Permissionless Decentralization and The Law

Transcript

humming there's only an hour so I'm gonna get going right away no time to spare on this one so permissionless innovation and the law what could that be about I bet you have no idea here's my outline I have some disclaimers I'm going to like fill philosophically like what is law I'm gonna try to bust some harmful legal myths talk about permissionless Lee innovating in law and I'm gonna talk about crypto law what is crypto law I'm like basics basics of crypto law and then I'm gonna have our conclusion so disclaimers I'm not responsible for how you use the information in this talk there's only so much responsibility that I can take with

for what you do and I'm trying to be responsible but there's only so much that I can do and you know you're gonna have to be responsible for your actions you're not getting any kind of permission for me I don't have that kind of authority you know please be responsible you know people have kind of pointed me in the direction of the law and challenged my legal thinking but you know I am responsible for the contents of this talk you know if you have any beefs come talk to me but also not during the talk I have lots to go through please come after so and the main reason why I'm giving this talk really is because I have big legal problems or I see big legal problems and I think they need to be urgently addressed and so I'm trying to help you

know make that happen by providing you know a bunch of information encouragement etc so what is law this is the definition that I'm using when I say law this is what I mean law probably or might mean something else to you and that's okay you know but this is what I mean said you know when I'm talking this is what I'm this is what I'm talking about so legal order is the structure of disputes and laws basically all of the ways that disputes can play out another way that I say this is by changing the word disputes for conflict so law is the structure of conflict or all the different ways that conflict can play out this law exists or you know if it doesn't how how does it exist well basically it exists

axiomatically as long as there's conflict as long as there's conflict there's like some like ways that it can play out and like that's where law is so it exists as long as there's conflict as long as there are disputes and where does it exist well if the people exist then in some extent some way and they all exist in like the same world then in some way the law exists also in the world with them like wherever they're having conflict law exists there's some business concept called a legal matrix a person's legal matrix is all their experiences judgements perceptions worldviews assumptions etc that make up how they perceive in the experience and they judge that disputes will play out

so like my legal matrix is kind of made up of the ways that I experience legal reality it's kind of kind of personal pot to an extent and the legal matrix in just absolutely is it the aggregate collection of every person's legal matrices so the legal matrix is kind of made up of everyone perceptions realities world views about how they have conflict and so law exists both inside and outside of people's legal matrix because it's like somewhat defined in people's perceptions of experiences but it's also there are things outside of people's perceptions and experience that will determine and influence the way conflicts plays out random events like things about the

universe like things that are written down but no one's thinking about right now and so just to give an illustration and made this tweet a little while ago and and I said like oh look this is a legal order between termites and ants and if you can you can imagine then each one of these answer has a kind of legal matrix the ones on the front line there are like directly kind of experiencing the conflict with the ants in front of them and they have beliefs or kind of a state about how that's gonna play out and the legal order is kind of the social order that come that comes about because of this structure of disputes between these between these ants and termites so you know legal order is like emergent and emerges

of individual people's choices and perspectives on the conflicts are having so long exists kind of all over the place it exists it's kind of complicated it's in every source of the structure of conflict law is actually law is ontologically very complex meaning that like its existence is complicated it's really hard to say look this is law here and that's it that's the whole of the law so now let's use this definition or this framework to kind of bust some common legal myths firstly the why or miss legal myths so common well firstly

like law is incredibly complex people can't really be expected to reason clearly about complex topics and you know law is really as you know as complex as life it's really you know very very complex and so mythal and mythology works to get people to do things and act and have kind of coherence in the context of unconceivable inconceivable complexity and laws incredibly old it's incredibly old incredibly complex is older than speech writing and culture itself because conflicts existed before any of these things and people had confidence on a few food territory way before they learned to speak and write and have you know what isn't kind of what I thought

of as modern legal institutions so people has experience of law as kind of a result of long history and there's various myths that have kind of long histories and so because it's so old and institutionalized and complex these myths kind of carry about they kind of are propagated so legal and legal argument is done in the context of people's legal matrices if I'm trying to convince you to do something to change your behavior I have to appeal to like the legal gods that you recognize to the mythology that you see and that you believe and so if I'm gonna have some kind of legal discourse with you to try to change your behavior I have to appeal to basically your legal matrix and if

your legal matrix has some common myths in it one way for me to to do that rather than having to change your mind in your worldview is to just kind of buy into the myth little use that use your the your legal matrix to manipulate you based on what kind of conflicts you recognize so you know the prevailing tradition is to study the legal history and become familiar with legal doctrines norms and institutions that people use today just kind of learn you know how is this law that it got here where did it get from and so people when they learn about law learn all these myths or some of these myths because of the kind of historical facts about how law became came to be the way it is so because of this kind of

historical complexity reasons and because of the nature of trying to convince them of something law is there's a lot of legal myths all over the place and there are also people in institutions who directly benefit from legal myths and so they're actively defended you know sometimes they're defended just out of like didn't give me cognitive dissonance when someone disagrees with my myth and so I'll just have to defend it but often it's you know unwitting self-preservation where like the way that you orient yourself in the world is kind of based on in on legal stories and if you if those legal stories are threatened then all of a sudden you know you feel on unsecure like you know and and people also feel threatened also just because just if you

