log in  |  register  |  feedback?  |  help  |  web accessibility
Logo
What Cryptocurrencies Can’t Do
Friday, March 13, 2015, 2:00-3:00 pm Calendar
  • You are subscribed to this talk through .
  • You are watching this talk through .
  • You are subscribed to this talk. (unsubscribe, watch)
  • You are watching this talk. (unwatch, subscribe)
  • You are not subscribed to this talk. (watch, subscribe)
Abstract

The technical benefits of blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies have often been linked to broader political claims that cryptocurrencies are inherently resistant to regulation. I will argue that the stronger forms of these claims are false; they rest on mistaken assumptions about the nature of law. The discretion and ambiguity built into law is a feature, not a bug: it is a crucial aspect of the interface between the crystalline world of software and the muddy reality of human affairs. The rules of Bitcoin derive ultimately from its users rather than from its protocols, and those users live in real places and depend on real governments. An obsessive focus on the double-spending problem obscures attention to the other work that offline payment and recordation systems do. I will discus what is and is not really new about Bitcoin with examples drawn from numerous fields of law.

Bio

James Grimmelmann is a Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law and a Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He previously taught at New York Law School and the Georgetown University Law Center. He holds a J.D. from  Yale Law School and an A.B. in computer science from Harvard College. Prior to law school, he worked as a programmer for Microsoft. He has served as a Resident Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale, and as a law clerk to the Honorable Maryanne Trump Barry of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

 

He studies how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power. As a lawyer and technologist, he helps these two groups understand each other by writing about copyright, search engines, privacy, and other topics in computer and Internet law. He is the author of the casebook Internet Law: Cases and Problems, now in its fourth edition. Other significant publications include Speech Engines, 98 Minn. L. Rev. 868 (2014), Sealand, HavenCo, and the Rule of Law, 2012 U. Ill. L. Rev. 405, and Saving Facebook, 94 Iowa L. Rev. 1137 (2009). He is a Contributing Editor for Publishers Weekly; he and his students created the Public Index website to inform the public about the Google Books settlement.

This talk is organized by Yupeng Zhang