounting statements replace the existence of quarterly financial statements and accounting audits. Furthermore, the real-time accounting feature can relieve the dilemma for Small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) to access external financing, especially for shadow banking. Equipped with instantons accounting records through blockchainbased big data platforms, bank groups and relevant financial institutions can easily grant loans to SMEs without complicated risk assessment procedures.

6.1 Sharing and sustainable development of blockchain economy 6.1.1 Distribution system of income and wealth

Blockchain in the regime of the economy has been widely accepted in the form of cryptocurrencies. However, blockchain is way beyond the scope the cryptocurrencies. It has reshaped the world with its encrypted nature and opens up the opportunity for every individual with the power to mine or mint tokens that can be used in every possible way (Novak, 2019) . Tokens are the essential carrier of the value of blockchain. It makes sense when people pass on tokens to perform transactions on the blockchain. It brings the breakthrough of the distribution system of income, where the individual has total control of its earning and earns an extra bit of fees when the individual is serving the network. Since the distribution of tokens is direct and transparent, it equalizes participants' roles and creates the legal person's unique jurisdiction in the blockchain aspect, where the actual man is mapped with an encrypted identity used for the legal person. To the greatest extent possible, a widely open distributed ledger provides the ultimate audit to the economic system (Novak, 2019).

Consensus, the step of getting the agreement among all peer nodes, should never be the weakness of blockchain but a way of promoting the blockchain. However, ever since the rise of bitcoin, blockchain has been linked with high power consumption, low efficiency, waste of resources with environmental impacts. In the first quarter of 2021, Cambridge estimates that to be 84.6 TWh, and it expands the estimation rapidly, later with a staggering 112.82 TWh electricity to be consumed yearly, which is a huge amount of electricity and a huge producer of carbon footprint (University of Cambridge, 2021). A well-criticized reason is that the consensus used by blockchains is not productive but a puzzle-solving game with no real value to reality. In the near future, Proof-of-Work consensuses are still considered the safest and most accepted public chain solution, and it will be hard to replace them without substantial changes to the current acknowledgment of Bitcoin and the transitional understanding to greener consensus. On the other hand, there are practical functional consensuses, which are utilizing the puzzles or the consensus itself being an essential service, for instance, Proof-of-Replication (PoRep) (Xu et al., 2020) used by Filecoin makes use of the replication status of file sharing for miner election (Protocol Labs, 2017), hence providing data query service in parallel with the PoRep consensus. Functional consensus is a major step forward in making a sustainable ecosystem for blockchain. It is also challenging to design a functional consensus considering the efficiency, availability, security and integrity of the network.

Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is a type of computing machine that has been designed to solve particular problems, in our case, the search of hash. It produces enormous heat while running, and the cooling of them costs extra electricity for air conditioners, increasing the temperature around the ASICs. Room heating using mining ASIC has been well-practiced in homes with low electricity price and low-temperature (Smith, 2019) . The heat generated by the energy-hungry machine produces roughly 2 kW each with a radiator design fitted to the cooling unit. The savings from the heating cost during the winter and the added value from mined crypto assets reach balances in a short cycle and eventually cover the cost of ASIC hardware. This has been recognized as a mitigation to the environmental impacts of ASIC mining activities, and the market of ASIC radiator rental has grown with more and more interest from greenhouses and winter gardens.

Considering huge carbon and greenhouse gases and the waste of non-renewable energies, non-renewable energies should not be used to power blockchain networks, especially the cryptocurrency network, in line with the commitments made by the governing body and local communities. The legislation shall consider putting guidelines and standardizing the energy source for blockchain application, providing its role and responsibility to the environmental impacts. Essential services powered by blockchain shall be allowed to use any energies regarding its jurisdiction of local regulations. However, Proof-of-Work based cryptos, for instance, shall be refrained from using coal/oil/gas generated electricity and has to pay the carbon tax based on its power rating. By setting up the guidelines and regulations for blockchain energy policies, the environmental impact of blockchain can be greatly reduced and provides a renewable future-proof legal status for blockchain maintenance. Compared to the tax difficulty of cryptocurrencies, taxing the mining machine can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and benefits the climate with the tax collected. (Jiang et al., 2021) 6.1.4 Storage medium revolution for blockchain in the future Blockchain provides immutable records to the public with its persistent storage of all records stored on the blockchain. It will be a great waste of resources if the records keep growing to infinity. Though, there is mitigation help to reduce the storage size on each node, that comes with great risk of data integrity and availability and tempers the blockchain's basic principle of immutable. Hence, the need for persistent distributed storage of all records in a distributed way is a critical issue for future blockchain storage. There are yet no answers to how to persistently store all records in a distributed manner with acceptable cost, but there are candidates for such desired feature.

With the exploration of new material, biological genetic material, i.e., DNA and RNA, are good examples of storoing a full copy of the record in a distributed way. That is saying that any individual DNA carries the same piece of information from its parent DNA when it performs mitosis during cell division. The double helix shape of linkage also resembles the immunity of blockchain, considering its hash linkage. Also, the art of folded protein is a way to efficiently store the copy of the blockchain in the near future, thanks to its compact size and persistent nature. Recent protein-based storage progress provides a practical way to distribute store the same piece of information with a highly stable shape and link. The protein can be rapidly scanned to find out the difference in their structure hence figuring out the data changes. It is a suitable medium for blockchain longterm storage and fast validation of data records.

It is apparent that the development of sciences and technology will drive the progress and transformation of society, which could have a great social impact, vice versa. Therefore, this paper analyses the implications of blockchain technology to social sciences from methodological, legal and financial perspectives. It found that although there are few negative impacts from blockchain to the legal side, blockchain technology is still of great potential. Therefore, this paper also answers how blockchain should be harnessed in a more sustainable and compatible way in society. The principle and design philosophy of blockchain have high relevance in social sciences and could have a great impact on society as a whole. Regarding methodological cognition of blockchain in social sciences, the blockchain-driven information revolution refreshes the cognition of the source of power. It challenges the traditional centralized source of governance by providing a new architecture where the power of governance is bottom-up.

In the context of legal regulation in cyberspace, blockchain refreshes the legal research approach and many legal concepts, for example, trust and transparency. It re-establishes these notions through cryptography, therefore, embedding these notions into the cyber architecture. Through cyber architecture, blockchain enables machine-readable legislation, a more convenient e-evidence system and the objectives of data protection law through privacy-by-design. However, the decentralization of blockchain also challenges the implementation of data protection law. Therefore, a legal interpretivism approach is required to handle this issue. As to the implication of blockchain to the economy and finance, this paper found that blockchain could enable new applications in corporate governance. Blockchain could break the market barriers and reduce the information gap between participants. It also found that although CBDC is commonly connected with Distributed Ledger Technology, the majority central bank attitude towards such linkage is disapproval, considering the centralized payment system is the foundation of absolute control of currency. Regarding blockchain technology, it promotes the development of other disciplines and benefits from the development of other technologies. Moreover, we are keen to see a more connected scene of blockchain-enabled interdisciplinary cooperation, to make the data flow effortlessly and easily accessible.

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