That German-Singapore Lawyer

Tag: blockchain

Singapore’s New Law on Electronic Bills of Lading

Peking, a steel-hulled four-masted barque, was one of the last generation of cargo-carrying iron-hulled sailing ships. She probably carried many bills of lading.
New tech­no­logy on the horizon

Singa­pore has adop­ted the UNCITRAL Mod­el Law on Elec­tron­ic Trans­fer­able Records, in a bid to get elec­tron­ic bills of lad­ing (eBOL) off the ground after pre­vi­ous efforts failed. The Singa­pore Cham­ber of Mari­time Arbit­ra­tion has pub­lished the ori­gin­al Eng­lish ver­sion of my art­icle on the new law. Trans­port­recht, the trans­port­a­tion law journ­al, has pub­lished the Ger­man ver­sion.

Facebook and Libra: The House of Medici on Speed

Face­book and Libra, that’s like the House of Medici on speed. The Medici fam­ily were mer­chants first. Dur­ing the Itali­an Renais­sance they became bankers, then princes. Then they pro­duced four popes of the Cath­ol­ic Church. It took them a few cen­tur­ies to do all that. But in announ­cing Libra, Face­book is claim­ing cyber prince­dom (cyber papacy even?) barely fif­teen years after its found­ing. No won­der the gov­ern­ments of today are stunned.

The moderator and panelists of The Dappers' event Introducing Libra: Facebook’s brainchild, on 16 July 2019.

Libra: A Sovereign Currency for Cyberspace?

Face­book, unar­gu­ably one of the biggest over­lords of cyber­space, has pro­posed a crypto­cur­rency: Libra.

That’s inter­est­ing. Why Face­book? What’s happening?

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook and proponent of cryptocurrency Libra, to be managed by the Libra Association.

Initial Coin Offering: an Inaccurate Term and an Imperfect Regulator

Patrick Dahm flaunting his Aviato t-shirt

This is my speech at the first Com­pu­ta­tion­al Law & Block­chain Fest­iv­al – Singa­pore Node on 17 March 2018. In it, I tried to explain what ini­tial coin offer­ings are, why gov­ern­ments all over the world eye them curi­ously, and how gov­ern­ments reg­u­late them – if they reg­u­late them. I also ques­tioned why brick and mor­tar gov­ern­ments reg­u­late some­thing so digital.

No, I Won’t Help You Whitewash Your Token Sale Scam

Over lunch the in-house coun­sel of a tech com­pany asked me wheth­er I ever decline work. We were mak­ing small talk, but funny she should ask. Because I have indeed chosen not to work on one or the oth­er ini­tial coin offer­ing or token sale lately.

I do what I do for a liv­ing, so I’m not prone to decline work by default. But these pro­jects didn’t smell right.

The Efficient Breach of Smart Contracts

Smart con­tracts are described as self-execut­ing: how they are formed is how they will be per­formed. This is why some of us see no (or at least less) room for leg­al dis­pute over them.

It shouldn’t be this way. Where it’s effi­cient, it should be pos­sible to breach a smart con­tract. Even though this may lead to a leg­al dispute.

Smartifying Blockchains, Legally

Yes, block­chain tech­no­logy can do things which con­ven­tion­al ledgers or registers can­not do. A few days ago I argued that this didn’t mean block­chain should replace tra­di­tion­al ways of record­ing leg­al trans­ac­tions whole­sale. Tra­di­tion­al ways of record­ing leg­al trans­ac­tions embed func­tions which block­chains don’t embed yet. Where the law demands it or wherever else it makes sense we should think about imple­ment­ing them.

Here’s in more detail what I had in mind.

Blockchain: The Roll of Deeds of the Internet

After read­ing Caitlin Moon’s instruct­ive blog Block­chain 101 for Law­yers I com­men­ted that we should think of it as a cybernot­ary who can authen­tic­ate — everything.

Ive changed my mind.

For the avoid­ance of doubt, I’m all for catchy ana­lo­gies. They help under­stand much of what’s going on in cyber­space. Even bet­ter than a catchy ana­logy, though, is an ana­logy that’s catchy and apt.

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