tell them something that they don't understand and you and you act like it has like legal force and then and and that also kind of can make people feel threatened so people have you know actively defend legal myths and so and and often for just their an immediate benefit whether its comfort or actual power or power that they get to have because of legal stories so let's go through I have eleven legal myths so law is slow static and it's not innovative common legal myth reality is that law responds in real-time to the conflicts that people are having right away and people you know will even preempt the conflicts they might have with legal

work today the law responds even in advance of conflict it preempts conflict so you know law is really really much less slow and Static than people imagine because people usually focus on particular legal institutions that have a lot of momentum and that have kind of these myths that they monopolize law we get into those in it soon and and and and they kind of have this idea that oh like law is slow and that's just not not true not true at all the law is expensive you know people believe this but you know the law is it not a market good you can't by law you can buy legal services and legal services can be expensive but they're not long right you put you pay for some

someone to represent you in a dispute you know you're not buying law you're buying legal services someone who's gonna to represent you maybe you hire a mediator you know you're not buying law you're buying someone who's going to participate in your disputes your right not you're buying the people obviously nowadays you know you're just buying their services so you know while I was coercive another super common myth laws not inherently violent although it obviously does and can sanction coercion people have many ways of dealing with disputes preventing them not just violence not just the coercive force you know the coercive kind of side of lies

you know there because the coercion is involved in conflict but lots of law is not coercive and law is not inherently coercive is that in fact lots of legal philosophies specifically set up to prevent coercion to get people to you know voluntarily change their behavior and to be voluntarily more lawful instead of having to be forced so like the idea that law is coercive is just a myth law the law is code people kind of believe this and it is it's not true I mean law is informational II ontologically epistemological II much more complex in code you know it exists in like not a single computational environment like code does you know code has like a semantics you know that's

like you can you know you usually has like a formal semantics law is it doesn't exist in like a single place like that you know law is much more complex in code the laws would not like code I slipped four into two because I didn't want to remember the the myths the code is law also kind of a myth so like the I do most people really believe this I just bring this up because it comes up in the space a lot while some legal orders are kind of the result of interpretation and enforcement of written laws that are not more than complex in code because they're just kind of you know formal writing on on like signal like medium however the interpreting of the interpretation and

enforcement of laws of like written codes is never the whole of the law and that's just because law is the structure of all of the conflict and it's never gonna be the case that all of the conflict can be encoded because you know you have conflict about that there's like it just conflict and disputes are more complex than anything you could write down it's just as has a person who's writing things down in a system in which the disputes are is taking place just informational e gonna be impossible to write down the whole in wah so you know code is never the whole of the law and thiing of code is law is usually deeply problematic law that is not enforced by the government or the state is not law common myth very common myth

people have many many many ways that they manage disputes and not all are dominated by the possible or actual intervention through national law it's just like a myth that only law that's enforced is law and it's a very harmful myth actually because there's lots of law that isn't recognized by this rule I think I have another myth soon to follow up on that another myth law is inherently territorial again people have lots of complex disputes that go across territories and that territoriality of certain kinds of legal order doesn't apply for all of them it's not inherently territorial because disputes conflict is not inherently

territorial it was maybe you know some disputes are inherently territorial but not all and so law itself is not inherently territorial common common myth and then the one laws the turf of legal professionals okay laws existed for way longer than the professionalization of law you know people making professions out of helping people with disputes one way or another avoiding them having them mediating them like you know resolving them you know there's a natural specialization because conflict is complicated and people aren't going to want to go or go it alone but legal professionals provide legal services and

they for the most part have very little agency in governing belong they're mostly participating in a legal system and have relatively little agency in governing law basically because they're providing services to clients and their clients are responsible in some way for telling to some extent anyways for for what for what they're doing so you know law is not inherently the turf of legal professionals law is much more the turf of the people who set the terms for conflict which is kind of a different class of people not always obviously lawyers get it get involved all the time but you know there's there's a kind of agency in disputes that is like not

inherent to legal professionalism but that it you know is much more about is kind of laws more the turf of those people than it is of legal professionals here in my opinion so you know here's another myth kind of offer the territoriality one international law global law doesn't exist it's not true these conflicts exist in therefore this law exists and there's lots of globally internationally recognized legal norms for example the prohibition on genocide there's lots of and there's lots of there's lots of legal norms that are internationally recognized but that aren't ratified in local legal systems so another myth law is fundamentally

about power obviously law mediates power relations because it governs how conflicts play out but it's not really it can't really be understood in terms of people's attentions because it's emergent from their conflict and it's not really just a and means of getting compliance because it's like the structure of the conflict it's not like a means by which someone has conflict so and people believe that law is inherently hierarchical and this is just untrue also because no one is above the law no one can have complete sovereignty sovereignty in governing the law not even the most powerful people or nation-states in the world have that kind of position in law and and since everyone is subject to law and everyone is subject to the rule of law and my and

