 Okay, and so we're back on technical difficulties as usual and Massachusetts is sort of technology We just check You went to the YouTube page Okay, oh now this okay, we're good super fantastic We're rocking now Let's go to the Which one is it's this one right? Yeah, okay, and then who said presentation mode is that a thing? Is that a button I can I didn't see the usual You Slide show Okay Okay, so We're back and I was in the middle of Saying how the record schedule paradigm doesn't work in various ways and and really we know that it doesn't work for print-to-paper first of all Digital objects down coming a variety of hyper media that can't So anything that's based on print papers is is old school in 20th century but we've also found in the last couple decades that Dragging and dropping objects is beyond the compliance level of Virtually everyone now there are groups of records managers and archivists in the world who do everything right and there are communities their cultures and communities that do a Good job of complying with what is written in statutes and regulations and policies about record keeping. I'm not Giving the broadest brush here, but For most of us we do not comply with record keeping policies and rules unless The technology embeds the rules so that it makes it easy because none of us have time in this world We are all overwhelmed by the amount of emails by texts by social media of all kinds and the expectation that somehow People in the US government or people in the corporation are going to be dragging dropping objects to some record keeping scheme is a fantasy It worked when there were very few Records, but there are just too many For us to deal with and so the whole parrot the paradigm does not work Okay Failed record-keeping paradigms. Well, this is kind of sub-paradigm print-to-paper backup tapes which we know can Be used for disaster recovery. They are extremely difficult Costs a tremendous amount of money to restore records from data streamed to a set of tapes Things have gotten better with index they go over the last ten years, but it's still a horrendous proposition You know and actually the the National Archive says You shall not use backup tips for record keeping purposes Then it's all of our idiosyncratic practices that we put our psd files somewhere We we we all give names to different folders. That's not record-keeping the way that Makes it easy for the organization to know what it knows and Makes it very difficult to access records within organizations. There's something called a 515.2 Standard I've lectured on that before I'm not going to get into it It's just it's a set of functional specifications that were developed in the 1990s for electronic keeping software They are very good in terms of their granularity Functional requirements. They're not used very much. It's not failed But they're underutilized because their Achilles heel is that it requires individuals to drag and drop Objects into the various categories that are set up in these schemas that are otherwise compliant in a whole sorts of ways And so that's the problem now John Mancy who is president of AIM till recently And myself we're singing the same tune if you mean records management the way that it has been practiced in organizations of the last 150 years It's basically dead because no one complies with the rules That's a harsh statement, but as I say there are exceptions, but basically it's virtually Across all organizations that there's a lack of compliance with the rules There's just an accumulation of records and data Especially in the cloud. It's easy to store stuff. Not so easy to get it back Not so easy to access it not so easy to categorize it, but The idea that we get busy people to figure out complicated schemes is ridiculous now in the present world In decade of the 21st century and going further so that was recognized by some of us and We recognize there's a transactional toll. There's a it's basically a toll on on our time To do something with respect to records and so we avoid it We just let stuff accumulate and so we're looking we're all looking for an easy pass rather than the traditional tools There was a proclamation in the prior administration by President Obama that said Proper records management is the backbone of open government We live in a glass house in the federal government because there are lots of access statutes that are involved President Obama issued a memorandum in 2011 that said that he recognizes the problem of record-keeping and that we need technology to solve Basic record-keeping issues and so he he threw down a gauntlet to the archivist in the United States David Ferriero who is still there and as of the time that I'm speaking here and Jeffrey Zients at OMB it OMB and narrow were to solve this problem They went around the government and they asked for a recommendation, but basically some of us Came up with some bullet points and two of them that are very important. It was just like John F. Kennedy saying we'll go to the moon by the end of the decade by December 31 2019 Which seemed a long way off when we said it in 2012 That federal agencies will manage all of their permanent records in an electronic format That means actually a binary issue. They need to separate what's permanent and what's temporary so it's it embeds that assumption that it can be done and then by December 31 2016 again This was out of 2012 federal agencies will manage their email all of their email in an electronic format and not print to paper anymore That was the directive that directive stands and is continuing through today So email is the 800 pound gorilla here of information governance of scandals of controversy. You can't go a Week maybe a day without email being cited by the media, you know, whether it's C&N or traditional newspapers or other social media sites and increasingly there are other forms of communications texts and otherwise that are also Signable, but it is still the the go-to medium for lawyers at least to find in evidence What is actually being said by individuals and can think of all kinds of scandals that have involved email so Some of us were involved in pushing a new approach really a new paradigm At the National Archives to manage email and potentially applicable to all electronic records, but start with email, which is basically to categorize Email in a binary way the binary rule would be there's a bunch of email that is permanently valuable and you should keep that and that email is going to be mostly from a select group of senior officials who Get policy papers via email and attachments and who are part of decision-making in the organization and We will treat all of that blob of senior official email as permanent and Everything else at the agency the thousands of employees that are part of a federal agency of any given size Could be tens of thousands treat as something else some not a capstone account, but a non capstone account and just to be preserved for let's say seven years under a schedule If they're substantive records, so that's that is a capstone If you think of it you think of it as a permit with a capstone on on the top with a small group of senior officials if it's the National archives. We're talking, you know less than a hundred somewhere between fifty and a hundred officials would be capstone accounts Everyone else in a three thousand person agency Would be non capstone accounts and so that is a bifurcation by role Not by substantive category. This is where the very difficulty arises Trying to convince the record-keeping world in the archivist world that that email is different that it is so pervasive ubiquitous and Covers such a wide kaleidoscope of records groups and categories by substance that it's better to treat it as a blob And to categorize it as what is permanent and what is temporary by role now? We can do a better AI job in the future In terms of granularity, but that's a first step for the government and I can say that It seems to be working in the short term So the example of capstone, I've already said narrow here. It's just I don't want anyone listening to me to say We're saving everything. We are saving email and attachments for seven years as a default for everybody But then it's disposed of Except if there's a legal hold there's some lawyers that are imposing some legal obligation So only a small everything is saved in the short term and a small sliver of email is saved for the permanent long term Fortunately or fortunately if you're a historian that small sliver Multiplied by 300 federal agencies is a huge volume which actually will come to billions of records by itself Certainly not just the White House, but the rest of government. Um, it seems to be working This is a slide that I have that when using capstone, there's a number of traditional record keeping considerations that one needs to do I'm going to go past this slide There are record schedules now there's a general record schedule applied to capstone accounts and there there is a need in some instances to Still preserve the email in some other place other than the large repository of a capstone repository And there's a need to have metadata, but the basic point is that you're preserving these objects in two different types one permanent one temporary and from the Recent narrow reports this one and later ones. It seems that more than a hundred federal agencies have adopted capstone and This means that potentially a citizens could FOIA those agencies and expect that There would be searches of what will be growing archives of email attachments in one place whether it's in the cloud or siloed you know in an IT shop somewhere it would be searchable and It would be accessible now subject to of course the exemptions of the FOIA or other Restricted categories that we're going to get to that later now so in just a moment the coming-age of dark archives is paradox of the inability to provide access unless we have smart ways of extracting signal from noise is due to privacy considerations primarily it's due to volume and it's due to privacy and I am all about providing citizen access to Dark archives. I don't want the archives of the future of the year 2050 to be the National Archives That you can't walk in and see anything because it's all digital and it's all not been opened yet In fact, there's a 75 year default Under current policy of narrow which is that if records are of a personal nature or they contain some personal piece of information They're reflexively or default Not opened for 75 years until the last person dies in that so We don't have privacy interests after that period, but the question is is is that too long for us to? open the records of Recent administrations can't we do a better job? And so that's what we need technology for we have to filter sensitive content We have to be At least cognizant. There are privacy issues and there are other types of categories of information This is a non exhaustive list. There are personally identifiable information in the form of Numbers strings of numbers like social security numbers that are in a well formed expression But and driver's licenses we can Count for much of that although there is a fuzziness to errors that are made in in records And so it goes off from the usual expression but then we have categories of material that are a little bit harder to Pull out or extract so as to make a record collection less sensitive to anonymize it because of arrest records and because of Intellectual property concerns and nine categories of FOIA including deliberate process. There are and legal privileges there are significant Issues to simply extracting out sensitive content But we can do a better job and the types of sensitive content There are the regular expressions. I talked about there's textual content Which is difficult enough in any kind of relevant query to isolate text that is on a subject And then there's non-textual content. It is a world of Data out there that is just not textual and so we're going to need new methods for that The directives mean that everything will be preserved In email for a short period of time the adoption of capstone policies means that there's a Repository that could be easily made subject to a search, but of course how to search a billion objects is not a trivial task and We can have a more complete Historical record of the government. That's what we're talking about the history of the 21st century If we can overcome barriers to access Well, let's pause for a moment and talk about search. So the search haystack The haystacks are large. The task is to find responsive records or to filter out categories of records when I as a lawyer want to search for Relevant records in a lawsuit. I need to find all the relevant needles to do a comprehensive job I can't just stop on the first three pages of a Google search for a restaurant and call it a day I need to find all the relevant records. So that's a problem in a world of huge volumes I need to find just the wheat and not any of the chaff I need Perfect recall and perfect precision. I've lectured about that in my last lecture here at MIT There's a flawed approach which we seized upon about a decade ago in the law that keywords don't work they're both under-inclusive and over-inclusive because of the and big U of T's of language and I was involved a decade ago or so with a search of Clinton White House 20 million emails We eventually through keywords got down to a hundred two hundred thousand documents a hundred thousand were relevant A hundred thousand work. It took six months. It took a lot of people. I Realized at the time that is not the way that the legal profession should proceed there's got to be a better way for lawyers to search ESI and a because of the track legal track and because of advances in technology There's a whole class of machine learning That has now been applied in the legal space Supervised machine learning is the absolute flavor of the moment where we can Task an algorithm with learning about what is relevant What is for a particular category of documents are relevant to a lawsuit relevant to a set of a request to produce? based on training data, we can train the algorithm with people in a quality control process and We can do this, you know based on examples of showing documents, so we are no longer in a keyword world Lots of lawyers are still relying on keywords to some extent but Those of the sort of the most advanced thinking in the space certainly in my law firm We use advanced search methods to search to get visibility into very large data sets It's called predictive coding and it's basically coding software with subject matter experts looking at a document set a training set or as you go through the collection in kind of a continuous active learning function you fine-tune the algorithm by Looking at examples that it's pitching out and saying whether they're relevant or not relevant and so this is a well-known Set of techniques set of algorithms that are in use that combine both human in the loop and Combine various sorts of algorithms that cluster documents that are a lot of like this kind of algorithm was given a judicial thumbs up by Judge Peck in 2012 and so sort of a new chapter in the law occurred where He was telling people at least in the southern district of New York and Manhattan that in his court We don't have to be getting pigs. We can Find that we can do discovery by using these kind of algorithms rather than keywords or manual searches and that it's appropriate and His opinion has been followed in dozens of cases and it's with each passing year There will be more and more case law about technology assisted review But here's the thing I started with the fact that you know, can we make can we reduce dimensionality? The the issue in the records world We'd like to think that the problems are 1-0, but Reality kicks in organizations of all types want At least more categories than just to permanent and temporary it works for email for capstone It doesn't work in all environments And so it would be nice to have automated categorization of records into a variety of categories the problem in information retrieval The difference between the e-discovery context and a records context is Essentially that the binary classifications for relevance what's relevant and not what's privileged and not those are more easily addressed by a Set of different types of algorithms Then dealing with a legacy environment of 500 record series and having 25 record retention periods You know for this series to be 10 years for this series to be 20 years so the records management task in Part today has been an acknowledgement of collapsing record series into bigger buckets and the focus on records retention as a driver for Records retention periods as a driver for big buckets not the series itself So you could have multiple series of records that are all part of one retention period this this this of this are all Going to be kept for X number of years in a bigger bucket And that helps the algorithms because if they just figure out that records can be in that bigger bucket and not have to do a granular approach, they're more successful So bigger buckets than what has been before that is part of the new paradigm There are also concepts called coverage and detail that I I won't go into here except to note different ways to evaluate auto categorization in terms of Comprehensiveness of the record series at the records that you have part of a record series or the detail in terms of the metadata in the records techniques like these can be used to classify content into a variety of different ways And could spend the rest of the afternoon here talking about different types of technologies I've pointed out a few that are in the upcoming slides The real question is again separating out leaded shaft the ultimate goal here is For the US government is permanent and temporary across all records not just email But it would be nice to be more granular as well. And so there's a series of Approaches that we can discuss in this space. I'm just going to march through it Very fast here slides are from my colleague Nathaniel Payne at UBC And a couple of source materials here that are well worth looking at MIT I am sure that Many students have encountered supervised learning in a variety of contexts and so I don't need to say too much here about that there are other flavors of machine learning and other types of Automation that need to be considered in the record-keeping space as part of The mix and so you have rule-based classification rules where they are easy to implement but There's a disadvantage in terms of at higher dimensions higher numbers of categories There are challenges involved and significant time can be spent updating the decision rule methods There's a fuzzy correlation kind of set of techniques that apply across the board to everything else. I'm talking about That we need to get away from trying to match single words Into something that is that takes into account an error function in terms of words being spelt right and being recognized as part of a examples in the document There are vector space methods that Are used in e-discovery and are very good support vector machines are very good if you're in a binary classification world but they're not so good if they have to be used for Dealing with multiple categories of records so the e-discovery world We're all about support vector machines in part, but in terms of advanced techniques to find What is relevant to a problem? It's not so not so easy to do in a record-keeping