Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code - Softcover

De Filippi, Primavera

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674241592 ISBN 13: 9780674241596

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2019

Synopsis

“Blockchains will matter crucially; this book, beautifully and clearly written for a wide audience, powerfully demonstrates how.”
―Lawrence Lessig

“Attempts to do for blockchain what the likes of Lawrence Lessig and Tim Wu did for the Internet and cyberspace―explain how a new technology will upend the current legal and social order… Blockchain and the Law is not just a theoretical guide. It’s also a moral one.”
―Fortune

Bitcoin has been hailed as an Internet marvel and decried as the preferred transaction vehicle for criminals. It has left nearly everyone without a computer science degree confused: how do you “mine” money from ones and zeros?

The answer lies in a technology called blockchain. A general-purpose tool for creating secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer applications, blockchain technology has been compared to the Internet in both form and impact. Blockchains are being used to create “smart contracts,” to expedite payments, to make financial instruments, to organize the exchange of data and information, and to facilitate interactions between humans and machines. But by cutting out the middlemen, they run the risk of undermining governmental authorities’ ability to supervise activities in banking, commerce, and the law. As this essential book makes clear, the technology cannot be harnessed productively without new rules and new approaches to legal thinking.

“If you…don’t ‘get’ crypto, this is the book-length treatment for you.”
―Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

“De Filippi and Wright stress that because blockchain is essentially autonomous, it is inflexible, which leaves it vulnerable, once it has been set in motion, to the sort of unforeseen consequences that laws and regulations are best able to address.”
―James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review

About this title

About the Author

Primavera De Filippi is a permanent researcher at the CERSA/CNRS/Université Paris II and a faculty associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Aaron Wright is Associate Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Blockchain Project at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674241592
• ISBN 13: 9780674241596
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312