you know that was a little more questionable um world law is like a concept that says that like you know the rule of law like the lot law should rule over people as opposed to vice-versa but even if people are governing law it's not gonna be the case that any one of them is in a complete monopoly position and so basically and just in the way that people just resolve disputes also isn't inherently about people's positions in hierarchy but about like the facts of the case and the particular law governing that dispute you know even everyone has rights under the law even people in disadvantaged positions so permission ly innovating permission permission lessly innovating in the law

this is like the kind of now we get to so so the reason why I had to do the legal myths first is basically that there's a lot of these legal myths are gonna stop you if you believe in them from from participating in some of the legal questions that legal legal issues that we have and and and so this this section now I'm going to talk about some tactics for how you can participate in law without permission without having like a special authority or special position in society that gives you advantage like I mentioned everyone has rights afforded by law everyone has some capacity for legal agency and permissionless innovation in law as

possible so here's the first tactic have disputes and manage conflict everyone has people and things in their life that they're able to dispute and that they are able to think about disputing or accepting or and you actually can exercise agency in how you manage conflict in your own life and it's incredibly important to understand that this is exercising agency in in to some extent at the margin of the law or basically like you and all of the people that you can have in conflicts with you know are that conflict discovered somewhat by your legal matrix the way that you see the disputes that you're having with them

and at the margin you can change your legal matrix quite relatively easily it's just changing what you think but in any case if you exercise agency and how you manage disputes you can change the law in your immediate vicinity and you're a kind of immediate legal context and you know this can be incredibly powerful you know if you're like being bullied at school you can like change the way you're managing that dispute and end up being less bullied and you know it you know obviously it's not always that easy depending on your bullies but you have some agency and how you manage conflict with them you can try to like agree with parties to your disputes how you're

gonna handle them there's limits to this but basically people do this a lot is kind of it's kind of a private legal pattern where basically we will agree beforehand before we enter a relation how the disputes that arise are gonna be handled and this is like the basic pattern of of private law and there's limits of private law you can't do this arbitrarily there's there's you know other people will come in and interfere with your disputes if you have like if you you know agree to slavery and you're you know and like you know or like lots of things that are just not legally allowed because of basically you know limits to private law there's like limits to the extent that you can do this then you can agree with people but like every legal contract is kind of

like this you try to manage your disputes by getting that some kind of agreement about what's gonna happen if you have disputes and you can just view lots of things not just you know the way someone behaved in a commercial interaction with you you know you can dispute norms doctrines just about anything you can identify and possibly change so the scope of things that you dispute is also when you're in your in your control to some extent so having disputes and managing conflicts like my first tactic for permissionless the innovating the law and no one can give you permission to have disputes or not in or it's not really necessary so tactic number to call it hack the matrix so hacking the matrix is about changing

the way people perceive experience their disputes or the way that they see other people's and disputes is general playing out hacking the matrix is you know lets you change a lot of them at the margin by changing how people treat and think about the dispute that they have now you know obviously there's only limit this limits here too because like how persuasive can you really be to how many people and but still you can to some extent just by changing the way people think about the disputes that they have in the coffee that they have that you can change law at the margin you can use language to do this but you can also there's also situational things and kind of actions that you can take that expose

or just force people's legal matrices to change because now they're like observing a new kind of conflict or they're you know seeing that things don't play out the way they expected and this let gets them to update their legal matrix and to be like okay maybe you know is actually an exception here or maybe this is not an evil law isn't the way I thought it was and so you can do things also to kind of put pressure on people's legal matrices to change because as they deal with reality they have to update their worldview otherwise they fall out of sync in high and there's costs associated with with that loss of context and so you can just do things and create situations and I like the situational kind of actions as

opposed to like speech kind of actions or media sharing media that can change people's legal matrices so in you can you can create a new matrix the third tactic this is kind of the idea here is like you create new contentious ground you creating space for a new law to emerge just by creating a place or thing that people have just gonna have disputes about where they haven't really had disputes about before now obviously like their culture will carry in some legal matrix for this new context but to some extent you have the opportunity to exercise agency about the law that's gonna exist in that space you know you create a new battleground you get to

exercise some agency about what that looks like and therefore how how law plays out so you get to choose to some extent the nature of the actions available in that space and that constrains what law is even possible there you get to and you can also tightly associate the space with legal doctrines so that when you get to the space and you learn about it and you learn about how conflict happens there you can basically be kind of be tricked or educated into adopting a particular legal matrix so when you come to this space you learn about how people what the culture is here how people do conflict here and that education kind of infects your legal matrix with

assumptions about how disputes play out and there and and and that creates legal order because it stops you from engaging certain streets that you think you're gonna lose it like gets you doing agents views that you think you're gonna win and you know so when you're when you're creating a new battleground a new place where people or like a new artifact where people that are people gonna have disputes about there's an opportunity to associate with that artifact legal doctrines and this is like Association like you know you like in the way that you learn about immutability when you learn about the blockchain it's like almost in the same sentence to hear about both when you're like being taught about either and so you know this tight association of legal doctrine with a

