Can Blockchain and Smart Contracts Move Us Towards Decentralized Justice?

As the legal industry continues to evolve, blockchain may change how attorneys conduct a multitude of services including: smart contracts, land registry, intellectual property rights, chain of custody, litigation, settlements, and financial transactions.

Bella Jagielski joins Zachary Pyers on the podcast today. Bella is a law student at Capital University Law School and serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Vol. 51 of the Capital University Law Review.

Bella and Zach answer the questions:

What is blockchain technology?
What is a smart contract?
What is decentralized justice? How can blockchain technology decentralize arbitration and juror networks?
How is this technology being used today?
What are the potential issues of using blockchain technology?

Visit our website for information about our legal services related to emerging technologies.

ZBP Zachary B. Pyers, Esq.

BJ Bella Jagielski

ZBP

Thanks for joining us. We have a special edition of the Reminger Report Podcast on emerging technologies today, and I am joined by a special guest, Bella, and I’ll try to pronounce your last name, Jagielski. Is that correct?

Yes, that’s great. That’s perfect.

ZBP

Okay, and you are a, you’ve just finished your second year of law school at Capital University Law School.

Yep, yesterday.

ZBP

Congratulations.

Thank you.

ZBP

I forgot that we had, we had emailed that you were finishing up your law school exam. And we’re here because one of the things we’re going to talk about today is a Note that you wrote for the Capital University Law Review.

Yeah.

ZBP

And it is, I’m going to, I don’t know if the title has changed, but the title that I have is “A Comment on the Future - Can Blockchain and Smart Contracts Move Us Towards Decentralized Justice?” And so, my understanding of the Note as I’ve read it and kind of as you and I have talked about it, is that it really focuses on two large issues, both the use of smart contracts and decentral arbitration, which is another form of decentralized justice. Is that, is that?

Yes, yeah, yeah.

ZBP

Okay, now, that’s going to be a lot to unpack and break down, and I, I’m excited to talk about all of those because frankly I don’t know that it’s something that’s discussed that much in the legal context.

Right.

ZBP

And frankly, at least when I have informally polled some of my colleagues and other lawyers about these topics, they have given me kind of that, that sideways glance where they’re like, Zachary, are you just making stuff up to mess with me now?

Yep, yep.

ZBP

So, I’m excited to talk to you, but before we kind of jump into the topic, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you end up in law school? I mean, I mean, I want to talk about how you got to here, but, but how did you end up getting to law school?

Yeah, uhm, so I was always one of those kids that knew I wanted to be a lawyer at, like, I don’t know, an age of six, and I had no idea what a lawyer was, but I was also always an art nerd, and so when I was in high school, I had a really special art history teacher, and he told me about art law, and so ever since high school, I’ve been following this dream of art law. Obviously things are kind of taking different directions right now, but my North Star will always be some sort of art law, I think, I hope. So, yeah, I’ve just always, always knew I was going to go to law school and be an attorney, and I studied art history in undergrad, and so, like it was just on this track of, okay I’m going to do the art thing and then I’ll go to law school and then hopefully stars will align on the way out that I can work with both, but right now, it’s obviously going more towards technology, but as Steve Jobs has said, technology and art go hand in hand, and I do believe that, so.

ZBP

Now, how, and I appreciate that, and frankly, I, I, I mean, I think I agree that there is a big overlap between, you know, art and technology, especially as we build forward and towards the future. How did you get here?

Yeah.

ZBP

How did you, I mean, because I, I mean, this isn’t something that I was studying as a second year law student.

Right, no.

ZBP

So how did you end up researching and focusing your Law Review Note on smart contracts and decentralized arbitration?

