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Blockchain Technology

the existing liability laws and regimes are not sufficient to deal with the compensa­

tion (Corrales Compagnucci et al., 2020). This constitutes a series of legal dilem­

mas. Hence, specific liability laws relating to blockchain in energy industries are

needed to guarantee the legal responsibilities of the parties involved. Specific laws

are needed to administer the liability principles in payment defaults, technologi­

cal breakdowns, deliberate non-performance, etc. As the energy industry typically

entails using vital infrastructure, the stakeholders need an emergency plan to specify

the protocols in case of a disaster.

7.4.4  Personal Data

One of the basic features of blockchain contradicts the personal data laws. Most of the

laws relating to data protection state that personal data must be deleted after they have

served their purpose. Industry experts and the scholarly community have long pointed

out that blockchain technology engenders privacy concerns. Prominent among them

is the contravention of the EU’s data protection regulation, popularly called GPDR

(Feng et al., 2019). The original intent of this technology was to facilitate P2P trans­

actions without a centralized data verifier. Therefore, no single party is supposed to

hold the power to hold a particular network hostage. For this reason, the entire system

should be permissionless so that everyone in this system can equally access the data

within. In the case of sensitive data in the healthcare industry, blockchain certainly

breaches several privacy principles, such as “Rights of Data Subjects”, “Security

Principle”, “Retention Principle” and “Right to be Forgotten” (Fabiano, 2018).

7.4.5  Challenges with the Financial Market Regulation

As finance transactions move from energy providers or banks to a P2P system, the

question arises of who is accountable for securing each financial transaction’s settle­

ment. Such a duty of care could not be levied on energy users and providers alone.

Instead, an individual body or a network operator should be formed to conform

to the requirements of financial services in compliance with the banking laws and

regulations.

7.5  POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS

Policymakers need to collaborate with the industry and ensure regulatory enforce­

ment to benefit from blockchain technologies. In some instances, policymakers

cannot implement comprehensive, prescriptive and detailed guidelines, as the tech­

nology itself is in its embryo stage. Policymakers must promote technology through

flexible laws to cover a large spectrum of technical applications. In all cases, regula­

tors should collaborate with stakeholders to ensure that the implemented laws/rules

and regulations are well thought out for the industry.

Among the proposals put forward as a remedy, regulatory sandboxes stand out

as a highly promising solution pertaining to distributed ledger technology (Ahl

et al., 2020). These allow an opportunity for program testing in isolated and highly