Addison Cameron-Huff, Blockchain Lawyer

Thoughts and opinions of a Toronto-based cryptocurrency lawyer who's worked in the industry since 2014.

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Seizing Control Of Public Blockchains Using Legal Process

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

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How I Blog: Custom Software

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

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The 21st Century Roads: Promoting The Internet

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.

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DAOs Overtaking Traditional Corporations: What Would It Take?

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.

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Why Blockchains Can't Achieve Shakespeare's Dream: The Need For Lawyers

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

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Policing Vs. AML: Hiring 35000 More Police In Canada To Fight Financial Crime

It's commonly considered among professionals in the anti-money laundering (AML) field that AML is the ally of police. The reason for this is that AML systems feed data into the police and spy service, which then use this data to inform their investigations. But this concept ignores the reality of AML, which is that it costs money for private businesses to have staff that do AML. AML rules are free to the government but very expensive to the companies they apply to, and those costs are directly passed on to customers. So whether you pay taxes for police or higher prices due to AML, you, the public, are always paying.

A Better Use Of Everyone's Money: Expanding Police

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Fake Identification Documents In the AI Era

Everyone's seen a teenager use a cousin's driver's license or a fake foreign ID card. These have long existed, and the history of all identification documents is a constant battle with counterfeits. But the AI era is not a continuation of that, it's a clear break with the past. Perfect-looking identification documents can be generated, and can be inserted into videos in real-time (or the entire video of the person can be faked). Anyone in doubt about how good these videos are should check out the latest OpenAI demo for generating videos from text prompts (released yesterday): https://openai.com/sora. High resolution video replicas of people are here, and they're available to anyone with a computer.

AI Impersonation

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Antiscam: Saving Millions

The vast majority of scams go unreported. No one knows how many people are affected, but I've spoken to many, many people by phone who call me out of the blue looking for advice about dealing with scams. Much of the time they don't realize it's a scam. Lawyers don't normally like these kinds of calls because they're not going to result in work (and might even result in liability for them).

Calls about scams are essentially the same as people calling up plumbers asking for free advice about how to do their own plumbing, or calling up auto garages to ask for advice about fixing an engine. But I'm happy to help out if I can, and feel good about the millions in losses I've helped prevent. I'm positive I've prevented more losses to people calling out of the blue than I've made in legal fees in my decade as a lawyer in private practice.

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Every Wonder How Crypto Scammers Reach Their Victims?

I regularly get calls from people who are the victims of Internet-based fraudsters. I have some fairly standard tips for them (see below!) but there's little that can be done once they're already a victim. Everyone's aware of the amount of online crime but few people know how these crimes happen. How do criminals manage to meet so many people? How do they reach the victims? In many of the cases they do this by placing ads on YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms. The ads lure people into the crimes by pretending to be the official sites of legitimate businesses and then they're robbed by lookalike exchanges, dealers, wallets, or other types of frauds. Below is an example from a YouTube ad I saw recently.

Screenshot of YouTube-based ad scam

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The Elimination Of Money

In the early days of cryptocurrency, there was some discussion of replacing “money”. Today, there's discussion of Central Bank Digital Currencies, modelled on crypto, replacing cash and banknotes. But all of these debates might be missing the larger story: the elimination of money.

As technology improves, the cost of switching between money and assets gets ever closer to zero. The interchange between CAD and USD is now close to zero (Wise). Cryptocurrency to cash can be under 0.25% (most dealers). Cash to stocks can be zero (Robinhood). Some assets have high transactional costs, like real estate, but the securitized version, REITs, are stocks that transact at near zero. All around us, the transactional costs are rapidly falling.

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A Concise History And Timeline Of Canadian Cryptocurrency Law

Canadians have played a key role in the development of the global cryptocurrency industry. At every stage, Canadian lawmakers and regulators have been closely following developments and issuing guidance or amending laws. To my knowledge, no one has written a concise history of the developments of the last decade. This blog post is my attempt to do so, with links to the underlying guidance, staff notices, interpretation bulletins, statutory amendments, and regulations.

The First Rules: Taxes

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Wishing Everyone A Wealthy 2024

It's a new year and a new beginning. To all the entrepreneurs, developers, businesspeople, investors, managers, lawyers and everyone else who reads my blog: I wish you a happy and wealthy 2024.

