Ethical Guidelines for Blockchain Systems

Enterprise architects and IT systems developers must often decide ad hoc how to identify, assess and mitigate ethical issues of autonomous, rule-based systems based on blockchain technology. As blockchain systems are decentralized and immutable, developers must assess ethical risks, not only on an individual level but also on a network level along the life-cycle stages of a blockchain system. These ethical issues should be addressed and ideally mitigated by clearly defined norms and values that are intentionally incorporated in a blockchain system. As a reference for a normative system, we have chosen the European Union and its ethical values to discuss them in the context of ethical issues emerging from blockchain systems. This paper presents a top-down approach that establishes ethical guidelines for blockchain systems based on ethical issues mapped against European values.