Financial Poise Webinars: Blockchain and Smart Contracts

Financial Poise Webinars™ announces “Blockchain and Smart Contracts,” a live webinar premiering  July 21st at 1:00 PM CST. This webinar is co-produced by West LegalEdCenter™ and part of the “Blockchain Basics” series. It will feature Dan Waterloo (Interface Technologies); Christopher Cahill (L & G Law Group LLP); David Lopez-Kurtz (Dinsmore); Tom Klein (BusinessBlock); and William Slater (Slater Technologies, Inc.).

Blockchain is a tool. Samson Williams likens blockchain to a group text message, in which each participant receives a distributed, time-stamped, tamper-resistant (and encrypted) record of data transactions. Each group text has these characteristics. Everyone in the group “sees” the data, and none can change or gainsay any group message. Smart contracts are computer code put on the blockchain (how, exactly?) that establishes self-executing terms and conditions of a transaction. Are smart contracts smart? If certain data comes in and fulfills a pre-set term or condition, then rights and responsibilities are formed, terminated, modified, or shifted among the parties. Ah certainty and transparency, but also ah garbage in and garbage out. Are some contractual terms not amenable to smart contracting? And are smart contracts necessarily contracts? If not, can they still be useful? If a smart contract is a contract, what is the governing document? Is it the words business people and lawyers use, or is it the code that is supposed to reflect the words?