particular area of disputes can create new legal matrix and buy new matrix I don't mean like you know you create a whole separate world but just that there's like a sub world you know more were the assumptions and beliefs that people have our or may be different or deviating from legal norms somewhere else great so those were the three tactics for permissionless lee innovating in law have disputes conflicts OSH conflict hack the matrix and create a new matrix the third one is probably less well it's more like create space with its own special matrix or create a matrix that's associated with an artifact or space so that people who interact with that end up getting kind of infected or getting

influenced by the legal norms and doctrines that are used around there great so now let's turn to crypto along important topic let me take a sip of water so what is crypto law crypto law is the law that governs disputes and conflict about cryptocurrency blockchain and other technology like related tech and another way crypto laws the structure of conflict and disputes about crypto currency watching and the related product protocols here are like some classic case studies in crypto law the Bitcoin block size debate was more like go war than a debate and the Dow Hart fork these are like you know some

examples where like we saw conflict in crypto that play out in different ways there's lots of other ones including like the prog pal thing like the stock funds thing like the recent Steam takeover there's lots of case studies encrypt all all the time actually because people have lots of conflict in crypto currency and then there's also case studies in national law that are related to crypto and that this is what people normally consider to be case studies about crypto along but I usually focus on the actual disputes about the protocols as opposed to disputes about how people use it although obviously how people use the protocols locally you know is also a crypt ends up also being a crypto law

issue right law doesn't ever the law doesn't exist in a vacuum exists in the context of the world that people are already having conflict in and so basically crypto protocols have associated legal orders you know super tightly associated and and and law and the Crypt encryption law governs conflict about these protocols and it governs also that legal order so and what happens is global crypto protocols established global legal orders basically protocol live in cyberspace and people interact with them from all over the world from behind their internet connections and they kind of become bound to the legal

matrices of these of these protocols and as they learn and you know as they learn how and as they are in of indirectly influenced by the way that disputes play out in those spaces so to some extent so here's like an example imagine you like interact with some tap on aetherium and then like you know the Terms of Service that they wrote our like void because they're not legally written like in a way that's recognized and then you end up getting bound to like a chord in New York because like that's where they're the core company that incorporated that or like built that application was built so that you can you so you can basically have you know even accidentally legal

orders be propagated with technology just because of the way that disputes ultimately play out around that thing you know people will look for ways to bind disputes to their particular legal matrix and if you can if you give them that sometimes you know you you can accidentally propagate like a legal order that you don't even intend to with your application so you know but but sometimes it's much more much less like accidental and much more much more deliberate like for example in Bitcoin in aetherium they're slightly less extent is are associated with legal doctrines that have like clear formal suggestions for how conflicts should

play out specifically you know blocking immutability is this global legal order that is established through the association of legal doctrine with technology and you know so pretty much everyone believes that if you try to like change the Bitcoin protocol and change it from like 21 million bitcoins to like 23 or 20 that everyone will be like no like that's not gonna happen in mutability is you know what they'll tell you one way or another and and basically everyone kind of believes in these in and has legal matrix that disallows this kind of change and so basically you know the like blockchain immutability is like propagated through these legal doctrine and hacks people's legal matrix it also creates deploying a blockchain also

creates a space where people will have disputes and you know so blockchain immutability is a global legal order that has been established through the association of doctrine of technology and it places certain software above dispute and this code is law fashioned it deviates from global legal norms everywhere and the legal justification is basically that there's no other way to stop nation-states and other powerful actors from capturing the protocol this is like the formerly legally why we have immutability is because we are afraid of capture it is like the whole the whole kind of story and so actually you know the the blockchain immutability deviates

from important legal norms and justifies it based on the foundation of legal myths legal myths that basically simplify what law is about that basically make to hijack people's fear of the nation-state that hijack people's fear of power of politics and kind of convinces you that unless you have this fully autonomous software there's not gonna be any law here it's gonna be lawless it's gonna be like basically like the most powerful actor wins so there's the kind of legal doctrine basically says that like you know anything but fully autonomous software will become legally captured and you know so the so we have like in my

opinion a kind of formal legal doctrine that defends immutability and this grounded in a bunch of myths about law and there's very very few actors with legal agency in crypto law most people don't even have like consciousness required to act in the space most people just accept immutability they just accept all of the um they just accept the way that conflict plays about crypto they don't really have any impetus or agency in in how that plays out and people who do have agency in crypto a lot tend to

subscribe to some of these legal myths and they're unable to recognize the existence or importance of crypto law in its own and its own right and so a lot of people who have agency crypto are just focused on keeping it outside the reach of nation-states or just focus on a kind of legal strategy that but that has to do with making peace with nation-states but doesn't have anything to do with the managing of disputes about protocol definitions use naming branding etc so many people with agents in crypto are kind of either working to protect it from the nation-state system or to being work with the nation-state system that are and are basically only exercising agency inside of the context of national law and so therefore are kind of they're acting in crypto law but

