# On unstoppability By [nikshah](https://paragraph.com/@nikshah) · 2022-01-09 --- **A word I see a lot on the peripheries of web3 is “unstoppable”. Like ‘decentralised’, ‘composable’, ‘trustless’ and ‘permissionless’ it is an epithet that captures something important about why web3 is new and different. Many of today’s most popular blockchain protocols are ‘unstoppable’, and I will try here to make explicit what that means in case your head is not as far down the rabbit hole as mine.**  (A caveat is that I’ve only been digging in earnest for a few months here so it’s possible that some of this is outdated or off-beam - I welcome corrections! But overall I think this is directionally correct.) Unstoppable means that a protocol / smart contract, once committed to the blockchain, can only be rendered non-operational by shutting down the blockchain on which it lives. As the most robust blockchains are themselves so decentralised as to be resistant to attack from even state-level actors, this property extends to the protocols that are encoded on them. (I’m going to use ‘protocol’, ‘Dapp’, ‘smart contract’ and ‘program’ loosely and interchangeably to mean code committed to the blockchain that can carry out tasks much as an application does on your computer. Feel free to point out why this is wrong!) Once a program is committed to the blockchain (in the form of a smart contract), it lives there forever, because most blockchains (notably Ethereum) are _immutable_. Even if the developer changes their mind, or if a government declares the program illegal, there is no way to delete the code or prevent people from using it. Once a smart contract is committed, users can use it and trust it without having to re-audit the code every time the developer makes an update - there are no updates! If you want to upgrade your Dapp, you have to write a new one and hope that everyone uses it instead of the old version. Value that is created on chain cannot be erased by anyone other than the owners of that value. Governments cannot shut down Ethereum, which arises out of computations taking place on thousands of nodes spread all over the earth, without shutting down the internet itself. And nobody, not even the Ethereum Foundation, can command the network to stop validating new blocks. This means that the art that you bought, (or the program you wrote to transfer money, or your agreement with your insurance company that they will pay out in the event of a hurricane in your area, or…) can never be deleted or revoked because a platform or government decides it is no longer allowed. It also means that your ability to e.g. trade in a given token is guaranteed even in times of extreme market volatility, and no centralised gatekeeper like RobinHood can shut down trading on a whim. The company Unstoppable Domains named itself after this property to contrast with companies like GoDaddy who revoked the domain names of far-right groups. The kinds of censorship we are accustomed to from social platforms and other web gatekeepers are simply not possible on blockchains. Not everyone will be comfortable with the consequences of unstoppability. The thing is, unstoppability doesn’t care. What does this mean for developers? The agile approach, where you chuck out a beta version and iterate on it, is harder. There are no edits, and upgrading your code might lose you your users. Keeping things composable is one way to minimise the risk here (and is arguably responsible for the ferocious creativity in this space). Of course, the fact that code exists doesn’t mean it will be used. All actions on a blockchain like Ethereum require some payment (‘gas fees’). So if your code adds no value, people will simply not use it, because it costs money to do so. But what if it works, just not in the way you wanted it to? Unstoppability means no regrets - if your code has unintended consequences, there’s nothing you can do about it other than hope that people stop using it. This poses a number of important questions for society. Who is legally accountable if a smart contract enables a crime? The developer? The signer of the culpable transaction? The L1 chain on which it resides? As developers race to build social media on decentralised infra, who do we end up blaming for the content that circulates there? There is no platform owner to haul in front of Congress. There is likely no single developer that has enabled it, and even if there were, they might simply be a pseudonym like Satoshi Nakamoto. States already feel somewhat powerless against global internet platforms but in reality they do have legal measures they can and do take against them as corporations. It’s entirely unclear what they can do against decentralised protocols that seek to replicate or replace the functions of the big web 2.0 platforms. Right now, the scale of the harms on blockchains are restricted to DeFi ‘degens’ losing their own money. Governments mostly ignore this because it’s not politically important, but also because they can’t do much - to shut protocols down would require shutting down the blockchains themselves, which in turn would require shutting down the internet, globally. As blockchain protocols grow and innovate, we can expect new kinds of application to emerge. Many will create significant value for their users, and for broader society (I’m excited about the potential for carbon trading on the blockchain, for example). But as harmful applications or uses emerge (and they will), we will see the same kind of incoherent approach to regulation that we have seen to date with platforms, but with even less power to actually do anything about it. Ultimately, I think the state will recede from trying to regulate what code goes on blockchains, and focus its attention on the users who use that code to do harmful things. But it’s going to be a rocky road while this gets worked out. In the meantime, blockchain developers need to focus their efforts on building applications that prove social value, not just economic value. The more benefits that accumulate in the pro bucket before the bigger cons start to emerge, the harder society will think about any attempts to regulate this space. Even if the technology itself protects against some attempts to regulate, there may be others (e.g. directed broadly at all Ethereum users) that would throw out the baby with the bathwater. It’s on all in the web3 space to focus on growing that baby (i.e. socially-positive applications) as fast as possible. --- *Originally published on [nikshah](https://paragraph.com/@nikshah/on-unstoppability)*