In Canada, it would be very strange to wish someone a "wealthy New Year" in-person. It's strange on this blog! But there's nothing better than seeing people become wealthy. I've worked for many people who've gone from getting by to literally buying Ferraris and dream homes. But whether it's that sort of wealth, or the kind of wealth that ensures people's families won't need to worry about food or heat - wealth is the best way to protect people from the misfortunes of life.

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Thank You To Colleagues And Clients: Closing Out 2023

Christmas tree generated by DALL-E

As we come to the end of 2023, the holiday season is always a time to reflect on what's gone well and think about the people who've helped make our lives better.

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My Bio

Here's a bio that I submitted to a talk for January, 2024:

Mr. Cameron-Huff is an experienced lawyer, blockchain industry participant, software architect, programmer, and consultant. He has provided consulting advice to two major Canadian regulators in the field of cryptocurrency, and provided continuing professional development to the regulator of lawyers in the same area. He has been an advocate for the industry for many years, and has been published in major publications in Canada and the United States. His work crosses legal, technical, and business domains. His blog on cryptocurrency topics features 300 articles going back to 2013.

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Derisking Token Projects: Book Chapters Written By ChatGPT

I have a collection of notes for a book about derisking token projects. It contains a lot of the advice I hand out to companies in the token space, which is based on years of work in the field and listening carefully to other lawyers. I took the notes for a few of the chapters and asked ChatGPT (3.5 model) to generate the book chapters. The result is surprisingly good!

Here's 40 pages of generated "book": https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/_assets/book/Derisking_Token_Projects_Chapters.pdf.

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The Sufficiency Of The Common Law In Tackling The Challenges Of DeFi, Stablecoins, And The New Economy

In a famous law review article published in 1890, future US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren sketched out a new era of privacy law. Drawing on ancient cases, the two lawyers explained the evolution of society and law which necessitates a new right “to be let alone”. The authors call for the common law to evolve to meet the new threats. They didn't ask for a new statute or regulation to be passed because in their view it wasn't necessary, since the common law can adapt to any change. From the second sentence of the paper:

“Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the demands of society.”

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Blockchains Aren't Magic: Viewing Success In Context

I've been asked whether “crypto is dead” many times over the years. More recently, people have become jaded and skeptical, following the failures of a number of scams and also the failures of some of the more wild-eyed promises of marketers.

The disillusionment isn't from the failure of technology but from the failure of marketing. Too many people fall victim to the lies of marketing people who want to part them with their dollars. Over the years I've seen many scams and one of their most common features is failing to show the code. How does it work? What does it do? What can you prove it does?

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Complex Law & Teams

Many of the legal engagements I work on don't have clear answers. I do the best I can to make the issues clear, and I help clients to steer away from the more obvious dangers, but ultimately there's a degree of uncertainty when people are forging a new path with technology. That's why it's critically important that everyone have a voice when it comes to cutting-edge tech law.

I've never worked on a team where there wasn't some contribution from one of the people. Even the most junior lawyer, or even summer student, can add something to a team. If the only perspective someone shares is that of how a non-expert might perceive something, that's also valuable, since framing and narrative are often important in legal strategy.

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15 Years Of Legal Experiments: My Journey

This year marks 15 years of making software-based legal experiments. I started down this path with winning a hackathon put on by Yahoo! in my final year of undergrad at the University of Waterloo. My two successful experiments, which became businesses, were in the search space and another in the regulatory management space.

None of the projects below have ever been a particularly great source of income, but they've been valuable in terms of building my knowledge of programming, law, and business. As a tech lawyer advising clients, it helps if you know at least a bit about what your clients do. On a less practical note, each of these legal experiments is an attempt to see whether how people use and access the law can be improved. There's also just a certain joy to building something that's never existed before.

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Risk Of Loss And The Consumer Protection Mandate Of Regulators

“Consumer protection” is the oft-cited raison d'être of regulators in Canada (and abroad). Central to this idea is that the government exercises its authority to reduce the risk of loss for a consumer. Consumer protection and risk of loss are intimately tied, and in the case of Canadian regulators position on the cryptocurrency field, risk of loss is central. But the tradeoffs inherent in this idea are rarely explored when risk of loss/consumer protection is discussed.

Risk of loss must be one of two things: i) losing out on risk of gain, or; ii) gaining a loss. But before explaining the previous sentence, I'd like to give an example of what this means in a context that's more understandable than financial products.

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There are hundreds more blog posts to read, going back to 2013:
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