In money and finance the hard wall to innovation is rarely technology — it is regulation, jurisdiction, and incumbents who use the law to punish what is new.
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A large vulnerability has been found in The DAO and someone is at the time of writing funneling all it’s Ether out. A proposal has been made for the various Ethereum implementations to: Create a Soft Fork to freeze funds in any DAO sharing the same code as The DAO. This would stop funds being released while giving the …
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There used to be a time not too long ago (in the 60s) when the top UK income tax rate was 97.5%, the top US income tax rate was 94%. Granted these rates were for the 1%’s of that time. I suspect that these rates came as a response to the “Pay their fair share” crowd of that day. In other words these high marginal tax …
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If you haven’t read the first article in this series I recommend you go read it first: Ethereum vs Mossack Fonseca: The IBC and it’s blockchain alternatives Trusts are an ancient contract structure going back to Roman days. A trust is used to separate control from the benefits of an asset. Traditionally a trust …
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Whatever your opinions about the Panama Papers saga. There are both perfectly legitimate and absolutely illegal ways of using the services of an Offshore Trust company like Mossack Fonseca. Ethereum through it’s Smart Contracts can actually replace many of the legitimate ways of using offshore structures, while at the …
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Kipochi the startup I helped found 3 years ago is in the [news again](http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Corporate-News/Safaricom-cuts-M-Pesa-link-for-bitcoin-dealer-Kipochi-/-/539550/3014318/-/cu0ho8/-/index.html). While the whole story ended up pretty painful for me I did learn a lot from the experience. It's been a …
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Due to the SEC’s closing of Prosper I do think that it is time to address the SEC rules, which were created by FDR during the New Deal. It was a very different world then. Not that I think they did a lot of good at that time either. We need the ability to innovate, even in the world of securities and investments. We …
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Prosper were just sent a cease and decist by the SEC for offering investments without registration. Prosper is/was one of a small handful of P2P lending markets offering an innovative approach to lending, allowing normal people to lend money to each other. Not that I am a lawyer, but from reading the ruling, it appears …
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I am glad to hear that Douglas Jackson and associates manage to avoid jail and get probation, community service and a fine instead. I still think it’s extremely unfair that a service as innovative as e-gold were punished like this. Apparently so does the US District Judge Rosemary Collyer: According to cnet: U.S. …
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update Several people have mistakenly thought my slightly tongue in cheek title to mean that I’m one of the part of the fringe paranoia groups here. While the USDOJ did bring down e-gold. The term “The Man” as well as the use of references to Black Helicopters were an attempt to caricaturize those paranoia groups. Now …
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In my last post Pragmatic contract law for entrepreneurs I covered the basics of contracts. It was pretty thin though with respects to covering jurisdictions. Jurisdiction basically means, who has the right to decide what happens over a contract in case of a dispute. As I mentioned before the legality of a contract …
