Theo Business Law Today:
On January 19, 2021, the American Bar Association (ABA) […] released an update to its comprehensive white paper addressing jurisdictional issues associated with digital products, including cryptocurrencies and other digital assets, and digital processes, such as blockchain.
Sẽ coi cryptocurrencies là hàng hóa hay chứng khoán? Định nghĩa chứng khoán theo luật Mỹ được viết kỹ ở Section 3. Cách một số nước nổi bật xử lý vấn đề này cũng được đề cập.
Tải the white paper ở đây.
Cập nhật:
For the time being, the biggest use case of blockchain technology is crypto tokens and as a result of globalization, crypto tokens developed offshore and domestically are both used in Vietnam. There are four main types of crypto tokens, including payment tokens, utility tokens, security tokens, and non-fungible tokens (“NFTs”).[14] Payment tokens (e.g., Bitcoin, VNDC, VNDT) serve as a medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. Utility tokens (e.g., AXS, BNB, BAT) give the holder access to a blockchain-based product or service. Security tokens (e.g., Blockstack and Metain real estate tokens) give the holder ownership rights. NFTs (e.g., Bored Ape and Hoi An arts, Eminem’s Shady Con and Suboi music videos) are digital representation of unique assets. The rights of holders as well as requirements applicable to their related transaction will depend on what the crypto tokens are.
Can anyone really own virtual tokens such as Bitcoin and Ether? And if so, how should the law protect the rights of the owner? Legal rulings in federal courts have yielded inconsistent policies regarding the applicable remedy when rights in cryptocurrencies are infringed. Some adopt a property rule, granting injunctions and enforcement of property rights against third parties, whereas others restrict the remedy to damages. However, all rulings share one problematic feature: a lack of distinction between types of crypotokens, resulting in an implicit, one-size-fits-all policy. The economic analysis of law suggests that the choice between a property rule and a liability rule should depend on transaction costs, but such costs typically differ across cryptotokens because cryptotokens are diverse and customizable. Thus, this Article proposes to exploit the common taxonomy of cryptotokens, which distinguishes between security, utility, and currency tokens, as a proxy for transaction costs.
Blockchain technology is predicted to have a major impact on the intellectual property (IP) ecosystem. More and more projects are being launched, both in the public and private sector. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has built up a Blockchain Task Force and is preparing a new WIPO Standard to encompass all types of IP rights and the entire IP lifecycle; the German Government published a strategy paper on blockchain with a chapter on applications in the creative arts sector; a European Blockchain Service Infrastructure is being built up; the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) established an Anti-Counterfeiting Forum as part of the broader EU strategy to create a blockchain ecosystem and now has its own blockchain for trademarks and designs in the EU. Furthermore, LVMH, with brands such as Louis Vuitton, developed its own blockchain to track luxury goods; Kodak started a blockchain initiative for image rights management; music and film streaming are offered on blockchain platforms; sports clubs discuss micro-licensing of their IP rights; digital fashion is created for distribution using blockchain.
This article begins a 3-part series that explains how blockchain technology is being used to change the way contracts are written, executed, and maintained, and how the disputes that arise are best addressed. This first part provides background and a contextual foundation to blockchains and blockchain ledgers.
In the last few days, it’s been hard to ignore the fact that (according to this VN Express article) Vietnam leads the world in cryptocurrency adoption. A survey by US-based consultancy Finder found that of survey respondents 41% of those based in Vietnam had invested in cryptocurrency, with 28% of the total investing in Bitcoin. It would seem, therefore, that Vietnam leads cryptocurrency adoption despite the fact that cryptocurrency is not a legal means of payment in the country.
The market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), transferrable and unique digital assets on public blockchains, has received widespread attention and experienced strong growth since early 2021. This study provides an introduction to NFTs and explores the 14 largest submarkets using data from the Ethereum blockchain between June 2017 and May 2021. The analyses rely on (a) the number of NFT sales, (b) the dollar volume of NFT trades and (c) the number of unique blockchain wallets that traded NFTs. Based on the number of transactions and wallets, the Ethereum-based NFT market peaked at the end of 2017 due to the success of the CryptoKitties project.
The price of bitcoin has continued on an upward trend since October 2020 and reaching new all-time highs in January 2021; but will this trend last and is this rise in price sustainable? This article considers factors that have contributed to this price rise and assesses the implications of looming regulation and other factors that could interrupt this trend.
Bitcoin, launched in 2009 by someone or some people under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, is the king of the coins, but there are thousands of them, (Yahoo Finance tracks over 300), including biggies like Ethereum, used for instance to buy and sell NFTs (non fungible tokens, which I wrote about here), Ripple, or XRP, which is used for banking transactions and the infamous Dogecoin, a satirical coin (replete with its Shiba Inu dog meme), which has a very no joke market value of $25 billion.
Yes, it's kind of crazy. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger don’t like crypto. Munger calls it “rat poison” and says it aids and abets criminals. That certainly has been true (along with all the legit use), but it ignores the obvious point that a vast majority of all the crime in the world is facilitated by traditional currencies and systems, (Exhibit A: The FinCEN Files investigations. Crypto is never mentioned here. JPMorgan, HSBC and Deutsche Bank and dollars are often.) It’s still very much the case that the $100 bill is the criminal’s currency and denomination of choice.
