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Full-Text Articles in Computer Law
Transactional Scripts In Contract Stacks, Shaanan Cohney, David A. Hoffman
Transactional Scripts In Contract Stacks, Shaanan Cohney, David A. Hoffman
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Deals accomplished through software persistently residing on computer networks—sometimes called smart contracts, but better termed transactional scripts—embody a potentially revolutionary contracting innovation. Ours is the first precise account in the legal literature of how such scripts are created, and when they produce errors of legal significance.
Scripts’ most celebrated use case is for transactions operating exclusively on public, permissionless, blockchains: such exchanges eliminate the need for trusted intermediaries and seem to permit parties to commit ex ante to automated performance. But public transactional scripts are costly both to develop and execute, with significant fees imposed for data storage. Worse, bugs …
The Tao Of The Dao: Taxing An Entity That Lives On A Blockchain, David J. Shakow
The Tao Of The Dao: Taxing An Entity That Lives On A Blockchain, David J. Shakow
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In this report, Shakow explains how a decentralized autonomous organization functions and interacts with the U.S. tax system and presents the many tax issues that these structures raise. The possibility of using smart contracts to allow an entity to operate totally autonomously on a blockchain platform seems attractive. However, little thought has been given to how such an entity can comply with the requirements of a tax system. The DAO, the first major attempt to create such an organization, failed because of a programming error. If successful examples proliferate in the future, tax authorities will face significant problems in getting …