space and part of this lecture is to encourage The crowd listening to see if they can do a better job of parsing out And then there are other types of information retrieval methods that I don't pretend to have used there are nearest neighbor methods Again, there's advantages to those compared with other methods that are being discussed here and there are disadvantages and so What we need is bright people to do essentially a experiment across Different types of algorithms to see how Caterization of records whether it's in the federal record space or just records generally can be done using these different methods They're tree-based methods and I don't think I have much more here there's one more which is neural networks and Here we're seeing this in the driverless car experience that there is a whole set of different sources of data that are being used by What is a neural network to? To deal with problems of driving We could apply this very fancy technology to dealing with documents that have a high dimensionality of features But there are disadvantages to this and there's a high computing cost and it's it's challenging to understand and so with that What I said out here steps for designing auto classification system We need to certainly under wet whatever method is used. We need to understand training requirements We need to understanding how the input features work and will be represented We need to understand the structure of the functions and and learning algorithms and we need to have kind of a testing protocol across The set so with that how much sure is auto categorization technology? well My homage to Carla dance here is that I'm sure everyone watching this listening knows who Carla dances is the father of taxonomy to the animal kingdom and With respect to auto classification in the e-discovery world and the record-keeping world the categorization optimization issue Sort of produces this so We have categories that are merged together and mushed together and There isn't a 100% accuracy in categorization Using any of these methods. In fact, they're just problems. They are problems with text classification and beyond where Methods say that you know two objects that look alike because of some features, but they clearly are not alike But we have a a ways to go, but the future is with AI the future is not capstone. The future is Applying these techniques to categorize information in more granular ways and he and Whoever invents the better mousetrap in terms of one of these techniques, whether it's vector space or neural networks apply to record-keeping really Now that is an IPO that I'd like to sign up for so In terms of my interest in ensuring a complete record of government activities. I have three propositions here I want to make sure that a comprehensive record is exist That means capturing and filtering technologies like capstone. That there'll be a complete historical record of government I want to encourage auto categorization using fancy techniques to parse out portions of the universe so into certain types of record series and to advance Assertion review of possibilities and we should be in we should be talking government about advanced search about Technology-assisted review to provide access not just to e-discovery, but also under FOIA and otherwise so there's a research agenda to this talk and Hopefully those who are part of the computational law course It's will recognize there's a signal-to-noise issue here that we need to Hmm Do a better job of finding permanent records and not just relying on roles, but roles is a first approximation Do a better job in terms of auto categorization strategies for distinguishing record series and we need to Evaluate how after using this techniques We are doing with respect to the total capture of email capstone and the 2019 policy are going to result in billions and billions I feel like Carl second records Coming into both repositories at agencies and at the archives and we really need to think through The right of citizen access to those records My future well, I have faith in analytics I have faith in algorithms doing a better job of information governance generally and separating out weed and chaff both in the private sector in the public sector and Now I also have some degree of faith that Blockchains can be used for record keeping the ethereum flavor of distributed ledger technology seems to be a Pointer to the future where we can not only have blockchains Quinting to data on documents and in an encrypted way and locking down in terms of trustworthiness of records But also have the records themselves Through either ethereum or some other blockchain like or DLT like technology to be preserved in amber and I think of blockchains is like bugs preserved in amber and and the trustworthiness elements that blockchain brings to the equation are certainly central to The buzz around blockchains at the moment and why MIT and other places are the seriously working to advance the cause and so I Think that the future of record keeping is going to involve blockchain and part Involve all sorts of analytics as I'm talking about so lastly what I'd say is older people like myself. Well, we're going And off to our islands to write our books about our days in government or otherwise There is a green field here for Millennials to take up my call to arms to use technologies In analytics and blockchains and whatever comes down the pipe to have more sophisticated Strategies to open archives up. We can do this by innovative means We can talk to each other across disciplines and I hope that that My showing up at MIT is part of that as a lawyer talking about these things I think culture change is possible both in government as well as in the private sector. I Edited a book I get no royalties for this but I strongly encourage people to take a look at a book on all the kind of Algorithm methods that are being used in e-discovery and to some extent information governance there's a set of references here for further reading and I'm also happy to talk to anyone who's been part of this conversation today About the future of record keeping From a lawyer's perspective. You're excited by this topic. Well, let's talk because There's only a bright future for you In terms of how we're going to do record keeping in the future using algorithms and using AI techniques, so I really appreciate Daza the opportunity to Talk at MIT today, and I'll hand it back to you. Thank you very much That was based on what I'm seeing online extremely awesome Um, and let me ask what we're transitioning. Are there any? comments or questions on it on That Naturally, in fact, they already are Let's go like this And you can see in kind of two installments. I suppose the video and the top over Jason's remarks and the other Questions comments ideas Well, I guess you nailed it I have one which is um, let's just say if I pathetically people wanted to take you up on your through the gauntlet down there a little bit in a gentle way, but um, but I heard it on This folks that want to try their hand at using some of the work cutting edge AI and The sort of like adaptive algorithmic techniques Is if people wanted to poke at that and try to do something what would be your advice for how would they get started? What would they do my advice is for you Daza to To open source some of this stuff so that MIT students can participate it is Unfortunately a world of proprietary software that we're talking about for the most part it so we need to convince The vendor community to open up and to have Some kind of demonstrations where people can participate and I think it's a good Gauntlet back to me as to whether there we can have that kind of dialogue right and obviously proprietor so the relate specifically to Not the really the license type of you know, there's so many business models out there But the notion of being able to have an open competitive market where we can benchmark one another we can look at performance or we can look at objective measures and There by maybe have some basis to evaluate and assess or make some progress and what are the Good approaches. This is also a scientific question to some extent as you know information science and I was involved in Starting something called the track legal track. So I went to this and we We as lawyers came to the party on text retrieval So there are tracks that are relevant and it may well be that that's one avenue for MIT students and others to play in Which is to check out track and possibly build a better Engine for searching as part of that experience. Okay, so you heard I know there's some MIT students in the room I'm looking at you all and then there's many more that are watching and who will go to hear this later in spring semester. So The gauntlet has been thrown down. It must be answered Thanks, thanks much of life. Um, Jason So We're going to I need to text Shawna to let her know to click the link now one of one of our cohort. Does anyone have Sean is? never All right, so all right, so Where are the absolute most current slides they were emailed to me when and by who Okay, so It's gonna do it like this. Yeah, okay. Everybody. Um commit to memory proprietary client information in my mail Thanks Or actually don't do that. Okay, so Shawna Have to get them right this second. So wow Oh, here we go. They must have been is this it look familiar All right So I showed how to do this I don't like this And I'll go 19 slides Say open with google slides The way that we do Um, all right, so this might be a good opportunity actually forward where we're going Through this to get everybody on the same channel Literally, um, so do you do you like telling people? Um, mr. Poppers they Tell everybody how to get on telegram and get to the right channel Do a lot of that and then she got edu slash learning Okay and uh There's gonna be the slide that one of the slide that we have the intro the homelands I need to put these like this So that's right There is this control almost all the way down the page. There's a slide back there and you're just gonna go To Let's see Okay, um, I simply get an email. Okay. Yeah. Yes. There's a jacket bother with the um It's it's the link just it's it's in the um Here I'll pull it up on the upload up. Yeah But it I should So it's for those of you online. Yeah now hear this Um, this is how you can participate like a first class citizen Present to everybody. Okay. Here we go. So we're on the class. Um, this is the class working page Scroll down down down and where did you? Oh, I'm sorry. Don't do that Actually, what we need to do is click view me on github So we're really going to get hacky here by some standards and then select the wiki This is how one way to get to the wiki for the class And what are we looking for? miscellaneous tools and resources miscellaneous tools resources Telegram and group chat. So four steps there five Let me say uh, so let's go to Yeah And then yeah, also if you go to the mitmedial.github.io Slash 2018 whatever Link is if you scroll down that's what I was trying to look for which is the slide that I can it actually just has Link see click on so oh right instead of the Yep, so if we go back. Yeah a little bit um to the um to the class here. We are Where do we find those links? Yeah, and then the uh slide six Okay on the slide. Okay, so go one two three four five six. Aha Oh, that's sweet. Okay. So telegram Um use your phone number to register your new account. That's how they kind of link your account to a phone If you're able to if you have phones, we know that some people don't have computers for security reasons But this and then you create a username and then you can click this um link to join a channel So anybody who can do that should do that And um, we're not we're this is an experiment for me. Anyway, not using slack and not using other chat channels but using the same kind of system that people are talking about these topics and uh technically and um, I think it seems to have some advantages You can export all the data later which we like so we can kind of put it on our page and you can kind of like have the dialogue And the main thing is we're looking for a way to a lot of people who are participating online Maybe in washington or other places to have closer to the rich experience that we're having in the room using nothing, but basically free tools Um and just by composing them in the right way. All right. So thanks again for helping us put that together And anyone who's installing this right now in the room, um, do yourself a favor and turn off the notifications. Oh, yeah Good call. Okay Yes, there's a youtube live stream Do you want to know how that's? We we are um and so we're broadcasting right now and um, okay Um, let's see and it looks like shon is not on yet So let me invite her Oh Okay I'm not sure why shawna. Is anybody in touch with shawna to know I've emailed her Okay Okay, all right. Well, maybe should we just get started? I guess you can share this Yeah But we'll want to use the mic. We're kind of doing this a little bit Again, um Good call Definitely you might want to just um depend on who's talking and right up in okay, so um Let's um, let me see what we're excuse me You want to start by introducing yourselves perhaps And I'll switch to screen share as soon as she's done that Here we go and google hangout. That's how we do it. Ta-da down the down the alley Maybe we should Great and the mic is pretty sensitive. She gets surprisingly Good given given how we're doing this Laura, okay Hi everyone This was a little more challenging than I had realized it was going to be to try to get in so you guys look beautiful today Hello All right, great. Um, so I guess I'll I'll help get us started. Um, so So This is um, the second segment of uh, the first day of the computational law course and I'm very happy and Well, um, maybe just Welcome back The star panel from the women's blockchain Panels from women's blockchain panel at our first MIT legal forum on October 30th and 31st Which was just a smash hit and um, and it seemed to be a lot of buzz and there's a lot of excitement About it and since then there's been more meetings and you know, it's grown Well, and it's not prospering and now has a new brand the blockchain diversity group and um, and the original panelists are we're willing to share some more Deep information more of a curricular Form um that I'm very excited by I've been watching the iterations of the content And this is exactly the kind of content that we had in mind to set the tone and to create a landscape framework Especially in the blockchain space and so the further ado I'd love to hand it back to the blockchain diversity group to walk us through your presentation And um, and then we have time for a discussion At the end of that so, um, please introduce yourselves and take it away All right. Well, thank you so much for attending today And I am moderating my name is Shauna Hoffman And I am of course part of the diversity and blockchain group With the ladies that you see here today And I work at IBM as the cognitive legal co-leader And I'd love to give an opportunity for each of our guest speakers to talk a little bit about themselves Michelle, would you like to start? Sure. Thanks, Shauna. I'm Michelle Gitlitz. I'm a partner at BlankvermallowPay I'm a securities lawyer and I'm also the co-chair of our blockchain working group and I do a lot of work helping companies with emerging technologies blockchain cryptocurrencies in life Hi, I'm Susan Joseph I'm Susan Joseph. I have my own consulting company largely targeted at blockchain and insurance Although I also help out at the UN For Bono. I am also a lawyer. They'll practice more on the business side of things and Got involved in this about three years ago and have an identity expertise as well And I'm Laura Jell. I'm a partner at Baker Hostetler in Washington, DC. I spent most of my career Before going back into private practice Working in technologies and in-house lawyer and the senior executive on the internet company beginning that company right around the time Uh emerging law. The internet was making emerging law. So I come to this from a perspective of Licensed learning of the mistakes made last time around. We had a set of transformative technology And hopeful that we'll do a little bit of this next time Sounds good. Well, we have a great agenda for you today. We have about two hours with you Maybe a little bit less and um, do we have the presentation up so everyone can see it? Absolutely. Okay. So a little bit of my challenge is going to be seeing the presentation Alongside um, you all is there a way for me to do that? Ah, there we go. Excellent So let's go ahead and uh head to the next page. We'll talk a little bit about the agenda today And the different items we'll be covering. Uh, it looks like the end of the presentation Oh, is that the yeah So by the way a part of the agenda is a q&a time Is that we'd love to answer questions um from those who are alive and then um, you know in the room and then of course those who are live Joining us. So thank you There we go That was really interesting. So we have a blank agenda for today. No, I'm kidding First thing that um, Susan and I will go through kind of an introduction to blockchain And then next we'll cover um sovereign identity and then we'll also cover in the end You know the law of tokens. So I think that we've got a lot of good information that we'll be covering We wanted to kind of start out and say why are we here today? You know society in general, um, I love this kind of houston. We have a problem We have a lot of data In 10 years from today, we will double our data every 12 hours So as of as you see here, this is every 60 seconds, you know over 4 million videos viewed I think those are mostly by my 12 and uh 14 year olds But we've got a lot of google searches, you know 3.5 million. I mean, it's amazing and outstanding To see that how much technology and how much data is honestly being used Every minute, uh that we breathe. So good. Let's jump to the the next slide We'd love to go into you an update on um, you know, what is blockchain kind of give that primer initially We will be discussing more on the primer end of things because we do know that most people Are just getting into blockchain and just getting into some of the specific areas we'll talk about today So what is blockchain? Let's go to the next slide We go to slide 14 there we go now the pre blockchain world Um, if we think about why we put blockchain in place We have to kind of look at the pre world and what that looked like. Let's say even, you know, three to five years ago You know business networks, um, they benefit from connectivity The participants are of course our customers our suppliers our banks and our partners We have cross geography starting to happen, you know, we instead of trading between us and our neighbors We've moved from trading cities to cities to now trading globally where I can purchase something very easily from someone in china And then of course someone in china can very easily purchase things from me Um, it is a little tougher than uh, it will be in the future with of course blockchain Now assets of course are anything that are capable of being owned or controlled to produce value So that could be everything from people trading chickens with a goat to everyone change trading Financial different financial things worldwide Now where everything is kept of course is a ledger and that'll be the base of our discussion today A ledger is the system of record for the business And a transaction is an asset transfer on or off of that ledger Let's go ahead and go to the next slide So in general blockchain is a distributed ledger technology Allowing any participant in the business network to see the system of record One of the things that we love about blockchain is that it's decentralized Um, what we've had in the past has always been centralized. There's always been someone who has been kind of that overarching Overlooking one, you know one person or one group looking at an entire ledger for maybe a company or an individual Now we have a decentralized work all of the individuals There's a lot of transparency in all the individuals within an ecosystem or within a network can see each other's Each other's blockchain and actually see what is going on within each individual's ledger So if we go to the next slide Okay, some of the key concepts we'll go through today Are of course shared ledger as you've heard before a penned only distributed system of record shared across business networks Also, we'll go a little bit into smart contracts, but we probably need to have a whole session on this one You know, it's it is um the new contracts of the future and actually they're being used by many businesses today Um, we're embedded embedded in the transaction Or keep a phone and information That relies that the smart contract relies specifically on to keep the contracts safe So we also have well, let's talk a little bit about privacy and then of course consensus Now one of the positive things about actually three of the positive things about blockchain is it reduces time So your transaction time can go from days To nearly instantaneous immediately. It removes cost overhead and cost intermediaries You know how we're all paying um ATMC's, you know, buck here three bucks here sometimes spending if you're in vegas, maybe 695 Kind of can get expensive depending on where you are in the world With bitcoin and with other types of cryptocurrency. We're starting to see a lot of those costs being removed and then as One of my favorite parts is reducing risk And really knowing who you're trading with So if you want to go to the next slide Susan so share with us a little bit about some of the definitions that you've seen that you think are important for those attending today to know So I've made a a list of definitions Really, these are key concepts that I think anybody needs to understand If they're going to be involved in this technology and I don't think that a definition Whether you're a lawyer or a business person you need to understand the definitions so it's cross applicable and I think the tech people need to understand The way that the business and lawyers are also understanding this So, you know, I've defined distributed ledger or which you Had a brief definition from shawna There's no central administrator is something that's very key Shared immediately upon A transaction happening. So in a practical term So imagine something I've done a lot of work in the insurance industry Imagine that you are managing a claim It means that everybody can look at that claims database all at the same time and there is nothing to reconcile So the power of this is that there's one spot that everybody can look at would be one record that you call the truth of the transactions Which that is part of the transformative nature of what the tech is Blockchain is the type of distributed ledger where the transactions are linked Um, and I'm going through these quickly because you've got these written down and because we have two hours And I'm unable to have their time to speak the consensus mechanism can vary across different types of chains And that is how you validate the transaction. It's also on a public blockchain A way of maintaining the health of the platform and the incentive to keep the platform Maintained a private chain somewhat similarly, but they're they're slightly Different in the way that they work. There are different consensus mechanisms. So that's the takeaway that you should Understand in different takeaway the consensus mechanisms have implications for amount of energy used for amount of record keeping that goes on etc. So just something that you should know about Smart contract is a written code or protocol that is embedded in the ledger that is automated and Should mimic we hope the words that are in an actual contract if you're using it as a legal document Whether it does or not that is up for something up for development code auditing and legal auditing Um Nodes are the way that you enter in the system. So that's just a term that you need to know It is your computer that is entering into the network or platform Cryptocurrency, I'm sure that you all have heard about that. That's a digital currency that uses cryptographic techniques for governance and security That's your bitcoin either XRP from ripple, etc. Anything that's made the news in the past two months Uh bitcoin is a type of cryptocurrency. It's been around since 2008 It has withstood a number of attacks and still seems intact where you have seen The attacks succeed have been in the on ramps or off ramps to the cryptocurrency the wallets and other um ancillary parts of the Crypto but not the actual crypto itself ICOs are called initial coin offerings. They are used to raise capital and usually in anticipation of building a platform and the service Uh have typically been done versus with startups. However, when we go further on I'll mention one that was just in the news this week From a regular enterprise and I think you should know the concept of the public chain Which is bitcoin or ethereum or any number of other Forks or branches off of those chains Um, that is the original proof of work Uh cryptocurrency generated chain that started the whole process and when somebody like janey diamond from jp morgan says I'm not really sure what I think about I'm paraphrasing. I'm okay. I'm not really sure what I think about bitcoin But I really like the technology underlying it. That's what he's talking about is the technology underlying the public chain or any variation of that A private chain and in a public chain anybody can join it anybody in the world can access it as long as you have a computer A private chain is permissioned meaning that it is a group of people selected Who can join in so perhaps a banking consortium or what you hear all of the consortiums. Those are all generally private Groups that are almost think of it like trade organizations that get together and create a certain network or ecosystem So that's pretty much the the definitions Thank you. I've been waiting a long time for somebody to do that Thank you, susan One of the makers that we thought we were going to share is why should you I mean, we all have Bitcoin in the news that I'm sure many of those here today and those watching have been also investing some of their money Or at least, you know looking at it being intrigued by how much bitcoin has gone up But we have a lot of companies and I'll talk a little bit about IBM for just a minute IBM has put our entire ledger onto hyper ledger. So we have fully immersed ourselves into blockchain and we had last year over 400 different blockchain projects that we worked on that are still in the works with many companies such as we see here today, so For those on the the panel Michelle Laura and susan Do you want to take a few minutes to talk about the projects that you're aware of at these companies? Sure, I was going to take this because I mean why this matters to you and the rest of the world Is because it affects every single industry globally It's not a software update. It's a network or ecosystem that's being created And if you can have one take away from this, it should be that you are creating a new marketplace model And in that sense, there are lots of things that open up for that and you can also imagine that the first to a marketplace is a market maker The last is a laggard and may actually not quite make it because markets have a way of sort of having an exponential effect once you Get them going. So every industry is affected, which means that every area of laws affected So I wanted to frame that up And talk about so public or government registries. So you look at land title You look at birth and death records and something that, you know, may be a little bit controversial like voting Financial services we have announced projects from the australian stock exchange to do their back end on blockchain We have an announced project by the dtcc to do all of the swaps clearing on blockchain by the end of 2018 When I talk about blockchain for those those are Private blockchains when I talk about blockchain for public and government registries. Those are more Those are more public blockchains So blockchains have different uses for different types of projects An insurance we have a reinsurance consortium going to develop a project that will be out at the end of this year. We have Policies and claims being put on insurance and insurance certificates just announced yesterday Digital rights. This is where I said you have the kodak coin, which you might have heard about so kodak announced that it was doing Ico or a coin to track digital images so that the producers could really get credit for this and get paid for it You can imagine digital rights management is really great use for this kind of technology as there's music rights. So expect that there will be some Projects going on. I know I can't say but I I know that there are projects that you'll see announced in that coming up in 2018 Because it's all digital rights management with the idea to democratize and get the original creator some more Compensation back for what they've produced and more control over the content Supply chain logistics. I mean I would be remiss to not say that there was something yesterday UPS and penske's have A logistics so that they just joined further the logistics supply chain to examine this but today's biggest announcement was mares Which has signed up for the joint venture with IBM mares phones 51 percent And they will be putting Shipping on a blockchain and it is estimated it's supposed to be on a joint venture Starting at the end of this year and they've estimated on the first day of operation 18 percent of world shipping and transact through that platform They intend to sign up customs and shipping agents as well. So you can see that that's really a sea change That's huge if you get the world shipping Then what else do you have you have the finance that goes with it? You have the insurance that goes with it It affects many other industries healthcare energy travel You've got luke tonsa. That's why up there up there. They're doing an ICO or have announced an ICO doing travel rewards crowdfunding done through ICOs sort of pirates the money away in some way from venture capital in the more traditional sense Forecasting you've got humanitarian concerns as well. There's a fair amount of interest on the humanitarian side You've had a piloted project through the refugee camps where money is distributed so that refugees can Buy groceries and it's tracked back to the original donors and that's been very successful and is alive um currently unicef just gave out a open call for Blockchain startups to show up to their door and ask for funding for projects that might affect what they're doing. That's why You've got the diamond providence fish providence. You've got an automotive coalition and so on so The reason that I go into such broad amounts is because every area of law is going to be affected every area of business process is going to be affected and so That People understand how broad sweeping this is But I know with your work at the un you've seen a lot of um a lot of this firsthand and what different company countries are doing um Yes, uh with varying levels of Success, I think one of the bigger projects that they're looking at in one area that we're going to talk today and when war is going to talk about it is self-sovereign identity and the Drive to actually put the fifth of the world's population that doesn't have identity Give them identity through some form of blockchain driven self sovereign Um type of system So I know that that's something there. I know that benefits distribution is a big deal I know that you know, you and women was looking at supply chain for World some of this It it's in varying stages. Um, but the humanitarian side is pretty active and you can also so one another takeaway that I think that I have from working both sides of enterprise and the un side is that Oftentimes in countries where there's nothing there is really very little infrastructure that already exists Putting in a new technology is not as imposing as trying to go over a legacy system It has its own issues because you're putting in technology But it isn't like you have an incumbent that you needed to fight in the beginning to get out of the way Or to integrate a bunch of systems because it's not been existed So a lot of ways the democratization of financial reach might really be helped with this kind of technology and Because it's in the wild because they have absolutely nothing else. So why not go with it? They're willing to go. I've asked this question of them. They're willing to go with projects that are brand new Industry can certainly take a page and understand what goes on in the wild because they're going to see it actually in action So there's a fair amount of learning that can be done in partnering that can be done to understand As well as doing some social good a long way might well play that but um There definitely Is a lot a lot to be said because they're both streams are happening at the same time because the technology is all being developed and applied at the same time Absolutely Well, and I know that we have um kind of shared here although you've just mentioned quite a few of these But areas of laws affected by blockchain, you know, one of the questions that I have is What is the right time to legislate or regulate? new technologies So that's a question that is Has been a big question throughout my career and it is a great interest to me because you have technologies emerging that You know, you have two choices, right? You can shove them into existing law That was written and didn't contemplate those technologies at all Or you can try to make new laws To address the issues presented by those technologies, but to know technologies are continuing to emerge and develop And I mean you look at all these use cases and all of these, you know, whether it's a cryptocurrency versus a shipping It's more context for shipping You know getting anybody who makes laws regulators legislators, whoever to understand technologies well enough And figure out when the right moment is to regulate them And if you look back at the experience of the internet, we are dealing as if we report this term is hearing arguments Um in the case involving microsoft about the stored communications act and whether you can get data that's stored on shore That law is from 1986. We didn't have the internet in 1986. The stored communications. They were talking about with your phone And we're also living under it and all of these battles between the FBI and apple and everything else I'll go back to a 1986 law that's a pre-internet error law that we You know, and so does that make sense? No, possibly not On the other hand, you know the internet companies and I Was one of the primary people doing this spent a lot of time Trying to keep um data free of regulation and have things like immunity price, please under section 230 of the communications decency act Arguably which allows The internet companies not to be laudable for third party counsel Arguably that Not even that arguably that paved the way for things like Russian bots and anonymous speech and all the craziness that we're doing By not regulating and by carving at an era where internet companies are free to do their architecture And allow access anonymous access You know to arguably freedom up from any responsibility for the kind of stuff that was going on in the platforms So if you look at those kind of two two lessons from the internet era when you start thinking okay Look at all this new stuff. Uh, what should the rules be? And you know the other question to think about is should the rules be Should the problems that are presented by this be addressed by law or technology? and Who decides right so it's a little bit of a cab mouse game will be legislate now and make regulations now Maybe the technology changes to get around it Probably does there's a lot of smart minds and a lot a lot a lot of money around all of these industries Um, so those are I mean those are kind of thematic questions. I think if you look at that The blockchain beings michelle's going to talk about what the sec has been doing um connection with Ico's and You know, so whether they are giving or she'll she'll talk about me. I got an hour later. I don't know In terms of whether that's whether they've done a good job in deciding when to step in Sure, I think I can I can briefly talk about that now. We're We're in sort of a mania cryptocurrency mania right now and everybody wants to create a token or a coin and Launch an initial coin offering and and the sec's position is that a case that was decided in the 1940s us v. Howie is the standard under which It will be decided whether a token is a security that should be Regulated by the sec um, and while they've they've promulgated that that howie test will still be used What they are not doing is making um broad stroke decisions About every single token what they're doing is they're bringing actions against specific tokens and giving guidance Bit by bit So there's a lot of there's a lot of unknown as laura was saying we're using an existing framework And we're trying to see how the government adapts a new technology to that existing framework But we don't have all the we don't have perfect understanding of what the government's actual view on every single iteration of a coin will be another area in which the uh, there's action the government You know sort of that for a couple years standing on the sidelines of all this partly presumably because of the incredible volatility in Currency world, which my colleagues here. We're just watching on their phones while we head lunch It's been a busy day is Congress is waking up to these issues. They have a blockchain Caucus that calls people in sometimes it tries to learn they don't do much so far And there's currently legislation pending in the senate judiciary committee, which relates to anti-money laundering provisions and more legislation pending the senate banking committee And I looked at the testimony from the senate judiciary committee hearings In which they talk about cryptocurrency and lots of things like being able to seize cryptocurrency when people come into the country So you sure you know your wallet Well, there's no differentiation in what they've been talking about thus far and the bill is not getting final form between cryptocurrencies and and there's kind of every flavor of cryptocurrency that are some that are really Seemed designed for anonymity and potentially to enable Terrorist funding, you know ransomware payments, you know all sorts of other sketchy and illegal activities and others that are completely legitimate and are designed to be legitimate and designed to be compliance with know your customer and Amel lost but the current legislation doesn't draw those distinctions And though I read the testimony from the witnesses