LawTechCamp 2014 is coming up this September 6th at Ryerson's DMZ. It's a BarCamp-like event for legal technology and if last year's speakers are any indication, it looks like it'll be a who's who of Toronto legal tech people.
[Update: my law practice is now a sponsor of LawTechCamp 2014!]
If your business is considering using Bitcoin then please don't put the accountants in charge (or at least the internal auditors).
In this month's issue of Internal Auditor Magazine (put out by the 180,000 member Institute of Internal Auditors) there's an article titled "Digital Currency Risks" that describes Bitcoin as being used by "10,000" people with "12.8 million" bitcoins in circulation ("worth about US$8 million").
Killing an endangered blue whale has a softer penalty than breaching Canada's new anti-spam laws by sending a single unsolicited email. The Canadian anti-spam legislation (full text) is now in force and penalties for violations are theoretically up to $1 million for an individual who sends one email without consent and $10 million for a business.
$1 million for sending one spam message is completely out of step with the penalties for other Canadian laws. Here are a few examples of penalties for individuals under other laws:
People are paid every two weeks because it's too expensive to pay people daily. I mean too expensive both in the sense of administrative overhead (if people are paid manually) and transaction fees (cheques/EFT fees).
Bitcoin offers the potential to pay people daily or even hourly because transaction fees are reduced to near zero. Here's an interesting article that explores this concept and the idea of paying for performance using Bitcoin/Ethereum: https://medium.com/@spencernoon/paycheck-2-0-385cf6c70ec7.
Interesting blog post on how to use the Bitcoin scripting language to build complex applications: https://curiosity-driven.org/bitcoin-contracts.
The examples they give are Kickstarter-type campaigns, escrow and gambling. I didn't know these sorts of applications could be built (trustlessly) on top of the Bitcoin scripting language.
Information about Canadian public company quarterly reports, insider trades, and more is only being made available to companies who pay a (secret) licensing fee. Individuals can access individual filings (after solving a CAPTCHA) but the information is not free for re-use nor available in a machine readable format.
Canadian securities filings are required to be posted to SEDAR and SEDI. The two sites are the Canadian equivalent of the (much better) United States service run by the SEC called EDGAR.
"Decentralized Applications" is a LinkedIn group (link) for anyone who's a part of the nascent decentralized application industry.
It's a small group for now but some good content (mostly written by Decentral, one of my clients). There aren't a lot of other places to find good information about decentralized applications ("DApps").
Ethereum, a blockchain programming platform (and client of mine), has started selling ether. As of Wednesday night they've sold around $3.7 million of ether in about 24 hours. You can watch the progress of the sale by looking at the address where they're receiving the Bitcoin.
Congratulations to the Ethereum team!
Dell recently announced that they're accepting Bitcoin. Here's a blog post I wrote for the Decentral blog about how companies like Dell and Expedia are accepting Bitcoin: http://blog.decentral.ca/post/92445053308/how-dell-expedia-and-others-accept-bitcoin-payments.
The short version is that most companies are using Coinbase (US-only) or BitPay. Both of these services work well with Shopfiy.
Bill C-31 passed last Thursday and with it comes new rules for businesses dealing in Bitcoin.
I've written a guest post on the Decentral blog that explains what the new rules are, when they'll take effect and what might happen: http://decentralca.tumblr.com/post/89657114028/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-new-bitcoin-law.
Business contracts have two purposes:
1. creating a legal agreement; and,
A landmark Supreme Court decision came down last Friday: R. v. Spencer.
This case takes Canada away from the past regime where police could request subscriber information corresponding to an IP without a warrant. In earlier lower court decisions judges have relied on ISP terms of service to say that users have no reasonable expectation of privacy. The legal theory was that the contracts users enter into allowed ISPs to disclose information to police so it was permitted. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected this regime and declared such searches "presumptively unreasonable":
In a previous post I outlined the key government tax schemes for Ontario tech businesses (here). A colleague who saw that post has pointed me to the MaRS Discovery District guide to funding programs.
The MaRS guide is 173 pages of government programs for the ICT sector. It looks quite comprehensive.
I've made an online heat map generator that you can use by clicking here. Below is an example heat map made with the tool.
BitPay (a less feature-rich Stripe for Bitcoin) claims to be processing more than $1 million USD in transactions per day.
It's hard to get a sense of how large the world of Bitcoin is, and especially hard to get a handle on the amount used for commerce vs. speculation. BitPay is one of the main merchant processing companies so this statistic is one worth paying attention to.
What tax credits are available for software companies in Ontario?
SR&ED: 35% tax credit for Canadian-controlled private corporations (CCPC) conducting research. Infographic explanation: techvibes.com.
I've written a blog post on the Decentral Tumblr blog: "Decentralized Bitcoin Exchanges: A Solution with Three Big Challenges". This blog post explains what a decentralized Bitcoin exchange is, why Bitcoin industry people are keen on the idea and what the implementation challenges are.
I recommend reading the article if you're curious about where exchanges (e.g. CAVirtEx) are headed. Many people in the industry think that decentralized exchanges are what people will be using in a few years. The first person to create one that works will make a big splash.
I've written a series of programs that process and extract the names of counsel from Ontario Court of Appeal judgements. I've analysed 8077 decisions and extracted 12,000 lawyer-case pairs (some decisions have multiple counsel).
Using the extracted data I compiled a table of the lawyers who appeared most frequently before the Court of Appeal over the last 15 years.
I've extracted the words from 8077 Ontario Court of Appeal judgements and calculated the 100 most frequently used words.
The most common case-related words are what you'd expect: "appellant", "judge", "trial", etc.
I've completed a more thorough analysis (see previous post) of Ontario Court of Appeal decisions. This analysis involves the automated extraction of costs awards from thousands of decisions between the years 2007 and 2014.
Of the cases studied, my program was able to confidently extract 1723 costs awards. Here are the statistics: