Thread by @angela_walch

We had our final class of Cryptocurrencies, #Blockchain Technologies & the Law yesterday!

At long last, here is the syllabus. (And yes, it is already out of date in this high-speed #crypto world.)

ledgerprof.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/blockc…

The course, as with the tech itself, is a work in progress. Thanks to my students for going along for the ride and to @VladZamfir for joining us for the governance class!

Some of my learnings:

It's really hard to decide how much time to spend on basics of the tech before moving into legal questions. I wish students could have a full course on the tech, its historical antecedents, its history over the last few years, key players in the space, etc.

It feels incomplete & kind of unsatisfying to grapple with legal questions around the tech when the tech is so immature and fast moving. Like trying to answer the legal questions is based on incomplete information. So, the course was framed as 'this is what we think now.'

I tried to be balanced & convey both the possibilities and the uncertainties. Not sure if I succeeded.

We dug hard into language & conceptual issues early in the course to highlight the uncertainty around the tech's basic characteristics (decentralization, immutability, etc).

I think that was a good decision b/c awareness of the tech's immaturity & our understanding was then able to flow into each legal topic.

On the legal side, this feels like a capstone-type course for law school. The more subjects students have already studied, the better. That's b/c the course functioned as a survey course -- how does crypto intersect w/ tax law, securities law, money transmission law, etc?

You clearly can't teach the entire subject (e.g., tax, securities law) when discussing its connection to crypto, so you take a very high level approach. This reminded me of teaching Corporate Planning, where we took a startup client through a myriad of legal fields.

Overall, the course was a reminder of how incredibly interdisciplinary the crypto world is. So many relevant & important topics we didn't have time to touch in a semester. Students asked yesterday if there would be a Crypto/Blockchain & the Law II. :)

Big themes that emerged over the semester:

-Uncertainty. Around the tech, terminology, law.
-Complexity. Around the tech, US laws/regulatory agencies, international regulatory competition.
-Rediscovery of why laws/governance exist.
-Need for critical, creative thinking.