This article contextualizes the rise of cryptocurrency within the historical relationship between money and the state. It begins by asking two simple yet critical questions: What is money and where did it come from? Armed with the answers, the article proceeds by taking a fresh look at cryptocurrency through the lens of the credit theory of money. It finds that cryptocurrency, by using new technologies and incentive-based design, attempts to overcome the previous geographic limitations that hindered broad adoption of private currencies. Even with these innovations, cryptocurrency appeared unlikely to challenge the supremacy of sovereign money until Facebook announced the Libra project. Policymakers around the world instantly recognized the threat and opportunity Libra posed given Facebook’s scale. Facebook may not be a sovereign entity, but its power rivals that of most countries. Libra compelled a flurry of new proposals in the U.S. to address the fragmented nature of cryptocurrency regulation. In choosing next steps, Congress and regulators must be careful to ensure that regulatory clarity does not come at the expense of sovereign authority.
Any future for cryptocurrency in Vietnam? (Asia Legal)
LNT có bài liên quan Cryptocurrency Trading Risks In Vietnam.
Kluwer Arbitration Blog có bài Award Concerning Bitcoin Exchange – Bit Too Risky to Enforce?
Did you know Blockchain Research Lab and Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law & Policy?
Xem PWC’s “Making sense of bitcoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain”
Xem Seth Godin giải thích dễ hiểu về blockchain trong bài “Why the blockchain matters”, chép lại dưới đây:
Why the blockchain matters (Seth Godin)
But first, let’s understand some words…
Bitcoin is not the blockchain. If the blockchain is a printing press, Bitcoin is a kind of paper money. There are countless things that one can do with a printing press, in fact, it changed the world, but the invention of paper money isn’t even one of the top 100 most important outputs the printed press created.
Cryptocurrency has a terrible name. Most people associate “crypto” with spies and secrets. And a currency is generally backed by a nation, with a treasury, an exchequer and banks.
It’s more accurately thought of as a token.
If you went to an amusement park, you might buy a bunch of tokens or tickets to go on the rides. And if you run one of the rides, you collect the tokens, which at some point, you can trade in for a different sort of value, probably currency.
If people need tokens and they’re scarce, they go up in value. If people think that tokens are going to up in value, they might buy them in anticipation of that. And the things that people do to get tokens can range from simply buying them with paper money (!) to performing various tasks (like the ride operators in the example above).
And, if a lot of people own tokens, they’re likely to do things that make tokens go up in value. Thus, an ecosystem is born.
Okay, so what’s the blockchain?
It’s a database.
Unlike most databases, it’s not controlled by one entity and it’s not easily rewritten. Instead, it’s a ledger, a permanent, examinable, public database. One can use it to record transactions of various sorts.
It would be a really good way to keep track of property records, for example. Instead, we have title insurance, unsearchable folders of deeds in City Hall and often dusty tax records.
There are databases everywhere around us (Facebook, for example, is mostly a database–who are the users, who do they know, what do they do?). Because the internet rewards people who own networks so handsomely, these organizations continue to gain in power. Google began by building a database on top of the open internet, and they’ve spent the last twenty years relentlessly making the internet less open so they can fortify the power of their databases and the attention they influence or control.
And that’s the first reason that the blockchain matters—because there’s a chance that it might lead to more open, resilient, market-focused networks and databases. It’s only a chance, though, because all the hype around the tokens sometimes makes it seem more likely that financial operators will simply seek to manipulate unregulated markets for their own benefit.
The second reason might support positive change. The existence of tokens and decentralization means that it’s possible to build resilient open source communities where early contributors and supporters benefit handsomely over time. No one owns these communities, and we can hope that these communities will work hard to serve themselves and their users, not the capital markets or other short-term players.
Consider a project like Wikipedia. Tens of thousands of people have devoted millions of hours to working to build it. 5,000 active editors are responsible for most of the work that we benefit from every day. This is unpaid work, done for the community and for the satisfaction and status that comes with it.
But of the top 100 websites, there are very few that are built on this model.
Now imagine a blockchain/token project in which contributors earned tokens as they built it and supported it.
Over time, the decentralized project would go up in value. As the ecosystem and the market delivered more and more utility to more and more people, the users would need to buy tokens to use it. And the holders of tokens would receive either a dividend or have the ability to sell their tokens if they chose.
Early speculators would attract more attention, and people with more skill than capital could invest by contributing early and often.
As the project reached a steady state, the stakeholders would shift, from innovators and speculators to people who treat their daily contributions as a job without a boss. Innovators could build on top of this network without permission, creating more and more variations and choice using the same underlying database.
One way to consider this: The open web led to a huge leap in the number of useful databases that we all use (things like Zillow, Instagram and even Tinder). They were fairly cheap to launch and run, and once the network effect kicked in, the profits were significant. Investors were eager to fund the next one, because the odds of a big win dwarfed most of what they could choose from in traditional businesses.
But dominant players are now working to make the openness of the web (the thing that allowed them to grow in the first place) less open. Google and Facebook and others push to make their stock price go up, not to serve users and others who now understand they have little choice in the matter.
The distributed nature of the blockchain, combined with this novel way of funding early contributions means that the network effect may very well bring powerful new databases to the fore, creating new ways for us to interact.
It’s hardly going to be perfect. There’s the issue of how the blockchain itself is run. If it’s run on the original method—proof of work—it’s likely to be a carbon disaster, getting worse as it succeeds. Fortunately, there are new approaches on the horizon (with great names like ‘proof of stake’ and ‘sharding’) that might address these problems.
For the typical user, the existence of the blockchain itself won’t matter, just as you don’t need to know how many volunteer editors Wikipedia has to benefit from using it.
The reason the blockchain matters is that it is an agent of change. Just like the transistor and yes, the printing press, when an agent of change shows up, it often leads to shifts that we probably didn’t expect.
Understanding it now is more productive than simply being forced to deal with it later.