ABSTRACT
This chapter presents blockchain within traditional mainstream regulatory frameworks, most notably those of the Internet and e-commerce, as a subset of Internet regulation. It focuses on self-regulation as the prevailing mode and explores other key areas applicable to blockchain in the short to medium term based on the lessons learnt in other areas of network regulation, notably multistakeholder co-regulation and coded regulation of cyberspace. The chapter examines multistakeholder governance as a mode of regulation by civil society that emerges in the face of failures in the market and the legitimacy of self-regulation. An interesting facet of multistakeholder at global level is the way it mediates between forms of self-regulation and, forms of autonomous code-based regulation. A regulatory tradition surrounds the Internet which it would be wrong or even impossible to ignore with regard to blockchain. A variety of networked technologies are rightly subject to, albeit to different degrees, pressing questions concerning their effect on human behaviour.