Right, well so, in your case, you didn’t start law school in a pandemic, and so my first year was all online, and personally, like everybody, I think, we were all just, it was weird. I felt like I was having an existential crisis, doing all online schooling for my first year of law school where I was an art history kid like I said, so this was just like, so I had no idea what was going on, and I would sit there with my laptop thinking, like, my whole life exists inside this laptop, and it’s crazy to me. And so my imagination was running wild, and then the stuff about NFTs came out, and so I started researching the non-fungible tokens, and that is a contentious subject, and people, you know, have their opinions about it, and I totally, and with that, and I agree, but in terms of NFTs and artists, NFTs finally are allowing artists to have royalty rights because of smart contracts, so that made me really intrigued to what a smart contract was, what is blockchain technology because really the big thing here is blockchain technology, and that’s the underlying technology that’s making all of this possible, and so through researching NFTs and getting excited about that, I really just found, I found it to be more interesting to learn about what the blockchain technology is and what we can do with that in the legal field because, you know, as lawyers, we’re not apt to change, and things are just very stagnant all of the time and so I guess, just my, I have a crazy imagination, and that’s what helped me get through my first year of law school was just researching all the stuff that, like you said, your friends look at you like you have 6 heads because it makes no sense for other attorneys and other lawyers, they’re like - what are you talking about? A decentralized justice system? This isn’t possible. But we all just spent basically two years online, and now you can see that we’re moving in a digital, or it’s a digital revolution. It’s crazy.

ZBP

Yeah.

So really, anything’s possible at this point.

ZBP

Yeah, so, if you could, let’s. I want to kind of take one step back because I know that we’ve already started unpacking, talking about like, NFTs.

Yeah.

ZBP

And blockchain technology. Could you explain to me just, like, from a, you know, the 10,000-foot, I’ve never heard of a smart contract before. What is a smart contract? If you could give me, if you could just give me, like, the light, the, you know, the basic definition of it.

Yeah, so I think before doing that, you have to establish what the blockchain technology is.

ZBP

That’s correct.

Because I think a lot of people, when they hear blockchain, they automatically think we’re talking about cryptocurrency.

ZBP

Absolutely. Bitcoin, right?

Bitcoin, exactly.

ZBP

Yeah.

And that’s not what we’re talking about. Obviously Bitcoin exists on top of the blockchain system, but blockchain technology is, like I said, the technology that is underneath all of this stuff, and so you can think of smart contracts and Bitcoin and these digital assets as applications on top of the blockchain, so it, and they are considered decentralized applications. So in terms of a smart contract with NFTs, if an NFT is on a blockchain and let’s suppose built into the NFT is a smart contract that is saying, if a piece of art is transferred, or this NFT is transferred to someone and there is embedded in that smart contract a 10% royalty right to an artist, as soon as it’s transferred, automatically that 10% royalty of whatever they’re paying for it, 10% automatically goes to the artist.

ZBP

On it, every time that.

Every single time it’s transferred.

ZBP

Okay.

So in terms of NFTs, I mean, in, with artists, that’s just incredible because it’s never, that doesn’t exist in terms of regular pieces of art.

ZBP

Right, because once the artist sells a painting.

It’s done for.

ZBP

Right, they’ve lost whatever right they have to ever receive.

So the biggest, the one, like the normal analogy that people use for NFTs are, for smart contracts, I’m sorry, are vending machines. So you think about the vending machine is technically the first smart contract. A vending machine works on a system where you put the money into the vending machine, it verifies the money and then automatically your candy comes out, and so that’s exactly what’s happening here with a smart contract. It’s, works on if/then function, so obviously that does leave room for error, or not a lot of room for ambiguity for attorneys in creating their own contracts.

ZBP

I, I think of, I can’t help, but when you talk about, like, the, the old 90s sitcoms, and you can pick whichever one, when they’re trying to use the vending machine, and like, the chips get stuck. You know what I mean?

Yes.

ZBP

And I’m like, somebody has complied with the contract.

Yeah.

ZBP

It’s supposed to, and, and, but one of the things I think you’re talking about, right, is that it’s like a self-executed function.

Yes, exactly.

ZBP

So therefore, it, it’s not something that requires a party to continue to, to essentially monitor in order to ensure compliance.

Right, and like that’s, I guess, the whole purpose here is to sort of eliminate the trusted third party who would be, you know, the court system or whoever. Well, in terms of decentralized justice, that would be like trying, trying to eliminate court systems or some, like, online dispute resolution systems and just using the decentralized justice platforms that are out there currently or working on.

