 Okay. Go ahead. Great. Hi, everybody. Can you hear me? All right. Great. So Amy asked me to provide sort of a contextual anchor that you can think about as you're learning or reflecting on this somewhat unusual technology of blockchain and smart contracts. And so what I've done is put together a very high-level use case is what I would call it that describes a scenario that is intended to be very familiar, and the idea is for us to from time to time through the day refer back to the scenario so that you can basically have an anchor to evaluate the business context, the legal frameworks that may apply, and the technology. So first of all, what is a use case? Here's an example of a very simple one. It shows a person who's a registered user of some system and the action they're taking is editing an article. So that's a use case. This is a very common method to describe aspects of the system. This nomenclature is unified modeling language, and while it's simple and diagrammatic, when applied completely and correctly, it affords sufficient information to actually verifiably code in any number of languages and application and to traceably test whether the application achieves all of the intended requirements and reflects all of the constraints of the system. So it's got a lot of usefulness for that purpose. Here's a slightly more complex use case that involves two actors going through a food ordering process that you'd be familiar. This is offline. So notice there's an actor, an action, and then see that little box that's a system boundary or a contextual boundary so that we know the facet of the situation we're looking at. This is critical when we're doing a legal analysis. So this is the rudiments of the use case. The one that I selected is, I think, foundational to common law and to modern commercial law. It's purchase and sale of a good. So in the United States, we'd be looking to Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code, and you can extrapolate to the appropriate Canadian canon. So one thing I want to highlight for you is this little method I call BLT. You can remember it because bacon, lettuce, and tomato, but basically the method is to take the little stick figures and the situation and to apply the business context. In business, you might say this person's a customer. That may be the prevailing context. Legally, they may be a consumer. Okay. There's consumer law, and there's a whole context there, technically, they're a user. So we're going to apply this BLT context throughout the analysis. Here's applying it to the other party. The other most important thing is I sort of gave it away in the last characterization, but in addition to these being abstract entities like customer, business, buyer, seller, they're also in a fact pattern that's a legal fact pattern that we can legally analyze to start to predict what the results would be in the event of a dispute, for example, or for some other legal analysis. They also are parties. So when we want to create the scenario, we want to say this is Jane Doe at 123 Elm Street. This is Acme Incorporated, Incorporated in Toronto, something like that. So for this particular use case, this is a use case that came out of the MIT Media Lab a couple of years ago when we were starting with a new initiative to apply legal to try to understand and help evolve blockchain technologies based on a legal perspective. So we're doing this through law.mit.edu and this particular project explored, well first we're going to explore an entire smart contract to see if we could analyze it in a way where we could discover predictable legal results when we probe various questions. And what we ended up doing was actually narrowing it further. So you'll hear more in a moment from Matt about the fundamentals of blockchain technology, but for the moment just know that one of the capabilities of blockchain technology is that it's premised on public private keys that every user has. They create an address on a blockchain. Well, public private keys is great, a key capability of blockchains is that every user will digitally sign transactions and some other actions using their private key. And this creates a signature that among other things can be cryptographically verified so that you know that the thing that was signed was signed by the corresponding key and it also allows you to know whether anything has changed based on hash technology that does a few other things. So what we did was we basically used the public private key pair on the Bitcoin blockchain and the Ethereum blockchain in a standard wallet and after monkeying around a bet and messing around with a crypto, which is a little weird as a quick aside for those of you that are into cryptography, it's not RSA and it's not any other common library that you might use. When we tried to do this we discovered it's, well we kind of knew it was an elliptic curve but it's SECP256K1 if you want to try this at home and so that's what you need to search for when you're looking for libraries or other things to try to make it sign something and that was a whole journey. Anyway, once we finally accessed the private key material and figured out how to utilize it, we just said okay let's say the actors using their blockchain identity with their key pair sign just a simple PDF document with it and the document is a contract for the sale of goods and let's just run that through the system and see what happens if there's a dispute and can we attribute it to the party and what other affordances does it have and then we had a couple of other scenarios where we then said okay let's say they also took that PDF contract, hashed it when it was signed and entered that onto a blockchain so we had some forensic evidence of it and let's say some of the terms in the contract were interested PDF but let's say they're actually being executed in a so-called smart contract so we tried a few permutations of it but for purposes of today let's just stick with the simplest possible case which is you're using the public private key pair associated with a blockchain address you're signing something in commerce is that exactly the same? Is it different? Is it better? Is it worse? Let's play it out. So what we how do you play it out? So what we decided to do is like a little mock trial and we postulated that that the buyers and sellers use this key pair and they effectuated a sale of a used car that was like ten thousand one dollars or whatever the threshold was to get it over small claims court so you could go to you know adult court and actually enter things into evidence and things like that and something went terribly wrong because it's a legal fact pattern and so you know like I just gave the money I didn't get the car you know I gave the car I didn't get the money I got the car it was a lemon something like that and now and what we focused on was admissibility and enforceability of the signature and the contract just again basic stuff what we discovered was a whole bunch of things the first thing we discovered is that it's not as well the the rhetoric around blockchain suggests it has almost mystical properties of non-repudiation and you know certainty and you know it either avoids or somehow resolves before they can ever occur legal issues so that we can you know almost float above these mundane jurisdictional wrinkles we didn't notice any mystical properties what we didn't notice was that it raised and clarified a bunch of specific issues which I want to share with you now and encourage you to think about some of these