they're doing it from a legal matrix that only recognizes national law and so they're kind of even people who have agency in crypto law tend to be not directly working on crypto long not really directly exercising agency encrypt a lot but exercising an agency and how national law deals with crypto which is of course I cooked a lot issue but it's not court crypto law because crypto protocols fundamentally aren't territorial they're not really to do with how people use them their protocol definitions and naming etc so basically as a result a lot of people encrypt a lot today basically don't recognize

crypto legal arguments they don't really they don't really recognize anything that you could tell them about crypto long you know they would recognize and they're afraid of national law and so you know you have to kind of if you make legal arguments with them talk to them about kind of the kinds of conflict they recognize like getting arrested you know like being sued like things that you know aren't really like crypto law outcomes but our personal legal outcomes for them and so you know this is like another issue that if you know you try to you try to persuade these people you try to change their behavior to try to say look like this is not lawful like let's do better and they're like don't recognize the words and so they just kind of keep going in their own matrix in their own in their

own in their own world not really participating in crypto life fully or properly and how do you have disputes with the people who have had success in the past of creating protocols and and then when these protocols you know they become kind of institutionalized almost immediately by the developers who maintain them and who can't really make big changes to them you know how do you have disputes with Satoshi with nick szabo with Gavin wood with italic you know how do you fight these people about protocol definitions you know the this doesn't have like a really really great or clear answer because most of these people don't have like a legal interface for you to do that you know most these people don't even they they kind of have their own legal

worldview and their own agenda and they're not really participating in conflict with each other about it it's more like is it's it's like you know the wood Gavin ever fight with Vitalik or an exam about how to govern polka-dot know right and and and there's and there's lots of different people who have agency in in crypto law but for the most part they they don't exercise it by fighting with each other and with the crypto associated with different peripheral protocols is quite different but doesn't really vary is the global scope of the legal order or of the ambition for people's use of the protocol and

therefore of the impact of that legal order you know public block chains and permissionless block chains are grounds for global law and whether it's Libre or national block chain approach project or you know an immutable one they have an Associated legal order and it's very consequential you know what this is because these are really really high stakes and furthermore here's like a big issue in crypto long it's kind of a from a broader issue in software long the legal modern model and software for the most part isolates engineers architects and developers from liability and assumes that people voluntarily use the software as if likely meaningly

meaningfully consent to it and therefore can waive their rights when interacting with that software and so you know this is the predominant legal model and even you know as going as far as saying that like software is speech so it's like additionally politically protected and not just and not only you know is it just protected by the waiver of liability that people can you know that is it assume that people are able to do when they approach software so like legal order and software today is quite bad in my opinion quite bad very bad a lot of people don't really understand software and and and oops they're supposed to say software people don't understand long there's a lot of risk actually to the public today because of

this because of legal order and software which basically allows for huge costs for the public but no just disputes that stick against the people who cause them and so you know you know and which is not to say that a lot of people understand law or that software people understand software you know these are incredibly complicated things and like even professionals work in the space have no you know real computer science or legal philosophy backgrounds and so you know just cuz you work with something doesn't mean that you actually understand it and then when you're working at the intersection of things that people don't understand and not only don't understand but have like all sorts of myths about and use it improperly all the time you know it's it's a recipe for disaster

it's like a you know complex dispute about things that are super powerful outside and like you know that we don't really control or that we don't really know how to control and so the law of software already sets us up for failure like the legal legal order in software development globally like sets us our failure and in crypto law we have it's kind of even worse and no matter how it plays out no matter whether the permission is immutable Bakhtin's win or an international corporate protocols or national blockchains we there's like a serious risk for global public because of the way that people use it or the way that people like for example you know imagine like evidence that's on the block it's admissible in court and if it's not

on the blockchain it doesn't exist like the unimagine all sorts of crazy kinds of things that people want to do in order to manage disputes with blockchain and which is not even mentioned disputes about blockchain and and you know there are like all sorts of all sorts of issues around watching governance and all sorts of risks and basically crypto law is that actually poses this risk more than the technology does because the technology doesn't govern how we use it it doesn't say how people think about how they govern it what crypto law does crypto law does govern them and basically what happens is you know we have these global protocols and they

pose global risks to the global public and no one almost recognizes the need for D to deal with crypto outside of national law no one almost recognized to deal with software law outside of national law and you know these disputes are not inherently territorial they're about protocol definitions and the way that we use protocol and you know so we have basically a legal culture that isn't prepared to deal with crypto law issue directly and so as a result we have huge risks and people who basically aren't able to recognize them and aren't able to therefore deal with them and so therefore the few people with agency in

the space the NIC Szabo's of the world the gavin woods of the world they see opportunity to do crazy stuff and they're not really held accountable by anyone because they get to basically compete in an open market in this kind of open market i think you lost the slide so what happens in crypto the kind of what equilibrium in crypto today is that like them you take the software as is provided you know with like a liability waiver and then it's up to the market for competition between protocols to determine outcomes and so the so these actors are mostly just rushing to market trying to get their protocol

adopted and accepted by market makers and all of them different market participants in order to get their protocol to win and this is kind of the way conflict place out in crypto today it's like if you've got a kind of a free-for-all race and whoever wins the race gets to impose their crypto legal order on the world and you know it doesn't sound safe to me because we well know that this market is not efficient its path dependent and path dependent markets are generally not efficient so conclusion nice I'm a good time so what can we do well there's a lot there's a lot we can do and permissionless lee we can have disputes in crypto along for example i dispute the immutability norm and the doctrine and the whole immune that everything

that's associated with it for me is just like I'm fighting to the death you know I don't know what means but you know if you hang out on me and you believe in that stuff you're gonna get some dissonance and I hope it hurts and I hope that you change your mind and I'm gonna continue to dispute the immutability doctrines because I think they're just just so wrong it's not even funny we can hack the matrix we can change how people understand the way disputes play out in cryptocurrency I'm trying to do this I'm trying to get you to imagine a world where it's not the case that this code is above dispute but where it actually can be disputed and where these disputes instead of playing out like sorry there's nothing we can do

for you are more like let's see if there's something that we can do with that reason you know that's reasonable you know because there's there's at the end of the day certain decisions in Krypton in watching governance that are possible and not in and there are gonna be limit there are limits decrypt a lot just because of the limits to decisions about protocol but you know to determine whether there's something that anyone can do for you you know isn't just a matter for me of looking at the immutability node norm and saying no take it home but a matter of looking at the like tech reality and seeing whether or not there's anything that's technically feasible to deal with you know this conflict especially if you

know it's like not a frivolous dispute but a dispute that's based on like sound crypto law work so we can hack the matrix and try to do that and you can create a new matrix third tactic and I you know invite you to have disputes and conflict in crypto law the space where we have conflict about protocol definitions used in naming implementations etc and you know this kind of space is not national law right it's not to do with disputes with the legal persons that have territorial monopolies on violence in a in a in a

geographical region you know these are about disputes about protocol definitions and naming and this is like a whole space where we can have disputes and then the norms that we use here are obviously very deviant from legal norms and other places but you know I invite you to have way more disputes to not imagine that this is settled that like crypto laws decided as immutability but that this is actually a full space where we can have disputes and where we can have a legal order that actually is the result of the way that people who consciously kind of know that they're having disputes about crypto along have disputes about crypto law I also invite you to launch your own protocols with

legal doctrines that you think about instead of accidentally porting some national legal doctrines or so or immutability or or some corporate governance or just kind of having this unthinking reflexive attitude you know instead of just accepting the legal realities of your protocol as being inherent it from like the the context in which you're deploying it you know think actively about what do the people who use your protocol believe about the conflict about that they're gonna have possibly with other people who are possibly between themselves you know about protocol definitions about whatever you know so I encourage you to

like when you're launching a protocol to think very carefully about this you know don't launch an application and unwittingly behind everyone who uses it to a New York jurisdiction like don't on wittingly launch an application and bind everyone to an immutable and immutable legal order just because you like that's the dominate culture in the space you know you should think carefully about how people will use your protocol about how they're gonna have disputes about your protocol and to exercise agency rather than to accept whatever is gonna happen and act like it's not your responsibility so please everyone has agency and you know everyone can

participate to avoid bad outcomes in crypto law you know if you just know to pay attention you know what cravat poses global legal risks but there's also incredible global legal opportunities you know the fact that someone can come up with the technology associated legal doctrine with it propagate it and have all no kind of deviant legal order associated with that tech is astounding and amazing and it will change the world and it has changed the world and this is a tremendous opportunity as much as it's a tremendous risk and and there's a lot of little need for global law in

cyberspace and on earth in general you know we have a lot of global legal problems that are poorly addressed under the like national legal matrices that people are living under and so you know it's not I'm not just trying to scare you but I also think that like you know it's something that if you want to make an impact that you should consider being involved in but if what on the scaring side you know if you seen us if you see it and do nothing then there's a good chance that one day you're gonna have a lot on your conscience because we are not heading for a nice disputes you know we're heading for a kind of nasty outcomes and if you see this and you do nothing then you kind of had the

opportunity to exercise agency and and and and if you'd and if you're like one of the few people who has a lot of power in the space then you know I think that that will be a higher burden to bear and this is kind of the most important piece of advice like pleading like don't obstruct trip too long you know don't be territorial don't engage in crypto lands drain standing you know you don't want to exclude people from participating we need as much input from different cultures as possible we can't be territorial about crypto law it's it's really really you know really not helpful especially when there's so many

Lamas and said don't don't if you know that it's a myth like don't spread it like don't spread harmful longness like all those myths that I listed are actively harmful and crypto law because people you know believe them and it stops them from even thinking about how to properly manage these disputes because that just seems like it's not their responsibility it seems like you know law is not the right approach whatever it is legal myths really harm crypto long it stops people from doing crypto legal analysis properly which means that like they aren't really able to navigate crypto law because they don't really understand how this Puetz play out with these nerds who you know don't reckon have like a very different

perception of how disputes are gonna play out you know or at least some of them anyways so like you know what it doesn't help your legal analysis to believe Lamas it doesn't help other people's it gets people confused it creates systemic issues so please don't spread la myths and stop looking for other people to take responsibility you know is a constant thing where people like think that they need authority or permission or to be specially blessed to do a certain task by someone you know but if you see the need contribute I mean this is the model of permissionless innovation I think it's like the my favorite model of

decentralization you know if you see you need and you see how to do it better just do it you don't need to wait for other people to do it better you don't need for other people to recognize that you recognize how to do it better stop looking for other people to take responsibility or new permission if you know the importance come help and we can definitely do better thanks a lot for listening so any question yeah we have ten minutes for questions amazing thanks a lot for this talk was really amazing I

think it's much more mature than the idea you already started twelve last year carry them that than the one the idea already started last year when you were ready to die on this hill what do you mean it's the same hell yeah it's the same hell but you got much more mature at explaining and I've been practicing all year yeah so remember year the last time we met I had to say that you were saying exactly what Sabo is saying but now it's completely different and it's reaching the wrong but I think that the part I wanted to infer that is not about crypto law it's about our tech disrupt legal legal has never the wrong understand software as you said and then never been really digitalized so the discovering computer and it's our tag disrupting legal and

everything they know that think we've and crypto it's particular interesting because there is governance and a lot of things that impact directly Rico I mean I think that like tech does impact the law because people have to have disputes about tech and with tech however I think that what we have in encrypt oh is like it's not just tech it's like tech in a particular socio-economic context and attack is always in a particular kind of context political socio-economic legal context and then like the particular doctrines that are associated with the technology are highly relevant like if we didn't associate blockchain technology with the mutability as the reason why it's trusted it would be we'd be living in a different world so you know it's it's it's also about sociology

you know like law like this Tech doesn't exist in a vacuum so I mean I agree that Tech is at issue because it leads to lots of complicated disputes and complicated ways that people have conflict but you know I don't think tech fundamentally disrupts law at all it's just you know law adapts to tech just like it adapts to any anything you know I would I would say that like there's a tremendous need for legal professionals in that serve crypto law but you know so I think there's actually like and and not only that but there's like a whole industry of crypto lawyers already that

serve people's needs in national law and so you know like I think that lawyers are the opposite of disrupted by crypto law or right crypto I think that they have like this opportunity to make money personally and to improve their personal professions like you know their career path like I think for most lot of people who are getting into crypto I mean it's an opportunity and they see it as an opportunity they don't see it as being disrupted and I think for right for good reason status Foley goal is rewrite this is a current status but the vision that's what blockchain can bring to the society to you mind interaction I think that's why I district like tech disrupted with Internet's already already interaction I like web too did

awesome yeah I mean III mean III I mean we'll see I'm not sure if I agree but please pass the mic because uh you know we might we need we have time for more questions anujan Vitalik and what a news photographer please go ahead I thank you very much for your presentation I'm wondering if you have seen any good examples of crypto lawyers um the examples are perfect log yeah I mean I think the DAO heart Fork was excellent I think the down hard fork represented a lot of in context legal judgment about like the various disputes that were happening and and I think it's like a nice it's like usually what I think about when I think about like the kinds of coordination that should happen in in

in in response to like really serious conflict and you know there were it wasn't perfect that there was the problems but yeah that's know me what I think about but but you know I would say that like it's not looking good overall yeah please if you maybe so I mean first of all and I don't feel like I'm that difficult to have disputes or thing and I even had a dispute with Nick Saban you look I blocked me on Twitter but anyway what's your least favorite crypto law other than immutability so I mean I I mean mmm that's this good question I mean really such a like a

dominating norm that it's like it doesn't leave room for almost anything else like almost nothing is allowed at all I think you know I mm-hmm you know it's tough yeah I don't know I mean I do I consider calling everything a scam to be part of crypto law Hey Anuj is next Anoosh is next I don't understand your question alexia news is over there he has his hand up

hey sorry I've been living in France too much doesn't mean anything I mean you know when you said and you know I've told you this before that what is law you give every ontology heavy definition I find it difficult because it's not the same thing for different people different stakeholders so like let's say national law right when you have a new law instituted it was different for the enforcers they were different incentive for example then say the subjects of the law then say the legislators of the law so even in the cryptology same thing I think part of the confusion that happens in crypto law it's it's not the same the

crypto law for the designers of the protocol other architects then for the users and unfortunately they don't see that they only have a mono stakeholder perspective they don't have a spectrum spec holder they don't have multiple stakeholders with different incentives so so I mean maybe yeah definitely just it's very clear that people have different positions in law and their experiences law is gonna be very different as a result and even I would say the out go as far as to say that like the legal myths that are sustainable for them to believe are gonna vary tremendously based on what their legal position is because like they see a different side of the elephant and therefore they you know they they defend my point is yeah so so and at least in my at least when I'm

talking about a little author there is in my definition right like if you use another definition you know that's you know you you knock yourself out but but you know I can't be fine but that's exactly what I cannot define so I have the definition and this is kinda what I'm using and maybe it's not the most formal perfect definition in the world that could be better but think but the idea here is basically that laws between all of the conflicts that's possible and so if you can think about say for example you know where that conflict exists what are all the sources of this of the ways that conflict plays out you know that's where law is and and and and

