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Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code. By Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright. [ Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 300 pp. Hardback £25.95. ISBN 978-06-74976-42-9.]
Blockchain and the Law is one of the first books offering a high-level overview of the legal issues raised by blockchain technology, although it is an overview in breadth more than in depth. The book provides a well-written and useful introduction to the subject for readers unfamiliar with the technology and its legal and policy implications. Those seeking a technical and in-depth legal analysis of blockchain technology, however, will need to look elsewhere.
De Filippi and Wright are well positioned to undertake the challenging task of explaining the legal issues raised by blockchain in lay terms, having researched the topic from much before the bitcoin boom and blockchain hype. The drawback is that the book focuses on the type of blockchains that were most prevalent in the earlier days of the technology (the public, permissionless bitcoin and ethereum blockchains), at the expense of the private, permissioned blockchains that have been an important driver of blockchain activity more recently.
The book starts with an accessible description of how blockchain technology works. Chapters 1 and 2 describe the technology's core characteristics, such as public-private key cryptography and consensus mechanisms, and explain how it fits into the existing Internet infrastructure. Readers with a general understanding of the technology might have wished that a book on blockchain and law would devote a larger number of pages to the legal analysis of the technology. It takes roughly 60 (out of 210) pages of introductory explanation of the technology before the legal aspects of blockchain are discussed.
Blockchain and the Law does not fall prey to overly optimistic predictions of blockchain's potential found in many other blockchain books. Potential benefits are systematically followed by a listing of potential drawbacks, emphasising that blockchain is a dual-use technology. De Filippi and Wright also avoid the trap of incorrectly labelling blockchains “tamper-proof”, as others have done, instead using the more accurate term “tamper-resistant”. Blockchain entries can be reversed by a majority of miners (those contributing computing power to the blockchain) in a so-called “51% attack”. Although this may be costly (estimated at over $1.5 billion...