things as you're hearing about the transactions and other performance and dynamics of blockchain one of them was raised the question of whether the parties had access to somebody who could actually lay a proper foundation in court so we had you know world-class photographers and other people we've kind of assumed various roles for the mock trial and the person that actually coded the system a great great developer named Christian Smith who's recognized global thought leader and identity and digital signatures when we were when I was playing the council to help them lay the foundation we realized well it's easy to just sort of assert that it's immutable but to lay the foundation and ask question after question was actually really complicated and by the time we were like 15 or 20 minutes into just you know the first few steps we realized no judge is ever going to understand this no jury is going to understand it and there's just a very practical question of how do you explain this in an understandable way and what kind of exhibits would you have that would show the salient elements of it Amy in her in her framework is going to clarify some of that but it's a the very first most important thing is to truly understand the capabilities and the functionality of the technology such that you know it cold you can describe it not to other people and not overstate or understate or wrongly state what it does now getting a little deeper there's a question about whether the cryptographic and other verifiable data was correctly aligned to what it is you want to prove later and so some of these on a blockchain typically you'll just see that you know address a paid a certain amount of money to address b well you if there's a dispute you want to fill that out a little bit with you know what was the what was agreement for and you want to somehow link those terms to the thing that happened on a blockchain in this case it wasn't a big deal because you know we had a bill of sale that was a standard bill of sale on the jurisdiction we played the mock trial for then include you know all the correct information you would need to establish the parties and their responsibilities and rights but that is you know that's only to think about more we're going deeper there is a question of whether the purported signatory had the requisite legal well first of all off authorization like was it even their car to sell is a question that doesn't go away because you're using blockchain and you know did they can we you know were they over 18 years old did they have capacity those kinds of stuff none of that goes away by going through the mock trial process somewhat methodically we were able to identify what can we rely on blockchain for and what do we need to apply a more traditional legal practice skills in order to ensure and and then the chain of custody so well on this one a little bit so for the chain of custody I'm just gonna go forward a little bit the most critical takeaway from this was to link the entity on a blockchain to a legal entity so that BLT thing is very handy here and what what I mean by this is basically the legal concept is attribution you can find this in the United Uncitral United Nations Commission on International Trade Law the Uncitral model law on electronic commerce which has been enacted in Canada in the ULCA and in the United States under Uniform Electronic Transactions Act and the E-Sign Federal Act has this concept that we call attribution it's basically attributing an act of a like a digital signature electronic signature electronic contract the act of an electronic agent to a legal party the law takes a common law approach to this in the United States and in Canada and it doesn't prescribe a specific method or litmus test like it doesn't say you have to register it with a particular government entity or then have a registry or use a particular technology it's more that you have to do something that will be credible and convincing later to establish what legal party took a given action technically so the way we did this well we didn't actually do it that well initially we just sort of we just asserted the peep that you know Joe that Alice and Bob the buyer and seller of the car had used their private keys and a given address in the blockchain to digitally sign the contract but then later when I was trying to leave the foundation I realized like oh wait a minute like how do we know it was Bob's key and the first thing that the other person did was kneecap me to say well that's not my client's key like I should have seen that coming but what with this some highlights is you want to have some kind of dual integration so some it's safest way belt and suspenders so I think to do this would be you just imagine there's something in the blockchain address that maybe links to a legal party so for example in Bitcoin you there's a field there that is kind of a wild card field you can put any data in you want you could in an address actually list like this is Acme corporation of 21 Dundas Street you know Toronto Ontario on the on the transaction itself if you were to enter a hash of the contract you could use that field to provide a URL to where you can find the contract and read it that provides a nice link and similarly in the contract itself when we revised this to do a second mock trial which we will do eventually under the first paragraph where we said you know this contract is between you know party of the first part you know Alice Jones who's doing 123 Elm Street comma with this Bitcoin address and this public key and you know Bob Bob whatever Smith at this address with at with this public key and therefore blockchain address now we now we're directly linking a piece of evidence that you can enter about a legal contract and activities that are occurring and entities that exist on a blockchain so we're integrating it both ways just to be sure so those are some of the things that we discovered so in closing when you think about what if somebody was doing this commercial transaction something happened and there was a dispute and whether you're going to arbitration or a court of law they were just negotiating and you know trying to establish your position for your clients for example or for regulators is another spin on this you really want to understand the roles and relationships of the parties one minute not just user a and user b but what are their their legal roles as a consumer employee is it licensee what have you the transactions also just identify the actors and actions in the system and then align those things so you understand the business legal and technical dimensions of what's happening and finally once you've identified the parties it just get it like normal just have a running list of the rights and obligations of the parties to each other what are the causes of action oh this sounds in contract it sounds in consumer law it sounds in securities fraud sounds in what have you and and what are the recourse and remedies so you don't have a right if you don't have a remedy so just think about what those would be in order to legally analyze the underlying transaction that's occurring on or through a blockchain so that's some there you go and we'll come back to this a little bit later thank you very much thank you so much thank you so much I think it is so important just to wrap your head around this use case right as you go through the rest of the day to come back and in your mind think about what you're learning how that's why this is where you say this is thanks to anchor