Blockchain and the Law

<p><b>Blockchains will matter crucially; this book beautifully and clearly written for a wide audience powerfully demonstrates how.<br>--Lawrence Lessig</b> <p/><b>Attempts to do for blockchain what the likes of Lawrence Lessig and Tim Wu did for the Internet and cyberspace--explain how a new technology will upend the current legal and social order... <i>Blockchain and the Law</i> is not just a theoretical guide. It's also a moral one.<br>--<i>Fortune</i></b> <p/>Bitcoin has been hailed as an Internet marvel and decried as the preferred transaction vehicle for criminals. It has left nearly everyone without a computer science degree confused: how do you mine money from ones and zeros? <p/>The answer lies in a technology called blockchain. A general-purpose tool for creating secure decentralized peer-to-peer applications blockchain technology has been compared to the Internet in both form and impact. Blockchains are being used to create smart contracts to expedite payments to make financial instruments to organize the exchange of data and information and to facilitate interactions between humans and machines. But by cutting out the middlemen they run the risk of undermining governmental authorities' ability to supervise activities in banking commerce and the law. As this essential book makes clear the technology cannot be harnessed productively without new rules and new approaches to legal thinking. <p/>If you...don't 'get' crypto this is the book-length treatment for you.<br>--Tyler Cowen <i>Marginal Revolution</i> <p/>De Filippi and Wright stress that because blockchain is essentially autonomous it is inflexible which leaves it vulnerable once it has been set in motion to the sort of unforeseen consequences that laws and regulations are best able to address.<br>--James Ryerson <i>New York Times Book Review</i></p>