@mengwong @backofthenapkin 1/ Cyber/cypher-punk operates in legal gray areas, and sometimes in the zone of civil disobedience. So the struggle of being a lawyer/cypherpunk is real, and the two identities are in tension.
https://twitter.com/backofthenapkin/status/1027593146862108673
2/ Many " blockchain lawyers' " work so far has consisted of trying to legitimize the tech by (a) re-centralizing it to achieve compliance or (b) publicly (& sometimes gleefully) decrying blockchain entrepreneurs' tendencies to violate laws (e.g. securities laws in ICOs).
3/ Even among the lawyers with a cypher/cyber-punk ethos who #BUIDL, I think there has been a tendency to 'not go far enough' in either honoring the radical roots/goals of blockchain technology or acknowledging the gap between legal solutions and cypher/cyber-punk ones.
4/But there are a few lawyers who have BUIDL'd legal tech that advances the cause, esp.: @CaitlinLong_ and @AndreaTinianow with Wyoming's and Delaware's blockchain corp. law amendments and @NYcryptolawyer who founded DLx-law as a 'new kind of law firm for a new kind of economy'
5/@MattCorva , @PatBerarducci and @awrigh01 are also doing important work at @ConsenSys -- both in educating regulators and developing new legal tech. I personally believe all of the above-mentioned lawyers are coming from the right place, though path is tough & full of tensions
6/ My own ideological focus/bias is cyber/cypherpunk, which I believe means leveraging public, permissionless, open-source blockchains. If blockchain generally turns into just a convenient apparatus for institutional nodes to record their consensus on permissioned chains, I'm out
7/ If blockchain generally turns into something that can be reversed, altered or halted by so-called "regulatory supernodes," I'm out.
8/ If on-chain "smart contracts" generally become freely reversible/stoppable programs that might as well be run on AWS, I'm out.
9/ My challenge as a lawyer is to show regulators & other lawyers how cyber/cypherpunk approaches are achievable within a legal framework. The challenge of everyone in the space is to show the rest of the world why these approaches are valuable/positive for society.
10/ Fundamentally the most important BUIDL'ing we can do is the work of spreading cypher/cyberpunk values through society. Without those values, blockchain is just a slow/inefficient/expensive way to do things that can be more easily done with centralized servers/institutions.
11/ But WITH those values, blockchain is a tool is maximize the promises of life, liberty and happiness we all should be striving toward.
12/ I am working on creating some frameworks and models to try to advance the cause. I'm sure those also will be flawed and either not go far enough or go too far. The important thing is that we all keep working and collaborating in the space with the right values in mind.
P.S.--I'm sure there are lots of other lawyers doing positive things in the space and I don't know everyone. I'd also like to acknowledge @legalese
and @mattereum, two projects I need to educate myself more about but that appear to me very promising legaltech approaches.
and @mattereum, two projects I need to educate myself more about but that appear to me very promising legaltech approaches.
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