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:
[Update: there's a more thorough (and slightly different) analysis available now: https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/court-of-appeal-statistics/index.html]
I've analysed 3000 Ontario Court of Appeal judgements from 1999 to 2014 using a program I wrote that extracts costs awards. Of the 3000 randomly selected cases that I supplied it was able to extract 733 costs awards with a high degree of confidence.
As part of my ongoing series of Bitcoin Law articles on the Decentral Tumblr blog, I've written a new post that looks at the feasibility of a blockchain-based real estate system in Ontario.
The blog post describes our current real estate registry and what it might look like if it was switched to a "smart property" system.
Parsing legal documents is hard. It's hard if you're a lawyer and it's even harder if you're a computer. Here's an article on the Free Law Project that describes the challenge of parsing legal documents: http://freelawproject.org/2013/11/01/want-to-merge-millions-of-legal-opinions-it-wont-be-easy/.
They have a collection of similarly great content on other practical problems that arise when parsing the law.
I've written a blog post on the Decentral Tumblr blog that explains Bitcoin terms in simple language.
Below is a text version of the glossary.
I've written a series of blog posts that will be published on the Decentral blog over the coming weeks. The first one is "Bitcoin: The Canadian Regulatory Landscape". It provides an overview of the laws that Bitcoin businesses should be interested in.
Coming up tomorrow will be a post about the steps for setting up a Bitcoin business in Canada.
If you'd like to start an ISP in Canada you'll probably need to apply for two licenses:
1. A Basic International Telecommunications Services (BITS) license
Edward Snowden's email provider, Lavabit, shut down their company rather than let the US government spy on their customers: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/10/lavabit_unsealed/.
It would take a lot of moral strength to agree to shut down something you've built up over years of work in order to protect your customers from spying. It would have been very easy for them to allow secret spying (like Google, Facebook, etc.) but instead they stand out as the one company I'm aware of that refused to provide "lawful access" by the US government.
Ontario court schedules are now available online (http://www.ontariocourtdates.ca/). This is a big step in the right direction but the goal is still miles away.
In order to access the court information you have to agree not to republish it anywhere, and solve a CAPTCHA. The CAPTCHA is there to stop people from programmatically harvesting court schedules and the contract is there so they can sue people if they do it anyway.
I have code running on all of my sites that attempts to reverse the DNS for each IP that visits. This uncovers the organization for many visitors but unfortunately it still leaves a lot of IPs that don't have corresponding DNS entries.
There's a public database of who owns what IP address. Using two ARIN WHOIS API calls (shown below) you can pull the organization and address for every IP (usually the address of an ISP). This can be used to replace random numbers (e.g. 154.03.34.11) with entries like "GONET (Ministry of Government Services, Infrastructure Technology Services)" and "Alberta PWSS, Telecommunications Division (10365 - 107 Street)".
I launched FederalMonitor.ca a few weeks ago and the reception has been quite positive so far.
This is the Federal version of OntarioMonitor.ca, a government relations SaaS that I've been running since 2011.
There have been four speeches made in 2014 about Bitcoin in the House & Senate.
MintChip, the Royal Mint's digital currency solution, will be sold by the Mint according to the Wall Street Journal. Development has been halted.
I assume this decision was taken after looking at their competitor: Bitcoin. The Mint could easily make their own version of Bitcoin/Litecoin and launch their own cryptocurrency for about $200 right now.
The federal government's budget act for 2014 passed "first reading" on Friday. It will amend the money laundering regime to create a new category of money services business: "dealing in virtual currencies".
The budget is a whopper of an omnibus bill but the key amendment is at s. 256(2). It adds to the existing categories of regulated businesses (e.g. foreign exchange): "dealing in virtual currencies, as defined in the regulations". I expect the regulations to set a limit of somewhere between $1000 to $3000 for dealing without collecting identity documents.
According to coinmap.org I'm the only lawyer in Toronto who accepts bitcoin.
Are you backing up your MySQL database regularly?
Here's how to easily backup a MySQL database:
I think it might be useful to form a group for lawyers who have particular expertise in the area of Bitcoin. Maybe "Canadian Bitcoin Lawyers" or maybe the "North American Bitcoin Lawyers Group".
If this sounds like something you'd like to be a part of please send me an email at addison@cameronhuff.com.
1. Every eight minutes someone receives ("mines") 25 Bitcoins (worth more than $10k)
2. The Bitcoin network is many times faster than the world's top 500 supercomputers put together
Here's a good technical article on how the Bitcoin protocol works: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bitcoin.html?m=1.
This is a follow-up by the same author on how mining works: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoin-mining-hard-way-algorithms.html
Forbes reported $15 million per day in power consumption for the entire Bitcoin network back in January but some people disagree with that estimate.
I think a fair estimate of Bitcoin power consumption is about $150,000 per day.