Transforming a Digital Generation: How the Economic and Legal Implications of Blockchain Will Reshape Society

Transcription

1 Transforming a Digital Generation: How the Economic and Legal Implications of Blockchain Will Reshape Society

2 State of the Art Agenda Technological Potential & Legal Implications Looking Ahead: Key Policy Issues for Research and Debate

3 State of the Art The Evolution of Blockchain, Its Limitations, and Future Developments

4 Blockchain Basics LEDGER DIGITAL ASSETS CONSENSUS PROTOCOL DISTRIBUTED VERIFICATION

5 Distributed Verification Technologies Continuous Verification Decentralized Authority Consensus Operations Provable Data Integrity

6 Elements of DVTs DISTRIBUTED DATA PROCESSING CONSENSUS

7 Distributed Verification Technologies (DVTs) Blockchain Bitcoin Linked List Implementations Ethereum Distributed Verification Technologies (other) Distributed Ledger Technologies Graph Implementations? EOS

8 Blockchain 1.0 Blockchain 3.0 Blockchain 2.0 Technological Evolution

9 Blockchain 1.0 Decentralized Digital Ownership Distributed Verification

10 Blockchain 2.0 Smart Contracts Executable Agreements

11 Ethereum Virtual Machine and EOS Paving the way for Blockchain 3.0?

12 Known Limitations Blockchain 1.0 Limited applications exchange of static digital objects Blockchain 2.0 Limited extensibility Can t program arbitrarily while technically Turing complete dapps are constrained to implementations based on executable agreements You can have any dapp you want, as long as it can be implemented as an agreement

13 Looking Ahead: Blockchain 3.0 Object Agnosticism Full Spectrum of Digital Ownership Consensus Algorithms for Arbitrary Questions Advanced Data Structure Implementations Moving Beyond Linked Lists!

14 Use Cases Healthcare Records Logistics/Smart Cities Digital IP

15 Technological Potential & Legal Implications Transforming a Digital Generation and Building a New Cyber Legal Landscape

16 New Tech, New Challenges Tangible Digital Property Ownership Real Property in Cyberspace Open Analytics

17 Tangible Property Ownership By cryptographically enforcing certain ownership rights (e.g., who possess a BTC) DVTs enable the ability of individuals to exercise actual ownership rights over digital objects, rather than just contractual rights

18 Tangible Property Ownership Tangible property (things that are not land) has presented a legal problem in cyberspace for decades Digital objects are easily replicable Maintaining ownership rights is difficult when the marginal cost of the next copy approaches zero This problem generally has been addressed through centralized Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies The problem with DRM is that it doesn t actually provide ownership rights, it just provides contractual rights (i.e., you don t actually own a song you purchase on itunes!)

19 Real Property In Cyberspace Blockchain 2.0 technologies, particularly EOS, present a gateway to the future of real property ownership in cyberspace Blockchain 2.0 tokens represent access to a resource similar to real property (land use) rights like water access or mineral extraction rights EOS tokens, for example, represent access to computing resources What if a token could represent generic property? (i.e., like physical world land ownership)

20 Real Property In Cyberspace Who owns cyberspace? (no one yet.) Real property (in the physical world) traditionally deals with the ownership of titled assets like land We don t yet have a true concept of owning space in cyberspace (yet) Property in cyberspace generally is a function of complex sets of contracts among providers of computing platforms (e.g., Amazon AWS), communications

21 Open Analytics There is a robust debate and research community regarding the privacy and ethical implications of centralized data analysis Much of it centers around the regulation, liability, and ethical responsibilities of those centralized actors But what about when there is not a centralized actor to hold accountable? In a DVT enabled analytic world, all the relevant information is stored publicly

22 Distributed Decision Making As Blockchain 3.0 concepts are realized, and arbitrary objects can be encapsulated in tokens, a concept of real property ownership can (finally!) emerge in cyberspace If a DVT 3.0 token can represent access (and control) over an arbitrary digital resource, without the need for a centralized authority, then individuals can exercise true ownership rights over property (space) in the digital world rather than having to rely on complex contractual arrangements The cryptographic and other computational enforcement of the rights associated with these tokens obviate the need for contractual relationships among many sets of providers to achieve something as simple as I own/control this space

23 Looking Ahead Key Policy Issues for Research and Debate

24 Closing Thoughts 1. Power of DVTs 2. Cyber Property 3. Privacy: New Ethical & Legal Questions

25 Power of DVTs Incredible potential that these new technologies will enable

26 Cyber Property Legal issue of the creation of new legal problems Ownership of things in cyberspace

27 Privacy: New Ethical & Legal Questions What changes with a DVT enabled world, is that the impact of decisions now has a worldwide effect on users Decisions cannot be bound just to the corporation or state level In decentralized environments, privacy is a different problem

28 Questions? Thank You! David Thaw Assistant Professor, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, School of Computing and Information, and Graduate School of Public and International Affairs