you know I understand that you're objecting to like the monolithic existence of the law however you know it's important to recognize that law exists outside of your legal matrix and outside of anyone's legal matrix because if not then somehow you would imagine that the ways that the disputes and conflict I have or that anyone has as structured is just a function of what people perceive and believe and how they act and we know there are subjective worlds and that's kind of I think it doesn't give enough it doesn't recognize the existence of law outside of experience or outside of the cell for us I you know and that and that I think is and you know shows somehow that that's kind of problematic because so you would

say that when this legal or are there disputes but not other way around always sorry - this legal order is already spute a priority but not the other way round no it's the both ways so we don't need two words so so I use legal order to mean the structure and the law to be a little more broad because I'm thinking all the boots and all we need two words they're the same it's different right because the disputes are governed by long and the so it's not like law is the dispute law is like the laws like the structure that governs it it's like the structure in which it takes place it's like the process by which it all plays

out it's it's is you know so it's not enough to just say disputes although I could always you know have a bunch of words instead of law you know there would be no disputes without law without dispute there would be no law and with a without law yeah so if law didn't exist that would mean that there was no disputes although it's a weird ball so weird exactly this like it you can own again thank you it's just like the causation doesn't work like that like exactly it's cause law and law cause disputes also but kind of like the disputes on the water we don't know there's nothing to dispute apart because there is no Lex no no no no no no not totally not no no I mean yes I mean kind of I would I would

say this way like law creates so I just fuse create law which create disputes which create law which creat disputes and the bottom is the disputes that's that's the way I bought him it out wow I think is well spiral you know I like to have induction and as opposed to circularity you know you have an induction with a starting point you know maybe I don't know I don't know I don't think so I mean for me there's just an argument what's your case on checking for like our testing for implicit trust and systems that that humans build for each other how do you test for implicit trust

yeah I mean that's a good question I mean so yeah I mean I don't know that's a tough question I would I would I would I would maybe rephrase to say like okay I like what how do you test if someone I mean I don't know yes I think it's too big is the course is too big sorry anyone else hey thanks for the talk do you believe that thinking of blockchains as dows more generally would help chip away at immutability thinking kind of I mean that's a good question yeah I mean maybe well you talk about

innovation innovation creating new crypto law but you don't didn't talk about the dangers of doing this you know for example we can it's a matter of sovereignty we can't create a new Krypton now and occupy this site and create some bonding Corp to manage its government I'm data etc so it's it's a danger to create new crypto law and it it's in conflict with other legal orders so what we can think about the conflict between different legal orders so that's a great great question so definitely legal orders don't exist in isolation of each other exactly you know and but but I would say that like we already have it really bad as it is so like you know the Dane

there is danger but like fully autonomous software is just about as bad as it can get I think and so I'm not I am concerned about it getting worse but I'm more concerned about just getting you know the status quo so I guess like I'm so urgently concerned by the status quo that I didn't stress that as much although I tried a little bit in the disclaimer but yeah definitely none of this stuff is low stakes and that means that if you screw up and or if it screws up it could be quite bad I mean you could imagine a world where you know some major nation state has the most popular public blockchain and and their courts resolve the disputes that happen on this like on the global

scale and and you know that could be that's like one disaster that's like very possible there's there's there's there's there's a number of ways that I could go badly and definitely you know today like the legal or we haven't crypto is very much in conflict with existing legal orders although I would say it's it's it's it's more its doctrinally inconsistent and the conflict is not really there yet I mean like conflict is coming because of the court collision course that were kind of on you know yes just what place you give in in this of illegal action when some ligado

don't permit who have so big spread between him it's an legitimacy mm-hmm yeah so I mean so so illegal is this concept that like it's against the laws or against somehow the legal against the legal order or you know I usually prefer the term unlawful because the opposite of eat legal is only said to be legal but then we talk about everything being like a legal construct or whatever and that gets confusing and so you know I mean I think that like they're I would say that like it's it's it's super important you know this question of like what conduct in crypto is lawful and not and it's and today it's kind of

indeterminate but you know what when you're when you say that I think you might mean in legal under the laws of a particular nation state and then how do we worry about that or do you mean do you know you mean like more globally unlawful yeah okay sure yeah so I mean the but but you know I it almost sounds like you're you're saying the only lawful thing to do is to do something illegal and it's kind of

its kind of this paradoxical thing where basically you know to like it's it's sometimes lawful to go against the legal order and sometimes it's not it depends on the circumstances and it's more and more has to do with like whether or not it's defensible whether in or whether or not someone or the world the world around you will take you down for doing it I mean in an exceptional circumstance you can behave far outside of a legal norm and people will recognize the exceptional circumstance and not bother you in a normal circumstance if you behave far outside the norm people will be like bring down the law on you and so and so you know it sounds like what

you're describing is an exceptional circumstance in which it's lawful to go against legal order and that totally totally happens and it's something that you know it's positive legal theories don't have a super great grasp on but which I think I can provide a nice except I think that was a nice description thank you thank you thank you thank you [Applause]