The Need for an Open Source Blockchain Platform Ecosystem
Smart Contract Dispute Solution
The cryptocurrency lawyers on LawTrades can provide proactive online legal planning to keep your Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency running smoothly during potentially rocky times. Emerging cryptocurrencies, wallet providers, smart contract services, digital miners, and cryptocurrency investors need a reliable legal service as they maneuver through complex financial cryptocurrency regulations and the legal ambiguities of this emerging digital market.
Our cryptocurrency lawyers are licensed across the country and are able to provide both the local regulatory support and the broad corporate guidance cryptocurrency businesses need to succeed.
An open source platform ecosystem for dispute resolution of crypto transactions allows users to opt into a conflict resolution mechanism that enables more nuanced crypto solutions and produces greater certainty for legacy businesses than existing solutions such as the Aragon network or OpenBazaar. The ecosystem provides anonymized arbiter expertise via rankings in combination with a representation option for crypto disputes. It provides an effective resolution mechanism for legacy businesses that desire to participate in the growth of crypto business opportunities, hope to avoid legacy system intermediation and the associated transaction costs, but require legal legacy system assurances and crypto dispute resolution equivalence.
The regulatory oversight over blockchain-based transactions is severely limited. Courts arguably cannot have jurisdiction over blockchain-based smart contracts because it is unlikely a court could find out who transacted via the anonymized blockchain. Furthermore, the court could not change or otherwise affect the transaction as it was coded because once the coded parameters were fulfilled the transaction auto-executed on the blockchain. Because of automated execution, contractual breach and damages are less likely to occur in smart contracts, especially as compared to traditional contracts.
The lack of identifiable parties in crypto transactions creates a distinct separation between real world and crypto transactions that has lasting implications for the application of existing jurisdictional principles. The aforementioned anonymity gained by the use of public-key encrypted identities and VPNs prevents the identification of the parties to a smart contract.
Without identifiable parties, jurisdictional principles such as subject matter jurisdiction, personal jurisdiction, diversity jurisdiction, and federal question jurisdiction become irrelevant. To illustrate this point, proving personal jurisdiction by means of 1. Physical Presence, 2. Domicile/Place of Business, 3. Consent, and 4. Minimum Contacts becomes impossible as none of these elements are known of the parties in a smart contract.
The enforcement of smart contracts with traditional legal means is limited. First, disputing a smart contract with traditional means (in court, arbitration, mediation, etc.) is only marginally possible because of the aforementioned anonymity in blockchain transactions. Moreover, while smart contracts are coded as self-executing contracts, they do not necessarily provide effective mechanisms for enforcement if one party breaches his or her obligations in the smart contract. Semantically, it may be argued that breach of a smart contract is not even possible: the contract simply will not execute if a parameter is not fulfilled.