Permissionless Is Not the Same as Ruleless

A recent paper published in the Journal of Institutional Economics, Beyond “permissionless”: governance, commitment, and rule change in public blockchains, makes an important distinction that is often missed in public blockchain discussion: open access is not the same as absence of governance.

The paper argues that “permissionless” is often used too broadly. A blockchain may be open for users to submit transactions or for participants to join under the existing rules, but that does not mean there is no governance over how those rules may later be changed. In other words, permissionless access and rule-change authority are separate questions.

This distinction matters because public blockchains are not only technical systems. They are also economic and institutional systems. Developers, miners, validators, infrastructure providers, businesses, and users all make decisions based on an expected rule set. Some of those decisions involve sunk costs: software development, equipment, applications, business models, and other chain-specific commitments.

The paper frames this as a commitment problem. If a rule-changing coalition can revise the protocol after others have invested, participants face the risk that the conditions under which they built may later be altered. In that case, blockchain security is not only about hash power, stake, cryptography, or consensus cost. It also depends on institutional commitment: how stable the base rules are, how concentrated rule-changing authority is, and how constrained governance is in practice.

This is the paper’s strongest contribution. It separates two questions that are often merged:

Can anyone use the system?

and

Can someone later change the rules of the system?

A system may be open at the user layer while still having identifiable actors or mechanisms with practical influence over protocol change. That influence may appear through developer coordination, reference-client control, foundation funding, validator concentration, mining-pool coordination, token voting, emergency forks, or other governance pathways.

The paper examines several public blockchain systems to show that governance exists in different forms across the industry. The point is not that all systems are governed in the same way, or that all governance is automatically bad. The point is that governance must be included in the analysis. Once it is included, the more important question becomes how rule change is constrained.

This leads to the paper’s discussion of base-layer fixedness. A stable base protocol can function as a commitment device. The comparison to TCP/IP is useful: the internet allowed decades of innovation because builders could rely on stable underlying rules while creating new services above them. In this view, fixedness at the base layer is not anti-innovation. It is what allows innovation to move to applications, services, and higher layers.

For BSV Blockchain, this framing is especially relevant. The BSV discussion is often reduced to scaling, block size, or low fees. Those are important, but the deeper institutional question is protocol stability. A scalable public blockchain cannot become dependable infrastructure if its base rules remain subject to discretionary revision whenever a powerful enough group decides change is necessary.

From this viewpoint, the set-in-stone protocol idea is not just a technical preference. It is an economic commitment structure. It gives builders, businesses, and users confidence that the foundation they build on will remain predictable.

The article’s broader contribution is therefore useful beyond the academic context. It reframes the blockchain debate around a practical institutional question:

Is the system merely open to enter, or is it reliable enough to build on?

That distinction may matter more than the word “permissionless” itself.

*Beyond ‘permissionless’: governance, commitment, and rule change in public blockchains — Craig Wright*