Tribal Governance: The Business of Blockchain Authentication
Gianluca Miscione, Rafael Ziolkowski, Liudmila Zavolokina, Gerhard Schwabe · Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences · 2018
The blockchain technology offers a novel mode of distributed authentication, which does not depend on a central authority. We consider this novelty against established governance modes. We illustrate our argument by paying special attention to blockchain-based authentication functions in the empirical domain of land registries across the world. Based on interviews with representatives from organizations deploying blockchain, and con-tent analysis of related grey literature, we discuss established governance idealtypes against what the rivalry that cryptocurrencies and blockchains bring to digital settings. After referring to market, hierarchy, network, and bazaar, we conclude outlining the prospects of a different, blockchain-related governance mode called -˜tribal’ that better captures the -˜togetherness’ which rivalry originates.