In March of this year, artist Mike Winklemann, AKA “Beeple”, sold a compilation of digital art for $69m through Christie’s. The artwork was comprised of 5,000 images, created daily over a 13-year period. Unless your firm is planning on investing in digital art anytime soon, why should law firms care about this sale? Because whether you are a Managing Partner or a Marketing Director, business strategy is about identifying important shifts in the marketplace BEFORE they are entirely relevant to your current business processes so you can determine if and how they might affect you and your client base in . . . [more]

Most of what you are being told about the future of blockchain in the legal profession is nonsense.

Don’t get me wrong. Blockchain is very cool. And I am the furthest thing from a luddite you will find in the legal profession. I’m a part-time LLM student at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law and Department of Computing Science studying the automation of legal reasoning. I’m an ABA Innovation Fellow for 2018/2019, writing open-source software to automate analogy to prior cases. I am an advocate for the adoption of technology in law.

So I’m enthusiastic about blockchain being adopted . . . [more]

Bitcoins are digital currency – and yes, lawyers are beginning to accept them from clients. They are also known as virtual currency or cryptocurrency since cryptography is used to control the creation and transfer of bitcoins. They use peer-to-peer technology with no central authority or banks. The issuance of bitcoins and the managing of transactions are carried out collectively by the network

Cryptocurrencies are created by a process called mining – by becoming a miner of cryptocurrencies, you make money (not much unless you are a major league miner). We won’t go into all of the technology that is used . . . [more]

Nobody wanted to die. The life extension project raised millions with names of famous scientists and promises of ground-breaking research. Trustees earmarked the bulk of the money as a prize to the first researcher who solved the telomerase enzyme problem.

On the morning of January 2, 2020, two independent groups announced successful telomerase enhancement formulas. One was from Atlanta, and the other one from Singapore. The group that proved it was the first to record the formula would get $50 million to continue its research. Peer-reviewed publication was not relevant as both completed it at the same time. The only . . . [more]

Cold sweat. I think this is a fair description of your reaction when you find out that you sent money to a wrong email address. Maybe hot flashes. But it’s bound to be some form of physical stress. And for what? All of the conventional payment platforms are reversible. Your money goes through so many intermediaries and layers of abstraction that it’s not usually a problem to reverse a mistaken payment. At worst, you can sue and claim some form of restitution.

But if you send cryptocurrency to a wrong address, you’re done. No bank to give your money back, . . . [more]

For at least a year now, the magic word in technology circles has been “blockchain” – the accretive cryptographic system behind Bitcoin and other virtual currencies.

A distributed ledger

A blockchain serves as a distributed ledger, a record of transactions or other information that is secure from alteration and that operates without any central authority. Its security derives from the digital signatures required to affect the record. It foregoes a central authority by residing simultaneously on very large numbers of computers on its network (which is what “distributed” means in this context, in contrast with “centralized”.) Each such computer contains . . . [more]

As I am writing this, one bitcoin is traded at about USD$17,600. In 2013, bitcoin traded at about USD$100. I thought it was a scam at the time and did not buy any. Since then I’ve changed my mind and started thinking, writing, and building about and around bitcoin and other blockchain technologies. It helped that I am both a computer programmer and a lawyer and that I had economics training. So if you are a lawyer and you missed the bitcoin rush but interested in catching up in your knowledge, read on.

Bitcoin is one way of using a . . . [more]

The not-so-smart money has pushed the price of a Bitcoin well above US$6,000. The crash is inevitable. The first-mover “cryptocurrency” is based on an inefficient proof of work model designed for anonymous transactions on a public network. The next generation of blockhain developers, like those working on the Ethereum platform, are less interested in the ideology of anonymous transactions than the practicality of efficient business applications. Corporate adopters like the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance have already noted the pace of migration from anonymous public blockchain networks to a combination of public and permissioned private networks. Since “altcoin” currencies are not . . . [more]

Addison Cameron-Huff is an active legal force in the Toronto tech community focused exclusively on the blockchain and internet startup space. He can often be found speaking at events and previously co-chaired OsgoodePD’s Critical and Emerging issues in Blockchain Law. He recently joined Decentral Inc., the company founded by Ethereum’s co-founder, Anthony Di Iorio.

As the world reacts to the uncertainty of cryptocurrency offerings, such as initial coin offerings, initial token offerings and sales of securities of cryptocurrency investment funds, many startups in the community are having discussions on what the future of Canadian innovation in the cryptocurrency . . . [more]

Several years ago, a Canadian attorney and good friend of ours, invested $10,000 in bitcoin. Clearly, he is a lot smarter than us. We can’t even imagine the extent of his profit – several days before we started to write this article, bitcoin hit an all-time high of $4,991.66 on September 2, 2017. It is down slightly as we write, but our friend certainly hit a jackpot.

We become aware of bitcoin wallets a few years ago, as husbands (mostly) began to hide assets from their soon-to-be ex-wives in those wallets. And then came a barrage of ransomware attacks. Law . . . [more]

As of August 2017, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) – a means of raising funds for a new cryptocurrency venture, whereby units of the new cryptocurrency are sold to early backers of the project in exchange for legal tender or other cryptocurrencies – were said to have collectively raised over $1.2 billion, surpassing early stage venture capital funding for internet companies. The value and nature of these transactions have, unsurprisingly, drawn the attention of regulators worldwide including a total ban on ICOs from the People’s Bank of China. On July 25, 2017, in response to criticism and concerns surrounding ICOs, . . . [more]