Addison Cameron-Huff, Blockchain Lawyer

Years ago I thought the future of law would be Uber-like services that connect people with cheap lawyers in developing countries, or even semi-automated workflows run by less skilled people but acting according to playbooks. That didn't happen. Instead, ChatGPT happened, and it happened quickly. Now, millions of people in Canada are getting free legal advice by software, something that the Law Society of Ontario tried to stop for many years. Foreign companies just did it, and suddenly the genie is out of the bottle and the Law Society isn't trying to stop it. There is no factual difference between a software program that provides legal advice and a human (other than maybe differences in skill, but LLMs are getting better every month). In other words: the free practice of law is here.

Ontario law is currently being dished out in the form of ChatGPT dialogs, but also Gemini, and a host of other models. Originally they tried to stop people from being able to get legal advice but it seems those safeguards have been generally dropped and LLMs will happily opine on Ontario law now. Lawyers had no say in this, whether through their lobbying groups or professional organizations. It simply happened. And regulators haven't figured out even a position on this, let alone any way of trying to stop this.

There is no “crypto industry”. There are companies that build things that use crypto. There are foundations and non-profits that make software. There are people who buy cryptocurrency. But there's no crypto industry.

There is a banking industry, they even have their own national lobby groups. There's a recycling industry, a power industry, and other groups of companies that act relatively similarly and have similar interests, usually acting politically through trade associations. But crypto is like email or HTTP - it's a technology layer.

Stablecoins are a $100 billion dollar plus market globally. Canada's QCAD (CAD stablecoin), which I was the initial lawyer for, recently announced investment by US giant Coinbase (although I haven't worked for them for years). Amidst this fast global growth, why are these coins limited to dollars? Why not commodities? Why isn't there an Alberta government-backed “PetroDollar” that's based on oil? If a coin can be made based on US or Canadian dollars, why not oil? What's holding it back?

The Usefulness Of PetroDollar

A man goes before the king and he's sentenced to death. The king asks him if he has any last words and he says "I can make your horse talk!". "What?", said the king. "Yes, give me two years and I can make your horse talk". So the man's sentenced is suspended for two years and he walks out of the king's chamber and his friend comes up to him and says "I can't believe you told the king you could make his horse talk, you can't do that!" "I know that, you know that, but two years is a long time. Who knows what might happen? Maybe I'll die, maybe the king'll die, or maybe the horse will talk."

In late 2024 I had a realization that anti-money laundering (AML) laws require AI tools for compliance. This blog post explains the nature of the problem, with a very specific example, and what I built to solve the problem. I won't be turning this into a commercial product, but I learned a tremendous amount about the future of compliance by building a solution. If you want to truly understand a problem, you should be able to put forward a solution. I did it. Read on to see how, because it's applicable to many other areas of law. The solution I made is a complex data tool with a simple interface: https://screencomply.com/aml_prototype/.

The Problem Of Politically Exposed Persons

As people switch over to using ChatGPT for legal advice, there's going to be a wealth of materials available for discovery in litigation. ChatGPT conversations aren't privileged legal advice. They can't be. They aren't. Only lawyers can give you privilege when you're seeking legal advice.

Privilege is a benefit of legal advice that's often overlooked because it's rarely triggered. Almost always, no one will be asking for your notes and records. But in a combative situation, such as a regulatory investigation or a lawsuit, those documents and notes are essential to turn over to the other side. Legal privilege is one of the only ways to lawfully put a stop to that. In Canada it's particularly strong, but this same right exists all over the world.

You go to law school and come out thinking that judges are the audience. Then you get a job at a law firm and learn that the customer is other lawyers. Once you start drafting your own agreements you realize that the first reader is a businessperson, the second is a lawyer, and a judge will never read your contracts.

Far less than 1% of contracts that are drafted are ever litigated. Really good quality contracts are almost never argued about in front of a judge. The focus of your efforts should be the business deal: what are the parties (specifically) agreeing to? A good contract is clear, and contains all of the business details. A great contract requires something more.

When Aaron van Wirdum's “The Genesis Book” came out a few months ago I bought it immediately. It's a concise history of the people and inventions that led to Bitcoin - the perfect title to buy for the shelf.

One of the most common questions I get from founding teams of blockchain projects is: where should we set up our business? People expect this to be an easy answer. And there is a common answer: Cayman foundation company (holding company) that owns a BVI corporation (which issues token). But there's a lot more to being a lawyer than suggesting what most people do. And not everyone will be well-served by following this path.

A companion blog post to this explains what goes into where to set up a company. But once a business is set up in a certain places that's not the final word on what laws and countries matter. Businesses need to be careful to try not to have their activities be regulated by places that they don't intend. In order to do that they need to be mindful of their actions, server location(s), who they do business with (along the way to serving their customers), their contracts, and where the people who run their business are located. These are all factors that lawyers can advise on and companies can exert control over. On the other hand, there's a number of factors they have a lot less control over, which might ultimately end up allowing someone to sue or maintain an action in a foreign place.