the witnesses were from the FBI. They were from home and security they were from Commerce it was there was nobody from The crypto community coming in and saying wait a second here's the introduction that Susan and it just gave us that Michelle will talk about later the things are They're not all the same animal So what you're looking at right now potentially is legislation that could go into place that is not At least in my view Sophisticated smart legislation is going to address all the nuances in this emerging area And by then if it goes in and passes and becomes law Does it become the dead hand like the start of education act in 30 years from now or 40 years from now was still stuck With bad law and didn't even apply at the time it was made So those are all you know issues if you think about law and emerging technology That's what you have to think about is which which emerges and who wins the cat and mouse game to regulate and to innovate Um, that says she'll not do you want to take it back for you guys? I have a comment about that. So, um In terms of the and it's also goes to what um, Michelle's going to talk about in terms of just regulating a token or a cryptocurrency per se where What's the relationship then between the cryptocurrency and the platform that it's powered And if you're looking at risk Is it the cryptocurrency? That's the risk. Is the systemic risk not to keep the platform up and running? I mean so Sometimes and it goes to your point of where you're regulating. Does that then skew how a platform might actually form and keep its integrity and Which piece do you you know when you stomp out one piece kind of it's been compared to lackable Then what happens though systemically to the to the bigger game? What are you and what are you providing? What do you mean your face of engineer around it or does the development of the industry go around? around Well, I think one of the really good in the legislature Especially Hey, who actually Can see kind of both sides of the coin um, you know, I have a huge concern especially looking at um Things globally that we will be regulated or let legislated out as um, you know citizens of the united states So I do want to make sure you know that um, you know, all of our voices are heard When it comes to you know regulations and and legislation So that is of course a big concern of mine. And I think you know of yours also That's exactly right. You see legislation right now I believe I've already talked about the state level But it's a it's a huge global ecosystem and it can't really be adequately ruled by This patchwork and michael levels Yeah national Well, it's interesting because we're asking for centralized bodies Like the legislature to then try to legislate something that is decentralized So it's a bit of a conundrum if you think about it. Um, so it's going to be definitely an interesting decade as Things start to hash out globally Well, and I think shawna the other thing too, um is that A lot of it goes to what everybody is saying is that what the in an in an emerging technology environment When technology is evolving it should involve which means that you need to have a very active and robust dev ops community And if you legislate in a way that they actually can't do that you're going to push out the good and the bad So there has to be some accommodation I think to allow the creativity and the solutions to emerge Yeah, you know, I was reading an article this morning I thought it was interesting because there are quite a few companies who are looking at moving to canada From china and I thought that was interesting or at least, you know, opening up locations in covec As there is a lot going on there for um, you know, bitcoin mining So it's fascinating to see if areas of the world regulate themselves that We are going to see people and citizens moving or, you know, opening up businesses and other locations that are freer um, so let's go ahead and jump to the introduction to self sovereign digital identity and um, you know This is definitely an interesting area. Let's go to the next slide Because I do want to make sure that all the who are attending really truly understand this So laura, can you kind of take us through and give us a good primer and kind of make it easy and simple to understand Self sovereign editing I don't know But um, just the coin's only one of them so so, um self sovereign identity is Idea at the moment it's it's more an idea and there are sort of prototypes and efforts underway. There is not really in most ways an active functioning um Use case for blockchain in terms of widespread usage, but it's an idea that under that underlies a lot of of issues and and addresses And Susan will talk a little bit about this addresses a number of issues across Blockchain cryptocurrency and your customer and everything else But it's a really it's a kind of a simple idea if you're going to imagine you mind about it, which is that you would have a lifetime portable identity That's your identity. That's your personal data that Belongs to you and it is it doesn't depend on any centralized authority So that when you need and it can't be taken away from you So anytime you need to better verify your identity You can do that by sharing only the amount of data in the way that you want to And then it isn't it isn't dependent on centralized authority So how does that work? It basically decentralizes The control over your personal data so that you don't have a government saying you have to share this or a business with whom You've shared it using your data and ways that you don't want to be used So The the back end of it is that the the blockchain distributed lesser technology Encryption together with provide secure and immutable identity records And you need to share some or all of that information for any party With whom you went to a transaction Um, and you can only choose if you have concepts and privacy on these days I'm going to see your privacy about minimum necessary that you only share the minimum necessary data for a transaction that's not the way By-large data is shared in the united states now. It's about to be presumably In europe under the new gdpr But that that aside If you you know, this is a simple kind of silly example But if you go into the father and you would like to have a turn and if the bartender's feeling generous And ask me for an id to prove that I can never return The bartender now That's where I live He knows I'm gonna make he knows how much I weigh which I really don't want to know He knows whether I need corrected lists to draw The bartender does not need to know that right? And what the all the bartender needs to know is is is he going to be in violation of some law like it is here So the idea of being able to share Electronically and not even necessarily sharing your birthday, which is personal data, but to share a validator It's validated by the blockchain that you are in fact of sufficient age To get it in Is all the bartender needs so that's the concept behind the Self-sovereign digital identities that you control it and you only share what you want to share with anybody at a given time So what are the challenges that um That digital identities intended to solve? Right problems that it solves or will solve we hope um account creation So including validation of identity or other attributes every time you go open a bank account or any other kind of account Right you have to prove your identity Pass forward or with driver's licenses or all sorts of other stuff or certificates um The cost and inconvenience of multiple account registrations if you are to go, you know to the you move You need a new bank account. You need to go to the dmv You need a bunch of other stuff. You have to spend all that time with each of those entities Proving your identity In the format that they want it proven and bringing, you know That piece of mail that shows your mailing address to get your driver's license all that kind of stuff in a different format for everybody And you have to take a day or two days off work to do this That in theory would go away that um The inconvenience, this is a nicely clear. I brought somebody else's language Inconvenience and insecurity of multiple user names and passwords Let's face it that whole system is dead It is it is no longer a functional system in many ways how many times a day do you sign in you have no idea What your password is unless you're using a password keeper You're not you either are using the same one over and over which you're not supposed to do because it's very insecure Or you keep forgetting them and getting a new one set which just adds chaos and time And then if the system's compromised You know, you have mechanic over echo faxes or the bleaches you have a broken system um So in theory digital identity would resolve that system Um that goes to identity factor account takeover as well Um, once your identity has been compromised of the current system of using in a password Anything's available. You know two hackers and people who are stealing them Um interoperability that's really you know data portability. Have you given it your data to one? system And you change you get sick of them, right? You don't really want to navigate anymore There is a barrier to transfer Um, if you're changing, you know, your cell phone provider or your uh internet address There are barriers between taking all the data that you've collected collected or created in any in any um environment That is essentially owned by whoever you gave it to even though it's your data Because they've got it in a way that you have to recreate it somewhere else So this would this would allow interoperability and portability um And then finally there's the problems that susan talked about that are so that those are all kind of what I call And I'm not sure if this is to say this anymore, but I do First world problems develop world problems. We're all worried about hackers and dig advances and who took our Who that has access to our bitcoin? In the in the developing world there are an estimated billion people worldwide who are just un Unidentified they lack any official form of identification and what that prohibits them from doing is You know pretty much anything other than living assistance life. You can't register for school. You can't get a bank account who can't vote You can't do a lot of things if you are a Recreation or a person there's a lot of migrants obviously issues going on now Whose documents have been lost? How do you ever prove your identity? How do you move to a new country and establish and address and if I can get all these things This is a real problem worldwide. It's a huge problem And that's part of what the un has been working on Is this effort to have everybody in the world have some sort of official identification? By 20 what's 2020? 2020 was when the plan should be put in place 2030 is when it should be fully implemented So those are all the problems the same technology would invariantly solve Those two kind of fairly disparate sets of problems, right? And a lot of people that are migrants are not worried so much about using the passwords and Equifax But there are two very real problems around identity and there are others that That this technology could Indeed you know solve Can I make um offer one little little augment from the media labs perspective? Um, and you often don't see it in these slides on self sovereign identity So it's not worthy and we're gonna make sure I'll see you guys get something out of think here So you can find out something over the rise a little bit But um, is we've been working on self sovereign identity? business side of the mic Well, and we look at what's different with blockchain technology in particular For those of you that haven't done the wallet um when you get a wallet It's automatic key generation. It creates an address for you and you trip to transactions basically From from into that address and it's then the main identifier as well as the main mechanism and method of Using identity is that key pair So it's a it's a hash of the public key and the key pair on blockchain on bitcoin blockchain, for example So in the 90s on the big thing with identity and digital identity with digital signatures digital signature guidelines on ABA Electronic signature legislation and so forth. That's an important mechanism of identity. We could say so one of the And so we took a look last semester made progress and um, you go to a blog on it You can look at get the open source toad to your demos on just leveraging the address on a blockchain as a mechanism for expressive authorization consent a set to a contract These are other indice of identity that people don't make that to the sort of more an account based on identity management Slideset and maybe they don't belong there necessarily it might be a different slide But because the identifier, which is the public key Like a core Like the core attribute of identity would be like your social carry number out here I'm on a blockchain to your public key like connected to your address also is connected to the private key by which we express Agreement, um, you know, which we digitally sign things. Um, it seemed like it went to well Look, it's also our own identity. How do we agree to governments in the United States? The basic concept is we it's cut legitimacy by consent of the government You know, we sign things we vote. We um, authorized This is um, the the pointy end of the stake of identity. So there's I think there's something in there You know, it needs to keep baking a little bit, but there's probably another little square that relates to the Um key pair and the mechanism of authorization and agreement Um from blockchain is something that's maybe even It's different from a translation of account systems of digital identity to a blockchain world And frankly better it might be the one we break the gap from identities that existed centuries past to how we How we can um refactor it for the digital age So um logged out of my t.edu come get your open source code and play with it yourself It's great. Thanks Joseph. Thank you So, you know, I I want to make sure I have time for Michelle's presentation But there's some I guess one of you know, some of the questions are you know, what what legal issues and risks are Presented and opportunities are presented by that. You know, we've heard the opportunity cycle What are the legal issues if you want to go into a regime of self-solving identity? And are those issues will those issues be resolved by wallop or by technology? So, you know What why where I get stuck on it to some extent is who controls the permissions? This is all decentralized and think about if you think about a public blockchain That means if anybody wants to sign themselves up can sign themselves up Have a bitcoin ball Well, if anybody can send themselves up for an identity, how's that a good idea, right? How do we know that you're really who you say you are? So, you know in a with the technology that's a whole the whole point is decentralization It's interesting if you think about primitive changes and once you've got your personal data and you add stuff to it You're going along with that But if you back up to the very beginning of digital identity How on the first in the first instance a baby is born or Susan wants to be identified Who decides that Susan's really Susan? And so that's I mean, one of the first issues is who's who's in charge? What's that, you know, how how is partly it's how is the blockchain structure? And one of this has been discussed is what they call a public permissioned which is a hybrid between a public blockchain and a private blockchain It lets everybody in but there is some administrative oversight body and they've talked about it being governed by a foundation for example a very diverse foundation so that geographically in different industries different worlds so that nobody there's no central authority But the foundation itself becomes central authority But there's a lot of legal issues to think about that, you know, and you think about different cultures I have two kids I'm pretty sure I know whose kids they are but how you know, can we have a system of first certificates? It's MS, you know, lots of culture servicing. You can usually figure out who the mom is There are, you know, other issues problems issues But you know, you have to there these are going to be legal issues to be to be thought about And are they solved by Structure of the some of them can be solved by the public permission blockchain, but are they solved by legal Structures or consensus of what is a foundation or by some kind of technological things Um, lots of privacy issues, right? So everything you have all your data is on this immutable chain and it's stored forever What if you know, what if you don't want it all there even if you're not always sharing each piece of it with Whoever you're interacting with in theory, there is a permanent record of it all somewhere That's something, you know, you want And how does that work with existing or exactly not even assisting still future still to be Activated the GDPR, which is the european's future of privacy law coming in in may of this year This would already conflict with that because it allows a right to be forgotten Or right of right of erasure. They call it so you can erase some of your data if you'd like to That doesn't work really with the blockchain. So what happens there? um And what happens to anonymity and we've all agreed you can talk a lot about I think that the downside of any of it right criminals tend to like any of the anti-modern ordinary folks that Trolls on the internet, but there are some things that people want to do in life and some valid Things you would like to be able to do anonymously. You'd like to not necessarily be tracked back to you You have to prove who you are to vote, but your vote is private. Um, so what happens? What about things like blind adoptions where you are you give up the child and their identity? Changes in order they're adopted by someone else and you're not able to go back and find your parents How do you change an identity in the witness protection program? You know, how does all this work if you have an immutable chain? so all of those kinds of issues um You know our would have to be addressed either again legally and technologically if you move to a system of digital identity Um, and then you know, there's everyone saying that there's the whole security issue Which is that although I guess Susan said the you know that underlying algorithm Has seemed quite secure relatively secure this far You know, I got into this area a lot because I was involved in responding to a big bitcoin Fapt which was at the time 72 million dollars And I don't even have the heart to tell you how much money that it's now It's like it's just staggering and actually a lot of those and I think Right Korea was behind some again huge transfers work well, but leaving that aside If you think of that as a cash of a huge transfer of wealth This is a cash. This is like the mother of all data breaches, right? If there is a way that this is compromising you're watching of identity data somewhere and it gets either stolen or Corrupted things get moved around and you get my identity and I do yours or I get someone else's you know all of that Um, you know, what are the safeguards and users private keys? How is that secured? Is it secured again by law or by technology? So, you know as these are just using all this kind of as an example All the things you