ZBP

You know, one of the things that I was just thinking about as we were talking about this, because I’m, I’m trying to think of, like, you know, applications where you could have these in everyday transactions, and one of the things that came to mind at least in my head was like in a real estate transaction when there’s like an earnest money deposit, right, and usually the earnest money deposit is transferred when the property is, is sold. I mean, when the actual.

Yeah.

ZBP

The, the, the transaction’s closed. Well, you can essentially use a smart contract in that scenario to say that if the, when the property is sold.

Yep.

ZBP

The, it immediately goes to.

Yes.

ZBP

Back to the, the buyer or immediately.

Yes.

ZBP

Gets transferred to the seller pursuant to the terms of the contract and it could be self-executed.

Yeah.

ZBP

So once the property was closed and let’s say the deed is filed with, with the County Clerk, then boom.

Yeah.

ZBP

It’s self-executed.

Yeah, exactly, and that, that is the purpose of what they’re trying to do with smart contracts and also with the blockchain technology, this is a distributed ledger system, and so this is able to really keep all of these records on this ledger system that is supposed to, really it’s never supposed to be deleted or modified in any way unless all of these computers all decide that it can’t happen, which doesn’t happen. So you know, it’s really being used for so many different purposes in, in terms of, like, deeds and stuff. They’re thinking that maybe we could keep those types of things on the blockchain so all of these records are there forever, supposedly, and you can access them anytime.

ZBP

Well, I mean, you know, the reality is, is that, and I think that, you know, you, you’re talking about, I mean, you kind of already have talked about this at least a little bit, right, but like, when you think about historically how deeds were stored, courthouses were burned down. I mean, I don’t, I’m not, like, saying frequently, but there would be fires in courthouses.

Yeah.

ZBP

Like, deeds would be lost, and even when people started scanning deeds, it was possible that deeds got mislabeled.

Right.

ZBP

Or, or they got accidentally deleted.

Yeah.

ZBP

Or they were stored on a hard drive and that hard drive went missing or, and then they started moving to the cloud, but it’s still possible the cloud backup storage doesn’t always work or, so I, I, I, storing it in a decentralized area certainly makes sense at least.

Right.

ZBP

When you start talking about recording those transactions.

Right.

ZBP

Now, when we talk about, we talk about the use. Before I even, before I even, before we jump ahead, we kind of defined kind of the smart contract, and I know that these have some relation to each other, but having read your Note, at least the pre-published version, the, the decentralized justice or, or decentralized arbitration, although they kind of are connected at times, they can also be, I mean, from what I was, could be separate.

Yes.

ZBP

So, explain to me or just give us the kind of, again, the 10,000-foot overview of what is.

Yeah.

ZBP

Decentralized justice or decentralized arbitration.

So, going back to, you know, the point about the vending machine and your candy gets stuck, so let’s suppose this is a smart contract and something, there is a dispute happening, and you know, one buyer doesn’t fulfill his side of the deal and then instantly within that smart contract, there should, you can put code in there that would automatically go to a decentralized justice platform. There’s, the one that I talk about in my Note is called Kleros. So you would put Kleros’, their code within your smart contract so as soon as the dispute, or as soon as somebody falls through on the deal, that automatically, that function automatically gets put into an arbitration function, so really, a decentralized justice platform would just be implemented into a smart contract in, in case something goes awry.

ZBP

Now, explain to me what is decentralized arbitration.

Yeah.

ZBP

Or what is a decentralized, you know, justice?

So, in the case of a company like Kleros, what they’re doing is, they’re taking these disputes, and they have certain courts within their system, so like, software programming courts. If you have a software programming issue, you would just go to that court or an insurance issue, you would go to the insurance court, and they have a bunch of jurors who, this is all based on blockchain as well, so these jurors are staking up their PNK token, which is Kleros’ cryptocurrency, so the jurors will stake their token and, or they stake as many tokens as they can and that’s how they get chosen, depending on how many tokens you stake. And so the jurors are incentivized to all vote correctly through this process, through game theory which then if, so once all these jurors vote correctly on this dispute, then, you know, the parties get paid out and they go their separate ways, but if they don’t vote correctly or if it, if one juror does not vote correctly, they are disincentivized, I think, through, it might be a fine, but it, it really is a lot of money involved here is kind of what it would be, but for the most part, it is all based around this game theory of what you would expect the other person to be expecting.