At the top of this page is an interesting experiment in using LLMs (large language models, like ChatGPT) to explore the content of a library of content. In this case, my blog. It scans across all of the blog posts and tries to figure out which ones are relevant, then use the relevant ones to construct an answer to the query/task. It's a great way for people to find content that I might have written years ago, or convert what I've written into easier to understand language. It's much better than keywords for finding certain content, and it synthesizes the content to smaller summaries for the reader.

The service uses lambdas (on AWS) that scan through pre-generated summaries of the articles (or the whole article if it's short enough) to identify the relevant posts. The prompt for this is:

The Ethereum Enterprise Alliance has written an extensive guide on DeFi risks: https://entethalliance.org/specs/drafts/defi-risks/20230116/#sec-compliance-risks. Below is a screenshot of the section on legal & compliance risks, which I think is worth mentioning because it's a great example of the views that many have in the crypto space. This section is considerably lighter than that of accounting, even though accounting and tax risks are rarely the reasons why projects shut down or don't get off the ground. So far as I know, no one has gone to jail for having poor accounting controls, but you can go to jail for violating sanctions laws (and some crypto developers have).

Canada's provincial securities regulators have approved certain companies to sell cryptocurrency. These platforms have the highest standard of regulation that applies, and are the least risky way for Canadians to buy cryptocurrency. For Ontario residents, the Ontario Securities Commission maintains a list of the approved platforms:

https://www.osc.ca/en/industry/registration-and-compliance/registered-crypto-asset-trading-platforms

The vast majority of small shareholders don't vote their shares. Many institutional investors do, but even then, many are voting according to recommendations from advisory services. At the individual investor level, votes are essentially meaningless because they're too small in number. And the voting process is uneconomical to them because they don't have the time to consider the candidates or proposals. The return on their investment of time is abysmal. This is a well-known problem in corporate studies. It's also a problem in token governance systems. Is the solution ChatGPT?

I've been a “crypto lawyer” for a decade now. So I did a double-take when I looked at the label on the pasta sauce I'd just eaten: a blockchain authentication label! Blockchains out in the real world. The above picture is the actual pasta sauce I ate. And the link on the QR code goes to this page: https://blockchain.authentico.it/q/?query=f00d00000000000100000000018e7bef3193d4d4b939f8150d73a11016e86fbe&show_cookies=1.

Craig Wright is an individual who claimed to be the rightful owner of billions of dollars of bitcoin, which he said he lost the keys to when he deleted his files. He wanted the crypto back, but without the keys this should be impossible. Mr. Wright came up with a rather unique strategy, that the rest of this blog explains, which should be studied by everyone who writes code for public blockchains or manages a protocol. So far as I know, Mr. Wright is the first person to seriously attempt this method. The basic idea is to ask a court to require the developers to change the code so that bitcoins would be given to him.

Most People Would Say Blockchain Assets Can't Be Seized

Yesterday I was speaking with a junior lawyer about blogging and explained how I write my posts. They asked me if I'd ever blogged about how I blog, and apparently the answer is no, I haven't ever written a blog post about how I write blog posts. This post explains my custom software for blogging, why I wrote my own blogging software a decade ago, and the advantages of using a static website.

Custom Blogging Software

The 20th century saw dirt roads turn into bitumen and concrete highways around the world. Massive government road building projects (and expropriation) constructed streets and highways across the western world and beyond. These roads were all billed to the taxpayer, with the promise being a massive increase in transportation and thus the economy. It was the century of gasoline and diesel. But this approach has been tapped out. New road construction seems almost like a relic as investors push NVIDIA shares beyond the trillion dollar mark and AI fever grips the business world.

Fibre optic lines, satellite Internet, and all the other infrastructure of the digital revolution seem like the highways of the 21st century. Yet governments largely don't build these, and government policy in many countries is now turning against the Internet. Under the banner of public safety, governments are restricting the Internet from various directions, including the introduction of a series of laws in Parliament in my own country, all aimed at reducing online freedom. The premise is that the Internet is a killer, but the number of people killed by the Internet is surely far less than that of road deaths in Canada. The reality of infrastructure is that big benefits aren't free. Roads kill people via the cars that drive on them, the pollution from their construction, and various other negatives that are simply accepted as the cost of boosting economic capacity.

What would it take for DAOs to overtake traditional corporations as the main way that Internet-based businesses are organized?

It's easy to take shots at DAOs but this blog post looks at what it would take for this transformation to actually happen. We're certainly not even close to a world where most tech is built and delivered by DAOs, but there are hints that DAOs can be used for quite a bit of what's currently done by traditional companies. They're starting to be used for funding scientific research or creating digital dollar equivalents. In another sense of the term, some major blockchain networks (e.g. Bitcoin, the first and still largest) might themselves be considered DAOs, and if they're not quite within the definition, they show a bit of the path forward. This article sidesteps definitions, and instead looks forward to what's required to make DAOs mainstream.

Blockchain developers and Shakespeare have in common the same dream: “let's kill all the lawyers”. This blog post explains why the dreams of both aren't possible, by exploring the need for lawyers in complex technological systems.

The Dream: A World Without Lawyers