have to think about and that's there's plenty more no doubt Um, when you start to think of the of a cool capability it solves lots of problems. It also creates a whole bunch of other problems Oh, no, thank you. Laura. Thank you. So I Just kind of an introduction to token law, but let us understand first off. What is a token? So a token is a is a digital representation of of value in essence We we've all heard of of the cryptocurrencies of bitcoin and bitcoin cash and monero and ethereum But we're in a we're an atmosphere where a lot of people and companies are now creating their own tokens and those tokens trade on various exchanges and they're offered to people through White papers and there's a lot of uncertainty about What your what your token actually is defined as is it a Commodity is it a security? Is it a piece of property? Could it be all of those things and the answer is yes and who who regulates? um the tokens and so We find ourselves in this in this web of law where different government agencies are in charge of Making sure that that the token issuers and the and the exchanges that are allowing trades And the people who are purchasing tokens and the people who are creating hedge funds that invest in tokens Then everybody complies with the relevant law, which was Enacted and had never foreseen the fact that we had something called a token um So who so I think it's good to think about who are the US regulators that actually regulate cryptocurrencies You have banking regulators. You have the irs. You have treasuries Financial crimes enforcement network. You have the sec and you have the cftc. I could probably spend about Six hours going through what each of these different arms of the government do and how they regulate I'm going to focus today because of all the height that's going on with the the mainstream tokens i'm going to focus today just on sec and cftc regulation And talk a little bit about those frameworks and how we should be looking at tokens and what are the different Securities and related issues So we talked a little bit earlier about about the how we test the sec's approach to regulation of tokens Is key to whether um a security is an investment contract and the way that you Um whether a token excuse me is an investment contract such a it's a security And so the how we test has how we test has um has four prongs and again It's a test from 1946 in a case that involved parcels of an orange grove So we've we've come from we've come from sales of interest of an orange grove to Regulating whether the dow token is a is a security or not So the the four prongs are whether there's investment of money Two in a common enterprise Three with the expectation of profits and four derived from the entrepreneurial and managerial efforts of others And really what we've seen a lot of recently In terms of the regulation is that focus on the third prong the expectation of profits and the difference between if there is an expectation of profits You're almost certainly going to pass the how we test And you're going to be deemed a security versus if you if you fail And you don't have an expectation of profits So if we roll back to july The sec issued a report of an investigation under exchange act 21a called the dow report now the sec investigates companies And it can bring enforcement actions But it can also write a report and decide not to bring enforcement action and instead Just educate the market and say we found a violation of the securities law but we're not actually going to enforce the securities law against the company or the organization because Everybody sort of didn't know and so that would be inherently unfair So we're going to tell you what the results of our investigation are and we're going to give you guidance And then normally what you see is a sort of slew of cases that come on its heels And and the warnings out there So the dow report involved an investigation of the dow And sort which is an unincorporated organization Slock it which was a german entity and sockets co-founders And certain intermediaries and whether they violated the securities laws by not registering the the dow token The dow token represented interest in an enterprise and could be paid for with virtual currency They could be held as investments. They had voting rights and ownership rights and they could be sold on secondary platforms Applying the highway test the sec determined that the dow token was actually a security and it should have been registered Sent sort of waves through the market with everybody thinking I just issued a coin is by coin security. No, my coin is not a security. It's a utility token But wait, I told the market that they were going to accept expect a profit there was sort of a whole mess of of chatter out there and and not not a lot of direction So what did we see after we saw actions in september october december? We saw a bunch of actions sec v. Recoin which involved Fraud in connection with the coin issuance that was supposedly backed by real estate and diamonds We saw sec versus garza in october which related to the fraudulent Offering of unregistered securities in a Ponzi scheme We saw sec v. Plexi corp in december, which saw the halt actually of an iso the government actually going in before the point Awkward doing an asset freeze again because of fraud and then finally we saw something really interesting We saw the munchie case In december and what's interesting about munchie was that There was supposed to be a coin offering and there was a presale And there was absolutely no fraud alleged by the sec It was really just the mere determination by the sec That the token was not a utility token that that munchie had had put statements out there and blog posts Um in their white paper saying that there was an expectation of profit And they went in and and munchie stopped the iso and said We understand that we felt we passed the howie test and they returned all the money to the investors so Again another message to the market. You're doing everything right. You're not you're not doing a Ponzi scheme You're not you're not perpetrating fraud, but you made the wrong determination Right, you're you made the wrong determination. We've seen a lot of statements by by chairman clain which They were informal statements He had made one at georgetown and and sort of off the cuff had said well, I don't think I ever met a A token that wasn't a security and and those remarks were revered it as well And then he actually put out a statement a few weeks ago And and he said he said we we do use a case-by-case basis And he gave an example of something that would be a utility coin and that would be a participation In a book of the month club And so you could issue tokens and you could use the money raised from those top tokens to invest in fund acquisition of books And help the distribution of books But really your token was a participation interest and that's really the key is your token being used That's why it's called a utility token is your token being used to support the enterprise not because I think I'm going to gain a profit from the book exchange But because I'm going to get some use out of the token um and so It's been a very sort of interesting ride that we've had um And this is really to see nothing of the fact that there's also Investment advisor issues and investment company act issues You know, there are people out there who are giving advice to other people Whether they should invest in cryptocurrencies. Does that make that person an investment advisor who has to register? If you form an LLC to invest In in tokens, you know, are you now an investment company? And so the law is is really we're watching a huge sea of change um So I focused a lot on on the sec and I want to in fairness Talk about the CFTC. So we know that the sec can deem that your token is a security in um 2015 the CFTC Which has oversight of futures options and derivatives contracts Determine that bitcoin and other digital currencies or commodities And if you think in your head, you actually can be a security and a commodity at the same time But we definitely know that the cryptocurrencies are commodities And the CFTC has fostered development of the digital currency market. They've permitted registration of a swap execution facility listing bitcoin swaps, which is the terror exchange they've um They've permitted trading Sorry, they've permitted ledger x a swap execution facility and an exchange list exchange listing binary options called terror bitcoin price index But they've also brought in enforcement actions people sometimes call me and say is this a security and could somebody from the sec coming after me and and Perhaps we can make a determination Once we have enough information, but you also have to remember that that it's definitely a commodity So the CFTC has jurisdiction and they've taken a really broad stroke if they see fraud connection with a commodity They've brought they've brought at least one case which was CFTC versus geltman blueprint and that was back in 2017 and related to a hedge fund that was basically High returns when it and when it actually was misappropriating investments. Um So that's part of the freight the federal regulatory landscape that we have And because we have a government where states can also regulate We have to think about what each individual state is doing And we've seen um, we've seen texas massachusetts in north carolina become very very active in the space texas and north carolina both suspended securities, uh The securities regulators in those states Issued emergency halts of operations of gig connect, which is a uk cryptocurrency marketplace And the massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth said that he was quote going to begin a sweep of entities in the state who are raising capital by icos We know that in new york If you want to be a money transmitter or have an exchange that accepts Or transmits money you need to get a bit licensed from the department of financial services So on top of the federal framework, you also have to be cognizant of the state framework Um, so there's there's a lot going on and as laura had mentioned Um, are the regulations that are currently in place the regulations that should be in place or the regulations that actually Are are are they outdated? Are they usable in the framework? Do we need to legislate? We don't even know what the courts are going to say because no court has a bind on any of these um Cases brought by the sec or for that matter plaintiff's class action firms a lot of people issue Tokens and they're worried about the sec I'm sure the sec can come after you but a plaintiff's class action firm can also come after you for failing to register your security Um, which creates significant liability. So um What i've tried to do is i've tried to give you a brief overview of of the state of play of Of token law from the sec and the cftc standpoint and a little bit of state regulation And that's uh pretty much Can i uh, sure i mentioned um the derivatives trading what they have allow The cfpc because we do have derivatives trading Going on sure fine sure Yeah, there's the cftc has approved um, they've approved exchanges for for derivatives trading There's there's a swap execution facility and derivatives clearing organization ledger x that has approval It's not that the it's not that there's not that our government is not encouraging the development of this of this marketplace But they're they're regulating it slowly on the other hand There were two applications for um exchange exchange traded funds that were recently polled from sec review because the sec one of their main concerns is liquidity Um, and it's hard for them to approve a fund if they don't know what there's going to be enough liquidity um So i hope that answers your I mean there is at least in my view the The allowance of bitcoin derivatives to be traded Cboe et cetera That is a regulator kind of sent. Okay We can put a few parameters around this and allow this within our rules. So Well, I just wanted to make a point that I didn't think they were only saying no because I don't think Different parts of the government moving at different speed. After me the cftc was doing that You had the sec and and the treasury secretary saying wait, wait, wait. Why are you guys going so fast? You know, you know, and so there's a there's a push pull Even in the administration even in the government itself As to how what's the right answer here? How fast? And I think there was um time for testimony on that coming up And we're going to Have conversations about those decisions, right? So maybe now's a good time. I don't know if Shalem and if you have uh, we're going to go into another piece. I'm going to time to take questions If anybody here has some, you know, I know That real good. I wanted to kind of go through some career advice I'd love to talk a little bit about How each of us in this area and some career advice for those in the room and those of course watching So how did you get into this Michelle? Do you want to start? I was actually at a party about A year a year and a half ago and I had I had um, no idea what people were were talking about They were talking about about cryptocurrencies and things that I had never Heard about and I was incredibly intrigued mainly because They were so animated about it and they were so passionate about it about something new and about Blockchain and this technological revolution and and at the time that I started learning about it There really wasn't a ton of of materials that were all in one place and you kind of had to go to your Sources that you you were able to determine were legitimate and had good information So I I'm mostly self taught but I thought you know This is this is the change of of a landscape and this is technology that is going to affect Every industry and while I was trained as a securities lawyer And and so my initial inclination was was to lean for the token issues I've really come most of my practices has really concerned helping companies that are getting into blockchain Purchasing companies that are that are interested in blockchain technology And helping those companies do those deals and and comply with all the various regulations there are Because this is so forward-thinking. I think you know when I would I always Tell the story when I started college and they gave me an email address and they explained to me how to use email It was beyond my comprehension that I could type in an address and that my friend at at harvard was going to receive So something on the computer. It just it didn't make sense to me And there was that that sort of excitement when you went to the computer lab and you checked your email account Like how many messages where they're going to be from how many different people um and now it's It's almost silly to think about it that way, but I think You know the people who you talk to say I've never heard of this blockchain thing They're the same people who two years from now will probably you know Be used utilizing it through various companies like it was So that's my story. Yeah, so I um learned about it in the conference. Uh, I just finished a job as a general councillor and I'm sure in the minute that I heard That reconciliation was gone I was sort of in my head jumping up and down because I understood how it could apply on the enterprise side So where I've come at this from is on the enterprise side of things trying to figure out what business processes could be Streamlined and what that does to business when they change their view of what an ecosystem is or what a market place is um, I Also self taught myself started out with that satoshi white paper and proceeded to go to a bunch of conferences eventually a master Well, I won't say also my story is like my family was just It's bitcoin. If it's big coins, you'll pay attention if it's not big coin. We can't get our attention anywhere so My daughter even threatened that if we got a dog, we would name it lockies. So If yes, you're not getting a dog But um So a lot of this was I was fascinated by what I thought it could actually do and Wasn't so much on the bitcoin stuff per se. Although I knew it fueled it but Since then I mean a lot of what you do is you stay educated I will say that the best source that I found in a lot of places twitter Just following the people who this stuff comes so fast that twitter is really a truly a great resource for it I'm linked the linkedin communities and I surround myself with economists Developers when I go on a consulting job I ask for a developer to be cared with me because I understand the logic of the code and I need to make sure that that's going to Work sufficiently within a business process Um, but and there's a ton of lawyers involved in this. I mean more lawyers than I ever imagined one I like I love them so But more in the law firm side, so you don't see really in a house a lot of lawyers Embracing this yesterday. There's a huge opportunity for businesses to learn this. There's an opportunity for boards to learn this. There's just Um, there's a lot a big learning curve still. So that's how I Approach it and how I I'd say, you know, I got into this. I was not the technology technology person at all Um, I was a constitutional law person in law school. I was a big first amendment scholar type Um, I'm like to think about freedom of the press and it's and then when I was I went into private practice and presented media companies Um, and then the internet and all publication it used to be something that published in New York Times We used to the New York Times It doesn't really work that way more. Maybe it's published by the times, but it's all electronically and the whole method and timing and the way information is spread You know, you couldn't just retract it. Um, and so I got recruited to go to AOL early on when it was the biggest to becoming the biggest internet company in the world to litigate a lot of community for internet companies And we did that quite successfully and I then stuck around and had much broader responsibilities that all involved the legal implications of this new technology and we built Target advertising And nobody had done and Can we do this? I had to figure out if you could and that's so I had to learn technology and Fell in love with it and with the business. Um, and then didn't think a much different kind of a lawyer that I thought I was going to be when I started out And I think that's you know, that's something to be aware of this is stuff And you may not go to it may come to you Um, I know if you just give me out of you know, the that our students slides earlier and all these, you know It's gonna come to you. It's coming to you right now So and you know Michelle and I were talking earlier about the law firms now A lot from lawyers by and large are not super entrepreneurial. They're pretty cautious And so, you know, we get these calls and it's like can you just do a bitcoin trading fund in london with these russians and these israelis and all of our clients are I don't know Um, it really is we don't we haven't done that before sometimes the answer that we have We don't have experience in them But no one does So it really is about being entrepreneurial and about applying What you know, either about the you know, not even about the technology about the law about the business and coming up with the best dancing in london with You know, at least in my experience that day Well, when we did that we would promptly sued or investigated by everyone in the universe We had a big budget. So that was good. But that's really how a lot is that game made um is You take the best shot you can and then you acquire the audience, right? You literally lose and you go out from there But you know, that's and then to get into the whole mighty entry into the Blockchain crypto world was I was doing a lot of Incident response the data breaches big hacks. Um, some on the national security side any as I said big Bit the next crypto exchange bitcoin exchange Was hacked um and a lot of value were now disappeared and I learned I got a call on some indication If you had the system That turns out that you can see, you know in blockchain where it went, but it's still gone You know, it's been moved. It's an immutable record that it's been moved to 2 000 wallets. You know, I don't have that much time It's still gone. So what do you do when they get enough of security issues of private keys and public keys and how the architecture is Even though you don't have to secure again the sound word and that's what's to be secure. What are the other issues around it and how it's You know, just technology in the wrong hands. It's just as bad as you have to be and that's just as bad as anything else So I came to it from that era and and then got very interested in all the non crypto and non cybersecurity related issues Well, and I Of course components And I saw a little link to blockchain a few years ago and started taking my CLE courses with IVM there and Really did not get though absolutely fascinated and A little bit. I will say I'm a little bit obsessed with blockchain right now It's my newest thing that I'm learning and diving into and I've dove into the deep end I was speaking in russia on a panel at the international legal forum and palo toska is one of the blockchain experts worldwide. He's with the university of london had spoken and I just got Totally fascinated Obsessed there were another it was another gentleman on the panel Who's with the university of sydney john flood and I think john and I kind of both left that conference going We have to really dive in and see what we can do to help the legal Profession, you know get into blockchain and see what see what new things we can develop So that was my forte into it and you know kind of similar You know, I'm sure that you're like me and probably many of those in the room who are watching Is I spent at least an hour in the morning and an hour before I go to bed reading looking at different things on the internet twitter my weekend this weekend was Um Really funny enough youtube. I went on and looked at um quite a few of the uh cryptocurrency You know youtube videos and it was kind of funny as I I saw no one my age That were uh leading the videos. It was all people about half the age awesome piercings lots of colored hair But they've got these super cool companies and they're all millionaires because they jumped in while the rest of us Were kind of standing back going. Oh, is this really going to be real and they just dope right in So kind of the risky. I think, you know, nessa being young, which definitely has paid out for so many of them So I know that we have about 20 ish minutes So and I I think we've got quite a few people in the room who can ask questions And then I don't know if we can take questions from those watching but uh daza. What's the best way to do this? um I would say um Telegram anybody um, so Thank you for asking that question um, shana always very um of the moments and so um, I I've been just likely looking at telegram, but I've seen um We've got you know, there's a few ringers up there and I've got a notice a couple of questions to you can go up. Oh, sorry. You're bringing Well, one thing that came up is there was a uh, there was an interesting um observation by um, Al Willis who's a full ethereum No, aficionado I suppose who comes to a lot of legal hackers meetings and MIT classes meetups in the area and Entrepreneur and a developer and he was in the telegram channel. He just said uh, He just thought it was interesting that somebody just deeded their house apparently um to an ethereal foundation Um, and so No, no, so there's a link in telegram that you can read all about it. Well any any questions? So one of the early questions was why legally are some of the differences between uh public and private blockchains and uh How Should people think about it? Right. Yeah, that came up when um, you were identifying that they were the public and the private and like private public and provisioned and Looking for um, just sort of almost like a way to a legal framework or from a legal perspective. Are they Different really the same? Well, I think we could start with the private permission first because I don't Think that there is a really particularly well set of law on what the public ones are You know in some ways the pope the private ones are Um You pretty much have an idea of what your rights are because you're in a in a group So you're whether you are In the merit trading group. That's going to be a private one with public interaction or whether you're in a logistics group or wherever So you you can define your rights fairly easily among yourselves um, it acts more it's not centralized per se but acts more in the sense that You know who's there and you can define that On the public side, I don't know actually don't really know the answer to that and I don't know that anybody really knows the answer to Read the whole idea is that there wouldn't be right, but it would be that it's the it's the crypto anarchist It's the idea that the whole that bitcoin and the public side I think gets sprung up to be free of regulation and free of control by centralized authorities whether it be governments or big banks or anything all that in The financial crisis era in the 2008 era So the whole idea was there wouldn't be any law that be all sorts of That's eroding in many ways as you know things happen with the silk road or what they In anonymity erodes and law enforcement gets better and things like that But the idea originally was a sort of a words of self-government and it's governed by consent the consensus of the blockchain not By authority by law or people or governments so But the private ones, you know, as Susan says you have for example the way the banks do for Informed currency transactions. They may all do that using Ripple using a back end sort of a private system in which they all communicate and send value to each other They will organize the rules of that and law of that particularly contrary right So, I mean if the public ones are Methods to replace government is kind of how you can abstract it So, I you know, I I'm just in thinking about this in general. I have to wonder it doesn't just Spring up. It's not like you and I and anybody else just decided one day. Hey, we have a platform here. It is its operational Somebody had to develop that platform. There is some centralization somewhere, right? You don't get a platform without forwarding So the question for me is where are you centralizing? Where are you shifting and then you look out, you know You know, who do you want to be empowered to run that? So if you're thinking of introduce yourself, oh sure, um, my name is Camila. Nice meeting you. Well, uh, I'm a Brazilian lawyer with background in antitrust competition and compliance issues I'm really thrilled to be here. Wins the prize for traveling furthest from this life And it's relatively worth it Um, so, uh, if you think about doing a business That's based on what change And giving those differences between a product and private blood chains Would you say that the most important thing is to understand the consensus mechanism? Just so you have a little bit of control of How things are going to go I think if you want control, you probably want a private or at least a sort of a hybrid System like we were talking about with a private public permission, but somebody has permission Otherwise it is There really isn't much of a control mechanism if you're building a business you presumably want to control at least some aspects of it So that would be Yeah, I would agree with that and the consensus for me goes to the security of the system An amount of processing All sorts of more operational type things that go on with it I mean on the public chain the consensus and the economic incentive are what provide the integrity of the So Some variation of that is also What happens in a private chain as well? So those things must work together, you know, you you're looking at decentralization But in a way to incentivize keeping Platforms and talk about this a lot with integrity and honesty because without the platform wouldn't have taken What does that do? Right? You need the whole platform and that work is really I think I don't I see the question being asked a lot about the tokens and I just I This is kind of myself back to my phone. What's the problem? What are you talking about? What's it trying to do? Um, how do you keep that going? Okay Um, so one of the a little bit of color What do you do on here, um, but um Coming out of the MIT legal forum Which also, you know, um, it not only did it bring us blockchain diversity group. Oh, gosh Like like frozen um, it also also brought us um a group called soba um that um, it's sort of self-organized and um, we have two of the founders actually Here in the class and I was wondering could you come very quickly and just say How we're fixing to organize this you don't have to say it. Uh, but okay, I'll just We'll do it quickly. Basically, I'll try to do a 10 days It's token based and um First of all, it's a discussion group to talk about blockchain to talk about AI. Um, so you know, we get together on a Mostly a weekly basis. We have a we have a lunch and Converse retreat books. We look at hacks. We do things But we were thinking, you know, really interesting is what could we use blockchain to run our group in some way some of it was like, you know, how to use a member who is in like We all have slack fatigue and we're also interested in using using the technology To maybe represent membership. Um, one of our members was running for city council at the time And so we were really thinking deeply about the governance aspects To model it just I think one thing that we did really that was interesting was we used paint for plates that I'm rebooting web of trust when it was in Boston is where we had a sort of like our breakthrough meeting where we Put it's simple. We kind of signed a paper plate and that represented our token That was issued. Um, and it was a physical token. So we begin to model The issuance to presentation and like the basis functions and flows of who got them and who didn't And then maybe because look at selecting the right Blockchain and the right configuration And issuance and you know functions and flows of what the token represent when it's this came up a couple of times They wanted some membership token the in the commodities context. Um, so when tokens represent membership What does that mean and especially when it leads into governance? Um, in terms of when we're voting on who's going to be a member who isn't a Some people as part of membership and so we're making up the rules for a time and then also we The other question that I just want to throw up there trademark. So, um, legal hackers Which is a group that many of us don't participate in really like um Is looking to do a trademark and I learned about a collective mark a middle service mark and a certification mark, you know Other marks, but only this one from a while ago that the word the trademark represents not original goods or Anything like that but it literally represents membership in a group. It's a collective mark I'll bet you there's an emerging jurisprudence. Um, that's going to work That's going to converge at some point on this notion of membership related token And maybe an introduction of this this element of collective mark or trademark and it might be one of the things If anybody's interested in exploring that low key way not, you know, with like high stakes client, you know, um rights and obligations on the on the line I know that our SOPA group is just very much Um, uh, like a um, a willing Guinea pig and prototyping group is and we don't necessarily have high power people talent That's for sure We're not necessarily sure about what's on the rise or what would be a portable legal framework So just some very relevant live questions. So, you know from these very halls Good I'm the unelected spokesman for that moment and that moment alone of SOPA. Okay, um, right so, uh on this was uh from brian, uh about whether or not under the current legal framework the us meant to issue a crypto token Or Whether You know, I know that there was me there was research on that being done an experimentation by large companies right now to try and explore that The question I would have so if you have a digital dollar per se then what are you going to do for your adult spend? problem on that how you're going to organize it and You know the larger question that I was talking to and I'm not an economist So I'm putting that right out there now, but I was talking to a friend who is explaining to me Negative interest rates and governments voting and knowing where all of your dollars are And not being able to take your dollars out of the system then the way that you can today And what does that do to money supply and governance? So I think in terms of bed point Those sorts of things might want to be explored. That's beyond what I know, but I know that those are issues that Are cocktail party issues Like I can can get them, but um You know, there's a lot of governments looking at that coin and then the IMF has predicted that we will have Different kinds of government coins going forward within the next 10 years I don't know what they're working on but It wouldn't surprise me that anybody else went away and or anything like that. Well, I think you also look at there's been some news coverage recently of russia and Venezuela and a couple other Iran Iran some public land some of your road nations All experimenting or going into having to obey sanctions to using position of their own Fed coins or you know governments Supported or authorized or initiated Cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions. So you're gonna You're seeing it in other countries. I think that might very well make it likely that you see here, but I don't know Yeah, I think actually there's a therapy in front of the camp on the rich one Which is implementing its own it's transferring this entire economy to the critical system If you also go to uh It's So I know in the UN sex sector that there are projects and Certain tech companies that are looking to build Currencies that might be tied to the dollar but digital currencies for countries that don't really have fully functioning banking infrastructure So in that sense that might be a really good idea Um, what else what other choice do they have? Is really sort of where it comes down to and if they do that then what are you going to learn has a Established country from that and maybe can we have some lessons with that? Again, that's another example where it's easier To do that where there's no sort of existing infrastructure No, maybe this will tie into the the next session, which I think is around Puerto Rico with the credit right so when you have Effectively now existing infrastructure to you know to rebuild With a with a blockchain or to build initially, you know from start with a blockchain as opposed to trying to impose You know currency right in the middle of the US economy Which is lots of other existing in the tentacles and other economies It may be easier for it to start with it swallowed less developed country that has challenges in transferring funds because they live existing banks or systems to do I guess and one other uh, I guess observation by way they begin to wrap and wrapping and then um I understand for There are reasons of like human biology and just the sensibility of psychology when you take a little break before we go to the next session But I think it's a particularly good question. You're from ringer from some Reuters lads Brian about about whether Mint could is just a direct question of issue a dollar that was an effective crypto currency coin partly because that's really the Um, that's one way to get at what we're trying to do it lot on MIT I think you and probably what like panels like yours here To educate to engage us is which is to look at Not just technically how could you have your sort of like a self? Authenticating and maybe like You're like a self enclosed cryptographic system for coins that people could treat as currency And you know we view the some of the attributes voluntarily currency But what would it look like if we utilize this technology and And um and look at it Um as fiat currency like what what's like what are the statutes and ranks and the whole scheme and our payment systems and in our You know for making a secret service down to point to sale What would it look like to architect a system that was designed? Deliberately as part of the way we govern ourselves to take advantage of the Properties and opportunities of the technology But the way that we do may not be as hierarchical Maybe there's other ways to do monetary policy and maybe there's other ways to allow for Equivalence of cash and and other ways to have traceable and know your customer type Outcomes that are very different with this technology, but we like to raise the question not only about you know refining iteratively improving law with technology but also the big moonshot questions, which I think are Raised by you could be could be us mint issue You know the type of bitcoin It's a deceptively simple question, but it raises the big questions of you know fundamentally You know the role of law in a self-government society It's worth answering not necessarily choosing it but um like coming up with two or three potential systems By which that that role could occur imagining the levels of economic and political and business and legal Debate and deliberation that would have to occur to arrive at suitable solutions I think is extremely good way to evaluate that technology Then to look at what it could really be used for in the maximally productive, um, you know potential future like use cases So a very creative question and most feel like having asked it. It must be It has to be hacked now like somebody has to prototype that and keep the tires and imagine how it would work Well does a lot one thing I do think you have to think about was with that with the government issuing a coin is Social equality and accessibility Because the whole concept of the coin you have to you have to have an electronic device in order to use that And not everybody has an electronic device. So it would be potentially you could have discriminatory issues because there would be certain people who didn't have access To the coin because they don't have access to a phone Or they don't have access to to a computer on which to use the coin Which is one of the issues that say a sweet green and other companies who don't accept cash That they're dealing with because they're being told no you have to accept cash because some people can't shop at your store because they can't Right, so we're looking all of our public accommodation and so forth. Yes, it raises all the big questions. Good question, Ryan All right, so, um, maybe, um, Let me get back to the panel so that you can wrap it up and then um, and then we're going to take a little break before Michael Casey Exactly how you love to wrap I think that was a pretty good point You know, I was thinking about the the idea of a big coin because the government issues cryptocurrency will be issues susan race, which is Then doesn't the government know where every dollar and the red coin you have Is and where it's spent or to whom So you start from me to think you start from the crypto anarchist Camera to All the way to This is nobody settled norms about what you do with your money or you keep it. Yes, you're supposed to tell the IRS how much you made and pay them but the rest of a lot of the transactions many of them you don't necessarily You know expect the government to be managing on the other hand everybody uses credit cards everywhere they go and there is already a record of it think about what we're talking about When's the right time to legislate you look at that stand on bitcoin to the high particle bitcoin The change in the impact of those technologies Anytime online you tried to regulate It wouldn't adequately capture or address the concerns or opportunities raised, you know on that same spectrum So that's that's where it takes me. Yeah I'm right there. I mean, I think technically you could certainly do it. You can have digital gold that already exists today You could create It's more a question of should you not could you Okay, so thank you everybody for doing that. Thank you shana for joining us remotely Thank you all for coming all the way to boston to help educate and also to challenge us on today in view of A better understanding of illegal frameworks What couldn't we build? What could we what problems could we solve what challenges could we potentially achieve? our student projects so Lots of good inputs and everyone please join me in thanking the panel in television land We're going to just go dark for a few minutes and then we'll be joined by Michael Casey and he'll throw up down the gauntlet also for the micro grid challenge So thanks again shana. Talk to you soon Thank you. Bye. Bye We're going live in about in a couple of minutes stand by Hey David, could I I know you're this is although you're paying right no, but as fast as you shut the door please All right, um, so We're back for Extra innings of the computate the first computational law course Which is off to such a rollicking good success that people it's like that great cocktail party Right, we're people want to keep talking. That's what I reckon is an excess No, it is too drunk on Oh It's it's a it's quite a brew. It's quite a brew. Yeah So, um, I I'd like to say um, and this is saying a lot because I love MIT It is my extreme. Uh, I'm very grateful to choose my favorite person at MIT Now Michael Casey now I just say this particular minute. That's right. Um, now we're dates You know in the day of fervor it's worth credit where it was due was Bill Mitchell who was my mentor and brought me into MIT God rest his soul, but um, I'll tell you what though. Um, what you are really like you Landed MIT and you're just going all the way taking it full on and you got projects and you're doing cool stuff Of the type that I like because it has a hacking Quality to it and it's innovating in the realm of business. It's got a strong legal element, but it's all it's really driven by the Powerful potential of these new technologies. So um, I'm thrilled to have you here Thanks for dropping by and I was just wanted to ask if you could share a bit about your I'm sorry on the phone We have our main speakers from tomorrow. Who's um, chris baron a partner at drinker beddle Um, it introduced to me by the way by uh, jason baron our first speaker They're partners at the same firm and I just wanted to thank you for um joining us by phone So you could get a taste of what michael was saying and maybe we could enter some of it into your computational contracts lecture tomorrow So thank you chris Okay, on the phone So could you can you bring us up to speed a little bit of the micro grid project and then if you want I can Try you to chuck the gauntlet down and pose a challenge. I know that there's some legal dimensions to what you're trying to solve Absolutely. Okay. Great. Thanks very much everybody. Um I'm serendipitous that I was able to be here and do this because I do think this is An interesting question for you guys to explore and it's and I'm hoping that I can get some value out of it as well so basically what I'm doing is um Exploring the prospect with a group of students from slone also from Ecs also from here at the media lab uh, the prospect of building a Distributed the transactive micro grid A You know off grid part of what the record the moment, right? So everybody knows that The public utility has been sort of decimated actually it was almost decimated before the hurricane came along because it was bankrupt and then uh, you know at least technically bankrupt and then the uh The hurricane came through and just worked out so much of the infrastructure So you have these communities around the country who've been out without power for ages For energy, but they also had this very strong emerging Uh belief or at least desire to pursue a new pattern And and there are many of us who believe that the future of energy is is a distributed structure Decentralized structure and there's many arguments for that one of the strongest though is was made clear by the hurricane And that is that you get more resiliency Arguably if you've got multiple nodes of generation so that if we just knock out one of them as we did during the The hurricane and sort of major transmission lines that they had then everybody goes down right whereas if you've got Sort of multiple locations lose one at least you've got another this is a sort of an architectural Design feature of many versions of security now We're thinking about the same thing with data security cyber security We push control of data out to the edges. Maybe there's less of a honeypot for hackers to enter into and and so now we have um You know a very different way of thinking about security To spread it around distributors that's one part of it, but we also think that if we can move uh generation capacity and Most importantly pricing power Away from these centralized institutions and bring it down to small market groups Then the learning and the data sharing and the information that comes from the community can be that much more powerful And that maybe there are better decisions that get made around both the generation and use of power particularly in an iot coming environment where Devices can be programmed to turn on or off depending on what the price is or what other signals they're getting So right now in a centralized model typically It's a sort of a take or pay model where the potential utility is just setting the price, right? Well, that's that's based on a price that's that's Bearing within it all the costs of credit all the costs of you know, the centralized architecture the infrastructure I would say corruption. I mean these are all sort of components of what come to the pricing model that you are forced to both pay and to receive if you are Generating your own power and selling it back to the grid or if you are just receiving it from that But if we have this again this model where? multiple nodes can share And the price is now being set by whatever the local market is You know interesting things could emerge out of that people could decide that Hey, I'm just gonna I think that there's there's clearly a rising Opportunity here because the price of power is growing there seems to be greater demand for wi-fi services So I'm going to add more capacity and put up the cell tower and build my own you know mesh net or something or I'm going to Put an irrigation system in and so there's a pump I need to do and so I can add more power for that or or maybe it's getting Too expensive. So I'm going to you know figure out how to bring in a more efficient You know a conditioning system, you know these these decisions we think become more fluid. That's the kind of economic thinking so we try to think of it not as a macro grid But rather an economic development platform the community is now I can do this. So what we're doing is we've we've found The institution that is It's called I and the instituto nueva escuela And they have 45 different charter schools around the country around Puerto Rico Each of them in underprivileged areas Um, interestingly, and I'll get to why this matters a little while they have a public charter So they're working with the very public schools and that gives them some interesting opportunities in terms of public finance um and we're Basically sending students down there on a site selection mission to look at each of these places to find what we think might be the Ideal community to experiment with this the school would be the anchor institution A school will typically have some unique qualities. It has a fairly large You know comparative to a home at least Demand requirement consumption. They're only during certain hours of the day. So for solar energy, that's interesting. There are hours Afterwards and obviously on weekends in which it's potentially drawing in a lot of capacity. So we think that with Battery storage and and others we can use that as a sort of a base load kind of model, but then we'd hook it up to a Low variant community you need to think of these things quite a lot in solar obviously because you get variants through the days and everything else You know A factory perhaps that is producing things would be one of them. There's the schools themselves actually have a number of their own sort of factory relationships for school supplies a Retail outlet of some sort maybe a restaurant Couple of houses that are both generators and a couple houses that is purely consuming and so through this relatively small community we create you know, the makings of a mini economy and supply each of them with Generation capacity the school being the biggest but the others having different loads And then the blockchain becomes important because what we're trying to do is to create A decentralized marketplace. So there's no central utility in the middle setting the price running the ledger This is something that it's already being experimented on and used in brooklyn. For example, there's this trans active grid there By a company called LO3 energy. There's a company called power ledger in Australia. It's doing these sorts of things So, you know, it made me that the blockchain actually doesn't isn't necessary Maybe you would just create some sort of Central entity the school itself might just run like that. We don't know but this is nonetheless Part of the experiment is to figure out what's needed to make this thing work efficiently And uh, but but but you know, there's all these sort of big questions that we face in doing this One of them is and these are these are things that I think, you know, reaching to have legal minds put put themselves to Um, you know I don't want this entity to have to go through sort of bureaucratic red tape of of that a regular utility You know, will it be designated as a utility? How does it define itself? What is the the corporate structure of this group? Is it a cooperative that actually runs the whole thing? Who owns it? How does that structure work? What is it? How does it relate back again to? Whether it's a utility whether it should be regulated by a utility. Is it a virtual utility is a real utility? Um, you know, we we want as light a burden as possible. Obviously for for regulatory purposes Um, and and the thing is we are trying to define a different paradigm here. We really want this not to be Uh, a centralized model and will the regulations force us to build a model that that undermines what we're trying to do Right, so this is one problem that that I think is is interesting to explore in addition to the simple idea about How do we structure that contractual relationships here? What are we typically the idea is that you would generate Certain amount of electricity and that would be represented as a token and you can sell those tokens Uh to others who then buy the right to to draw down that that electricity whether it's stored in battery form Or it's a right to be delivered in the future So the trading can be sort of separated sometimes from the the actual energy product, but you need some proof that what's being Uh claimed is is backed by real generated electricity Um, so there's sort of a contractual question in all of that. I think um, you know design around Where the rights and obligations are who owns is the capacity to generate this what sort of an asset is that? and then in the midst of this we're thinking about how we're going to finance it um, and the There's two core questions. I think are are interesting here um, one is Do we have uh rights to FEMA money? so Typically obviously because of the hurricane there is a right that uh people Puerto Rico have institutions to You know disaster relief funds from FEMA to rebuild the infrastructure um But there is we don't quite know what the ruling is on this but if If you're not building back exactly what you Destroyed or at least some representation of it if you're building something that's quite different is that Exempt you from from the right to have that that that's another is it reconstruction Right. Is it reconstruction or existing reconstruction? Is it new? Is it investment or is it reconstruction? All right, it would seem you know very unfair to be forced to build something You know old inefficient clunky and broken Uh for the sake of just bringing in uh FEMA support But on the other hand, we're also very interested. We want this to be a private sector model The whole idea behind this is to um Allow to empower communities so that they can scale it And that there's the capacity to draw down financing on their own terms And add in a very organic quick fluid easy way Capacity when it's needed and this is where uh blockchain technology can become quite exciting because we think through smart contracts um digital payments smart devices and the like we can construct smart contracts that defer certain rights to the investors that they can execute without having to necessarily go through essential jurisdiction Because there's the sort of the executability of those rights via That the contract written into the computation um And this is an idea that we've been exploring in different ways of what's come up that i'm quite excited about is that Just a few days ago. I was out in san francisco and i met a guy called jace miller who's actually an mit alum is from uh dusk who he went he was an alum of dusk the department of urban studies and planning and um Yes, it's wonderful. I'm called naively that is disrupting public finance and What they're doing is is using a crowdfunding model and sort of smart um, you know computer modeling to Disintermediate the investment banks that have dominated and and essentially sort of centralized and Depersonalized in fact Uh municipal bond market that was traditionally something that people bought into personally, right? So he he turned up with these wonderful old bonds With all the embossment embossed images from the past that people have kept over the years and there was this personal connection The people had in their towns to investing in the waterworks or whatever, right? And that's all gone because it's now all massively handled through, you know wall street machines and With that comes all the excessive underwriting costs and Everything that that we know is broken with that that system These guys are saying let's get back to the roots and link this guy to that guy But they're doing it in a modern way with the technology so crowdfunding and now they're thinking the blockchain They're thinking about ways you could tokenize Uh the bond share that and then there's this idea of smart contracts which then can sort of allow you to Uh, you know construct as I said this By passing on the system and why that's really sexy when it comes to Puerto Rico Is that right now if you are buying a Puerto Rico more important if you are selling a Puerto Rican bond you are Critically hindered by the sort of bad brand name association that comes with that, right? So you're paying this high premium for for subjecting The risk of your bond to the collection capacities of a Puerto Rican institution We would argue that if this school which as I said is a publicly chartered school and therefore has the right to issue municipal bonds Could do so within this community Maybe it would issue bonds on to to to just simply pay for its portion of the group Maybe it would issue to cover the whole cost and then sub land to the to the smaller players in that group I'm not quite sure that yet, but either way could do this and have a smart contract direct relationship with this pool of Social impact investors that namely has access to a couple of billion dollars worth of funds waiting to invest in this sort of thing Then you could make a pretty strong case and these guys have got that kind of community to have these conversations with that You can separate almost entirely that out that Puerto Rican risk and it goes away Because you're not investing in Puerto Rico first say it's input happens to be in Puerto Rico But it's got nothing to do with the political risk of the place it's to do with the functioning of this grid itself and How well the the software itself functions in terms of your ability to make that climb So we think this is pretty exciting because we can now in addition This is this is a core part of the way we're thinking about this grid is it's not just An experiment in electricity in electricity trading It's a platform upon which we build other ideas and this is a another idea a public finance Component which then hopefully becomes something that can be scaled So that we'll we'll probably come in and subsidize the cost of this thing But we don't want to suck. This is also this point about female. We don't want this to be entirely free for these people Because we need them to have some risk capital, right? We're not going to be able to study the economic dynamics and reality as place unless people who Are involved in it have some skin in the game. That's the nature of economics Right, so we're not quite sure what the balance is. We don't think they have to own this thing at cost But you know, maybe there's a bit of FEMA money in there. There's a bit of uh the the actual contractor But then there's a bond that they have to pay back and it's a it's a mini bond or something like that and Uh, you know within that structure We've got something hopefully that that makes this far cheaper than the ridiculous 25 cents a kilowatt hour that they play in in those parts of the world um But also it is uh Is a model upon which to to build the future and that's pretty much it. So you have a question. Yeah So I'm trying to vibrate around describing an absence the blockchain comes up. It sounds very Sounds very similar. So they already have out there like the world Co-op. Yeah, so is is there any difference or would it be a very similar to be a world co-op? And if we can already establish those here then Why is it a challenge to do there other than you're talking about the blockchain aspect of it? Are you talking about the initial funding of it? No, I don't think it it might not be in fact the real we've thought about this We've talked about this as potentially being the structure. Um, I mean, I would think the difference Tends to