ZBP

Now we talked, we started talking about this before we started recording.

Yeah.

ZBP

Because, honestly, it, it, when I was reviewing your Note even before we started talking, it, it’s not, it’s just different than when we think of jury deliberations, like, in a federal courthouse or in a state court, you know, a state courthouse, in a sense that, you know, in, in those type of settings, you’ve got a group of jurors, whether it’s six or eight, and there can be in that group a contrarian. The person or two or three who no matter what everybody else says, they are going to, they are going to do the exact opposite.

Yeah.

ZBP

And sometimes it’s for good reason, and sometimes it’s

Yeah.

ZBP

Just because they’re the contrarian, and they’re always the contrarian, and if they’re always going to do the opposite of what everybody else does.

Right.

ZBP

But the way you describe the, the juror process in this arbitration, the contrarian is then essentially punished.

Yes.

ZBP

For having the contrarian view.

Yeah.

ZBP

And so, it almost anticipates or it almost requires the jurors to not only arrive at what they believe the correct determination to be in any sort of dispute but also requires that they arrive at what they anticipate the other jurors.

Yeah.

ZBP

Are going to do in the dispute.

Right.

ZBP

And incentivizes them to essentially make, choose that outcome.

Right.

ZBP

Is that?

Yes, and like, so it all depends, as I was saying, there is an example that it all comes back to this theory of game, the game theory, and so if you were to tell somebody in New York City, and you guys had no cell phones or anything, let’s all meet at this one particular time at this one particular place but you guys don’t say where, you don’t say when. Everybody would expect the other, generally, everybody would expect the other person to be at Grand Central Station by noon, and that just is the game theory that that’s just what you would expect to do if you were in New York City and nobody had phones and nobody knew where to go. And so I think especially in terms of Kleros, obviously these are people who are choosing to be a part of this, and so I would hope that they’re not just being the contrarian to be the contrarian, but there is obviously a lot of room for error.

ZBP

Well, and I mean, it changes, I think, too, right, what, what we see the decision-making process on because, and I’m not saying that this is good or bad.

Right.

ZBP

I’m just making the observation.

Yeah.

ZBP

But it takes, it kind of takes that individualism away to a certain extent.

Yeah.

ZBP

And forces everybody to think about what the collective would do.

Right.

ZBP

What the collective would think is the right.

Right.

ZBP

Situation in, or the right, the right outcome in a particular situation, which is just different than.

What?

ZBP

I don’t even, and I’m not, I’m not even sure that it’s different in the sense that we talk about, like, a jury of our peers.

Yeah.

ZBP

Maybe it’s better. I don’t.

Yeah.

ZBP

I don’t, I, I don’t know.

Right, right.

ZBP

It’s just, it’s just different than we think about.

Yeah.

ZBP

General juries.

Yeah, I think it’s definitely good to, you know, all of these things are obviously in, its like, infancy stage, and I think it’s good to be talking about it, especially when if you think down in the, down, towards the future and you’re thinking about if the internet does become a fundamental right, which I think is very debatable at this point, it might as well be a fundamental right, and if people are able to access the internet everywhere and we can get people phones at some point and the internet is, you know, literally accessible everywhere through, I mean they’ve talked about putting up towers and stuff across the nation to make it accessible to everybody, and so if all of these people are now able to access blockchain and these are accessible things and we can have, I think you can take the concept from things like Kleros and these companies doing decentralized justice and think about how can we implement that into our society today if we were able to get a bunch of people access to the internet and then quicker access to judicial services, and I talk about, like, in, what China’s doing with their internet judiciary system which I think is super interesting. You know, they have a ton of people doing or adjudicating their disputes online, and they have a 24/7 hour access to filing disputes, paying fines and all this stuff, and so it kind of makes you think about, so if we did that and we were implementing more internet judiciary systems in some way, more people probably would have access to these things and maybe we wouldn’t have some strange dilemma of voting upon, you know, the common consensus.

