Code Is Law — Competent Blockchain Design, Not An Ideology.

By Stevan Lohja on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

Code is Law is a catch-phrase for blockchain Immutability. So, what is blockchain immutability? Believe it or not, immutability is a critical design implementation for permissioned and permissionless distributed ledger technologies. You can find immutability in Bitcoin, EthereumClassic, Hyperledger, and many more DLT projects.

The idea of immutability is a record committed to the ledger is permanent. Blockchain needs immutability because a record changed after the fact is no longer a trusted historical ledger. Blockchain immutability is cumulative where each piece of data is linked together creating a cohesive whole that is difficult for an attacker to modify.

Transactions are signed by their creators and it is infeasible to forge a digital signature as the structure of the blocks is publicly defined and invalid blocks are rejected. Each block contains the value of the previous block and malicious actors cannot produce another block with the same hash. Blocks are signed by their creators by publicly known (PoS) or difficult to become (PoW) making it infeasible to be a false block creator.

So, immutability ensures the integrity of digital signatures preventing attackers from creating transactions between parties.