be Could could be in the ownership structure. I don't I don't know like um, we haven't Um, to be honest, I don't know enough about them exactly to sort of be able to give you the legal definition but I think that you know, the the general idea is uh In a lot of these regions of the united states where you have you might have a better explanation from minus things that places that inherently are um In hard to They could be offered. They're not but they they are in difficult costly places to transmit from the central power. So The the sort of cheapest way for these uh communities to come together was to form a co-op co-op in which there was it's a non-profit that um, essentially gets them to share power Based on they would probably collectively own One or two generation plants So I think the the structure of it legally could be similar But I think the physical structure would be different because we're sort of talking about in front of people can like add You know panels on their own roofs or as a co-op would sort of collectively own one single standalone Generation plan, right? That would be my understanding Maybe chris has got a better answer Yeah, this is Many cooperative To have um Presidentship about everywhere except behind the meter makers and so on Let me describe though Just as a point of electricity law here Even the vast majority of jurisdictions is not the production of power for self consumption um That triggers you into utility staff. It is this distribution of an electron or a thermal steam from one enemy to another That can trigger utility staff. So that's that And I use utility staff to scroll up to that every day from you know, sort of giving a public good public convenience to having to go through full force in an office service rate filing And having, you know, full board rate regulation on what we charge our customers I would handle this issue quite a bit Here on the main end of the reasons and my team developed a a focus review for the structure that we I don't think we'll now it's going to deal with close recently where we represent the master developer and the participle to review the medical care Yeah, that's inputting the microgrid and we use the microgrid concession with the structure with an output to the developer That's a fairly novel but the key thing to keep up that Before the regulation and I suspect this is also true in Puerto Rico. I haven't looked at the The way the statutes work it but um, what we did is we made it to that all of the wires Steam pipes and so on within the microgrid that are used Here is customary with the microgrid We're collecting lead only in house by the owners of the station Pulling on mixed use canvas development and when we have a collective owner of the distribution infrastructure We still have one end of the distribution Another which is part of the dynamic to the statue We've filled you with one end of the distributing yourself and that The Actually And I can take the microgrid to multiple customers In a way that we have been possible In a prior role in the traditional irrigation and we do that through infrastructure reasons Dynamics on having the title to the equipment As to the microgrid need to be back to the intersistation In several ways, but it's a model and structure that helps distribution walk And for what you're discussing I think from these are really the dynamic that could help. I I still have a lot of questions that's in the heart of saying all the people who said it's giving the project finance and so on and that's um, but uh, at least on the regulatory side You should definitely hit them with the self-distribution network. Okay. That's that's really helpful. Chris I just have one question throwback at you though and that is like Does that though uh impede our ability to create a transactive environment where you've got You know, each of these owners effectively trading with each other So that they're you know, you want to we're trying to create some sort of competitive market forces within this environment So underneath that you know collective ownership I'd somehow want to have sub ownership or something with it that's that's allowing them to trade back and forth And on top of that we'd likely have outside customers so that the grid is so not everybody who's an owner there's also Actually sort of has put capital in there just So, sorry, not everybody's using the power is just put the book capital in there are outside homes that are consumer only Whereas the others that are pro-sumers Um, how do how do I can I can I square that circle? Yes, you can but it's Because I think it's difficult because we're having a centralized entity um Paging the wholesale power purchases Anytime you make a sale for retail Or you're making a sale To someone on full sale. Well, we can trigger your partners to have Whole sale special So on this case, we were just sold It was all really like Essentially what that The self-introduction song for the way that the introduction structure operates amongst everybody participating from We do that That was creating Of the power going back and forth and so on can occur any number of ways And uh, you know, you can do it as far as there on top of the infrastructure So this revision without triggering you go into that dependent on how we're doing this Can I do this properly? It might require Standing up special purposes. I'm also generator You have these Like that because that can that that process is going to stop executing a lot on my That's all through the vacation. So I think the key thing is is um But I'm just making sure that the underlying activity is the consumers that transact the energy I end up You know, it's a little nearing the extent that if I end up having more swing power production at the time Instead of sending energy back to the main power grid where it's that we heard On the leader against your retail grid Um, do you think should we be net nearing again to be up the consumers who have to band at that time And we're seeing the consumer, you know, trying to back the energy network Which is the most available that's opening up Um, it's a lot of strong more of a sell-in in West Virginia generation Yeah, that I get that's that makes sense. That's really helpful Chris I'm I'm very glad to hear that you entirely put the car wash on for a while. I thought it wasn't gonna make it Sounds like with a bit of a Good That's good. Yeah, I appreciate this Chris. Thank you. I don't have much time friends, but I'm happy to take one or two quick questions. If there anymore Yeah What what is this? So first of all good good catch um on the uh, roll call outs. Um, any other ideas David, um, how how much would broadband be? profit access be part of what would be needed for These are things we need to discover because this is a totally new model It might be that you could create the trading system around mesh network It doesn't necessarily need to be permanently online because it's just capturing that and then you could you know Periodically prove it to a blockchain on that basis, which is another architectural thing that we'd have to look into um, and so To be a deal breaker because it is a problem right at the moment that all that stuff has gone down as well, but I think that um You know We we certainly think that there's ways around it on the other hand what's also interesting is that we'd want to see again this platform to be the sort of place to actually Experiment with the development of like community broadband, right? There's is interesting ideas This could be the the platform what you would sort of build that that infrastructure So I'm hoping we don't need it, but that we actually kind of make it something we get to build Um, so I have all the questions We are going to be together on tomorrow And chris will be with us and we'll have opportunity to use all this whiteboard to do so some creative, um Lawyering and technical business architecting to find You know those that to make sure that legal there's not an obstacle Maybe even somebody's going to enable the best outcomes on the market Look at computational contracts and then on friday, uh, excuse me on thursday With ryan and his team and some uh, and so now I can't be grateful. I have a chance to maybe use some rapid prototyping And then looking forward and uh mark 16 17th and 18th Is the computational law and blockchain festival? um But it's Still that's not very So we'll have learning we're also going to have traditional hacking for people that want to do projects What in these opportunities and I'll tell this to you more, you know, we'd say any families rooting with law MIT legal hackers What what sort of things will be useful outside of you? You'll always want to you'll want to have you know access to great, um, high quality kind of um, you know, um Council like like this was providing but is there something to be useful as you're integratively, um, you know kind of almost rapid prototyping this from a legal perspective that um that we should be By way of challenges or team projects like you're so you'll be useful or helpful that Maybe he's been holding you back or the that if you could do it It would unleash um, you know, some of the genius of the system It's funny because I haven't we haven't gone far enough down the path yet that I've run up against what I knew would be the legal You know upscore that I would recognize like yours to bear to help me with So I haven't put enough thought into what they are, but I've mentioned some of them, right? I mean, how do we define the contracts of the between these parties? you know, what is the the utility status question from regulatory point of view, um You know and what how would the smart contract be? So so there's different the smart contract in terms of the finance part, right? So I think there's this There's this concept that uh, you can create smart property, you know sort of collateral that That is not necessarily something that is physically taken by somebody but is defined as such because You have the capacity to remotely Turn off or on access to it, right? You've got a device But on off switch that can only be turned on or off if if the right payments are being made Digital money becomes programmable money and that that gives you this this power to potentially execute Your rights Is that legally enforceable? I mean, you know, how what how would you structure that, right? And yeah, these are some of the things that people are already doing right with with cars that have on off switches and so forth and There's a there's a bit of a prototype for it with mcopa you can look that one up if you like mcopa was it is a canyon-based company that's using the monetary infrastructure of mpesa, which you may know is the digital money payment system over the airtime payments over the cellular networks within Kenya and the idea there is is it's not But we're looking at which is more of a kind of a rights to a bond that would eventually convert to ownership but this is rather And it's this is just one-on-one and so people put By a little kit from mcopa It's two panels and a few cell phones or something like that and so long as they're paying It stays on when they stop it goes off and if they it's conceived of as um pay as you go Access right, but it's literally just being turned on or off by this thing And then at some point if you once you've paid up over a certain period of time the asset transfers to you So it's kind of like a a lease to own model Um, and we've thought that that might be something that you could sort of morph in a hybrid way into a security of some sort Across a micro grid or different parties were paying up to a point and different owners might be A head or behind or a rears in the rears and you know out of that would emerge some sort of structure that's a collateralized bond Sort of pie in the sky, but there's Interesting things you can start to do when you when money is programmable when smart devices are tied to a blockchain that everybody trusts to Execute on your behalf Joe I think you you pose the challenge So we should fine. We've got to get we have to write that down And then see if we can fill it out a little bit and if we can add it to one of the challenges for the computational on blockchain festival I will have a well a bunch of teams here at the media lab that weekend But leading up to that that would be a very interesting and not just for the energy thing to do But I think quite generalizable um asset ownership, you know an access and management Use case sort of there's a lot of primitive primitive fundamental law in there in terms of Let's call them a building block rights of ownership that can be composed and you know partly um transferred the big one not just termination destruction of property but Suspension of the services. Um, so there's a little bit of a tweet from common law properties now I'll mention that could be modeled. Did I hear the dulcet tones of Prince? Are you gonna help bring us bring us uh bring us home? I was just gonna say that when we're talking thinking about You know ownership of the title to remind everybody to think of title to something That's a bundle of sticks And that's the sticks and people are going to be right to be in custody. They're like a property in the arithmetic company You know they're like to operate You know you can be trapped in some of those Um Yeah, it's always helpful to be reminded. Um Ownership is a bundle of Sticks and a bundle of sticks in this case But i'm glad that you've been really grateful that you the time to think and then to pose You know some of these sticks are more equal than others in a possible business legal and technical model and the major one would be um It is an alienation and The one that turns the service off in the utility context to keep that kind of page you'd go Could be a very very potent. Um You know a point of concordance between the the business league one technical Layers of the system and that might be one that we want to separate the model of use of smart contracts and blockchain Prototyping on see how far we get Good idea. So everybody a little help you thank Michael There's a huge Excellent, okay I'm gonna get a flight. So, uh, thanks very much for your time. Good luck with everybody Thanks. We'll see you again next time Circum for ambulation Okay, and christ you're welcome to stick on we're just gonna close uh close up class for the day All right. So, um, there's a very important thing that we have not done. Um, and that is just a quick round of introductions. Um, so, um, May I ask brian are you keeping track of um, how many um active folks we have online? I know I saw Al I saw Could you put a call out to see if there's anybody that wants to do an introduction and it would be telegram It would be the way we would do it, please. Thanks. And um, I just wanted you a quick round. Um in the room And um Should we um, could you mind if please kind of speak as a group that we save? Um, or Dla, uh for for last and that you kind of go as a group. Um, so let's start Why don't we start um with you if you're ready? Yeah, I'm um I'm working down And um, I'm also very interested in Blockchain technology and how we can use it in the health space and also I'm interested in also looking at legal space and applying more of machine learning to uh Actually, I don't want to have people go too long But could you just highlight that part about um, AI and contracts and before and after a little bit because that would be interesting It might spark collaborators. Right. Yeah, so the idea is to um, use natural language processing to read contracts For one particular product and another product would actually be to use machine learning to actually Uh, look at contracts before and after lawyers look to actually teach the machine what the lawyers are looking at and how you're getting more value of Having had the contract ready by boy. How does how do those say two into these two lawyers on either side? If they will come together speak to each other No, not to replace layers Sorry You have to say that Just like put your seatbelts on lawyers. It's coming Okay, mr. Poppers My favorite crypto I'm at Mr. Greenwood at the economic space agency. Um In oakland, california. That's true and uh, I also moderate a trader which is the largest live ethereum channel the internet Using telegram. So I came here to help administer the telegram and thank you. There's a birthday yesterday. Yes Yep, and so far so good on telegram. I feel too by the way So, you know, look do a real audit when we're done with the class, but like I haven't had one of those painful I hate this moments on slag and I'm able to get a few things done quickly in our back channels too. So thank you, David um Who are you? My name is I'm a software engineer And an activist in game bridge around for city council last election and I'm a matter of soba and I'm quite so I've been a dive then a deep dive into The technology over the last Three years and I'm interested in figuring out How it can change the way that we organize and manage ourselves as communities Although the discussion bits we're going on All the all the models are always good to discuss if you want to come down to the primitives You're here and this is one of the people that can help us to actually do some packing do some development um Hopefully um, I don't answer a lot. You're you're in our midst Welcome. Hi, my name is And I'm a special force with uh, gb media studios We are following and writing a large um primer on blockchain right now. We just are wrapping up in the ai um And if you would get the chance to read um our founder's blog Gregory's assistant He goes pretty deeply into all of this subject Good Thanks for bringing the crew up today And uh, we have a we have a strong Portuguese um segment uh today, um, lusiana And Our i'm being working currently into different projects on blockchain One is for smart cities, so i'm interested to talk a little bit more the other one is a kind of a magic token that has been Uh leveraging idle blockchains. They're not so congested like the main ones and you can kind of support transactions to go and kind of smart back So Welcome I'm going to do a quick run over here and you can really introduce yourself. You have mr. Liebel hacker All right, my name is brian wilson. I I'm one of the ta's for the course. I Found and managed founded co-founded and co-managed uh, cance city legal hackers. Um I work at a machine learning startup called risk genius where we use, uh advanced computer science to better understand the Disparities of policy language and uh quantitatively like find gaps and policies and Areas within the marketplace within different marketplaces that Maybe are a divergent. I also have a project with the aba center for innovation as a fellow There where we're using, um Where we're setting up a data driven legal framework to better understand and improve the efficiency of A wrongful conviction investigation so that we can create data about what the most common features are for a wrongful conviction and then use that to Uh, create policy recommendations and uh, give people out of jail right Innocent people innocent people model legal hacker. Yes every lawyer's be like brian Yep, you're here great and I sort of introduced yourself. Yeah, I didn't didn't get a chance to tell you what I'm here for so I'm basically interested in Sorry, oh camila. Sorry Nice to meet you again. So my base, uh, my basic interest here is As a problem to solve because transactions. They're not transparent the way they should be And a good challenge would be