ZBP

Well, one of the things, you know, that sticks out to me, and, and I think part of the thing that you’re talking, I mean, and I don’t want to dive too far away from it, but I think one of the things that comes to, you know, to my mind is, like, the access to, is always.

Yeah.

ZBP

Kind of like an access to justice type issue, and one of the things that’s always stuck out to me is, and you’re talking about combining this form of our, of, of potential decentralized arbitration and making it more readily accessible whether it’s arbitration or, or, or, or justice in the sense of like what China’s implementing.

Yeah.

ZBP

Is it, when we talk about, like, insurance companies, the insurance industries have utilized for a long period of time inter, what they call inter-company arbitrations where if an insurance company has a dispute with another insurance company over, let’s say, a fender bender and who caused it and both insurance companies paid out to their claims holders and now the fight’s just between insurance company A and insurance company B, instead of necessarily taking that dispute to court, they may just arbitrate it between the two of them because they’ve all agreed to participate.

Yeah, yeah.

ZBP

And it, it occurs to me that those large, you know, commercial entities have, have, have come to the conclusion that it’s more economically feasible for them to settle their disputes amongst each other at least when, in regards.

Yeah.

ZBP

To these issues.

Yeah.

ZBP

To do it through arbitration because otherwise it would take forever and cost them too much money and they’d bog, get bogged down in the system, which then raises the question why aren’t more of us pushing for that type of resolution of some disputes.

Yeah.

ZBP

That are either too small to, you know, to, to, you know, necessarily justify or warrant, you know, an, a, a court action. It would be too costly to either prosecute or to defend, and, and is there not a better way to maybe resolve some of these things.

Yeah, exactly, and I know people in dealing with smart contracts and blockchain, they have been talking about using these types of things for, that, exactly what you’re talking about - insurance disputes - because it would just be that if/then function, you know, who’s not paying out or however that works, I’m really not an insurance person. But, yeah.

ZBP

Now, in terms of the use of these technologies, how, I mean, on a scale of 1 to 10 or however you want to judge this, how readily available or, or how frequently are these being used today? I mean.

Yeah.

ZBP

Am I unknowingly signing smart contracts right and left?

No.

ZBP

And not actually knowing it? Do we see these in a particular area? You know, what, what did you find in your research and what did you, what did you see?

Yeah, I think right now, obviously like I said, this technology is really up and coming and people are slowly catching on to what it can be used for. I mentioned in my paper, for example, Walmart uses blockchain technology for their supply chain stuff, and that has really helped them decrease disputes with their third-party providers because this whole time, you know, they can’t find invoices and all this stuff, and they don’t know when so-and-so is getting to a certain destination, but with smart contracts or with the blockchain, they’re doing everything digitally now, so every single invoice is on their phone, they’re signing in, you know, checking that they’re in as soon as they get to their destination and everything, and so I think I have in my, the statistic is, is like, yeah, less than 1%, there’s been a less than 1% discrepancy rate, which was opposed to their 70% rate prior to blockchain implementation.

ZBP

You talk about, that’s a huge.

Yeah.

ZBP

Change.

Yeah, because they know exactly where everything’s coming from, and I also remember reading about they’re doing it for, I mean, all of their products, so they were able to track where their salmonella was coming from because they knew exactly where this meat had come from prior, and there’s no guessing about it. And so it’s really, like I said, it’s this digital ledger system that is storing all this information and it can’t really be disputed or argued in any way because it’s right there.

ZBP

Yeah. Now, I, I know we’ve, we’ve kind of talked about, you know, how these things are kind of, we anticipate, or I should say, you anticipate kind of these coming about and impacting us maybe like in our personal lives as a consumer and, you know, as a market participant. As a legal professional, I mean, how do you think or have you thought about or looked at how you think this might change the legal profession, you know, moving forward as, as we, as society in general starts to use more smart contracts and/or potentially decentralized arbitration?

Right, well I think, just thinking about what has happened for all of us in the past two years and realizing how much our lives exist on the internet and the increase in e-commerce and just all of these internet disputes that we have. I mean, it’s happening every second of every day, and so I think this is creating this huge cloud of issues from the internet that we aren’t really touching fully whereas, like I mentioned with China, they literally create an internet judiciary system solely for internet-based disputes. As we continue to see all of these internet-related disputes, I just think that there will be more people who are utilizing smart contracts and blockchain for these disputes and from that, maybe using some sort of arbitration or an online dispute resolution within these smart contracts.

ZBP

One of the things that you talked about was eBay, was using, in your, your paper, you talked about how eBay was using a function for online dispute resolution.

Yes.

ZBP

And I was, I can’t remember what the statistic was, but I do remember that when I read it, my jaw dropped because I thought to myself, I cannot believe, I mean, let me, let me preface this. I can believe that eBay has a lot of disputes between buyers and sellers. That part’s believable. What I, what I was shocked about was the actual number of claims that had been submitted and resolved via eBay’s online dispute resolution platform. That was by 2010.

Yes.

ZBP

So, between, between early 2000s and 2010, you’re talking about 60,000,000 disputes that eBay had settled through their online platform, and, and one of the things that you’re talking about that’s in the future everything, I, I can’t help but think about the rush to the metaverse, the rush to augmented reality, the rush to push and now how, you know, where a year or two ago, it was a joke that people were buying this, like, real estate in the metaverse, right, this, this world of augmented reality, but that now, that there are legitimate, you know, entities who are buying this real estate for their, their stores. And they’re, they, with the intention that some day, you know, the Nike store will be in a form of augmented reality, so as you do your online shopping, instead of looking at my iPhone, I may be putting on an, a, an AR or a VR headset, a virtual reality headset and I may be walking in and, and looking at the shoes as if I’m in the store, and I’m thinking, you combine, as you enter into this world of augmented reality, it would be very easy to roll into the, a smart contract with decentralized arbitration.

Yeah.

ZBP

To say, look, if you have got a dispute over the purchase of your shoes or whatever it is you’re purchasing.

Right.

ZBP

Now all of a sudden, that dispute, instead of going to Small Claims Court in Franklin County, it’s going.

Right.

ZBP

Now to whatever platform you choose.

Yeah, I mean our, the dockets are full as they are, as we all know, and so, I mean it’s only going to get worse, and so these small disputes that are happening online, where should they be solved? I don’t think we should be really wasting a lot of time in a regular courtroom if there are ways that we can just do it online, especially for, you know, if we’re talking in the metaverse and something occurs in the metaverse, then shouldn’t we be doing, you know, some sort of adjudication online instead of actually going to a courtroom because where does this exist? It literally only exists in this virtual reality that we’re set in.

ZBP

Right. That’s interesting. I think Kenton and I just found our new business idea, and that is a metaverse dispute resolution platform.

Yeah, there you go.

ZBP

Can we cut that part out because I don’t want anyone to steal it. As these technologies develop, are there things that are causing people to lose sleep at night, right? Are, are there issues that you see that are making people nervous or have people on edge or they are identifying as an issue of a potential problem in the future?

Well, there’s a huge, huge issue with blockchain technology, and it’s a really humongous climate issue. Mining takes a ton of energy, and so a lot of people are, will probably not enjoy this podcast and I’m really sorry, but you know, it is a really huge issue with climate change in terms of how much energy is used to mine and not to keep bringing up China, but they are ones who just completely banned, I believe, private use of any blockchain mining because of that reason; however, they do it themselves through their own government, but because of that reason. Because the pollution is just so bad of using the energy, but there are, I mean, people are trying to figure out how they can work around this. Right now with blockchain, I know proof of work is what is causing this energy problem because of the mining, but other companies are trying to use proof of stake, which should be, which would allow, like random computers to be doing the mining process basically instead of these computers competing for it.

ZBP

Okay.

So that’s supposed to help, but I’m not sure how much it really is going to. The long-term effects of this, we just don’t know.

ZBP

And I think one of the things, too, I, I mean, and I think you’ve probably, my understanding, just from the, like I said, the 30,000 foot.

Yeah.

ZBP

Is that there are, there are certain blockchain technologies that are more efficient or less efficient when it comes to actually running the proofs of the calculations, and but I, I understand and I, I mean, the news is littered with stories about the energy consumption.

Yeah.

ZBP

As it relates, especially some of the bigger, some of the bigger, more widely published or publicized blockchain technologies like Bitcoin.

Yeah.

ZBP

I, I know that there’s been a lot of publications and a lot of press about their use of energy.

Yeah, yeah, definitely, and, I mean, you know, these people are working on it, but with everything right now, I mean climate change is just a huge issue in general and I’m hopeful that there, there will be some sort of solution so it’s not as impactful, but I, you know, I think it’s too early to really tell what’s happening. But there’s definitely a ton of issues with blockchain and smart contracts, and I know for smart contracts, a lot of attorneys are curious about whether this is actually legally enforceable. I’m almost positive it is because there has been an Act for all digital, you know, like digital signatures.

ZBP

Sure.

And digital contracts are obviously.

ZBP

I feel like I sign them every day when I click.

Yeah.

ZBP

On my computer where they’re asking me to update a software and to sign some user agreement.

Yeah.

ZBP

And, and you click and you.

Right.

ZBP

Right.

So they’re definitely legally enforceable contracts. And then I think another issue that I came across was how can these contracts be really enforceable because, well, with smart contracts, there can be no modifications made once they’re already implemented because that’s just how the blockchain works. You can’t, like, you can’t break it, and so, you know, there’s solutions of you would make sure you memorialize a full contract, you know, in writing first, and then within that contract, you would state something along the lines of the smart contract that, you know, included it within your real contract and then also in the smart contract, I believe you can implement some sort of code that would refer back to your final agreement in some capacity, so there’s ways around it, but they definitely are legally enforceable contracts at this point as far as I know.

ZBP

What you’re saying, what I, or what you’re talking about, almost having them in counterpart, meaning you’ve got like a written one.

Yeah.

ZBP

That you’re actually executing, but you’re still embedding the smart contract.

Yes.

ZBP

Aspect of it into what we would consider to be a traditional.

Right.

ZBP

Written contract.

Right. I think, and I think that would probably, right now, would be the best way to go about that just so you’re covering all your bases just in case if you do decide to use, you know, all these systems, that you probably should have.

ZBP

Right.

A traditional contract because we’re not, you know, there yet technology-wise in terms of just completely going digital, so yeah.

ZBP

Well, I will say that I do think we’re getting a lot closer though because even, I mean, I, I remember which has been four or five years ago, but when we, when we were buying our last house, we signed all of the documents via, I mean, somebody’s iPad.

Yeah.

ZBP

And you, not at the actual closing, but at least when we were, when we were entering into the purchase contract.

Right.

ZBP

All that, all those documents are exchanged digitally.

Yeah.

ZBP

Without ever.

And so, at what point are, you know, are we not using paper all the time?

ZBP

Right.

And just, this is only existing through someone’s iPads and we’re just signing stuff off iPads all the time.

ZBP

Right.

Instead of having to do, you know, traditional paperwork, but we’re just not fully there yet.

ZBP

Right.

But I think, like I said, with this past two years, we’re seeing what can happen and where we are going in terms of technology.

ZBP

Yeah.

In this digital sphere and, you know, Web3 is coming, so, and we might, kind of, already be in Web3 for sure, but I think there’s, there’s just a lot that’s going to be happening that we cannot possibly predict. They couldn’t predict it 20 years ago, what was going to happen when the internet came out, so.

ZBP

Yeah.

ZBP

Well, Bella, we really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. We’ll be excited to, to re-read your Note when it’s actually been published in final format.

Thank you.

ZBP

It comes out, and we will be, obviously, interested to see where your legal career goes.

Thank you so much.

ZBP

Once you get out of law school and what you do in the future.

Yeah.

ZBP

Thanks for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

ZBP

We really appreciate it.

I appreciate it.

The Reminger Report: Emerging Technologies

Can Blockchain and Smart Contracts Move Us Towards Decentralized Justice?

Listen to this podcast on