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88 UMKC L. Rev. 365 (2019-2020)
Blockchain and the Law of the Cat: What Cryptokitties Might Teach

handle is hein.journals/umkc88 and id is 377 raw text is: BLOCKCHAIN AND THE LAW OF THE CAT: WHAT CRYPTOKITTIES MIGHT TEACH* Bryan Wilson** INTRODUCTION The invention and wide-scale usage of the internet has created a ripple effect on the behavior of everyday life. The internet allows us to rent homes from strangers,' bid on unknown goods from strangers in auctions,2 find strangers to help move your things,3 donate computing power to strangers searching for extraterrestrial life forms,4 and otherwise enter into transactions that, without a combination of social norms, market forces, and trustworthy code, would be illegal. This highlights something important about the internet: it exists because *In 1996, Frank Easterbrook suggested that the study of Cyberlaw was as useful as the study of the Law of the Horse. What he meant by this was that the best way to teach Cyberlaw would be to teach the most foundational areas of law-torts, property, contracts, etc.-and apply them in this fancy new environment called cyberspace. At the time, this assertion provided a novel way to understand the impact of these new concepts on the practice of law. Yet, as more devices are connected to the internet and greater advances are made in computer science, the distinctions between real space and cyberspace become muddled. The digital world becomes simultaneously less comparable to the real world and more ingrained in it. As new technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain realize more of their potential, the way behavior is regulated in digital space becomes similarly muddled. Innovations such as the sharing economy and the Internet of Things have demonstrated how difficult these challenges can be. In these new digital environments, direct forms of regulation, like law, become less compatible to the unique considerations of the internet, while indirect forms of regulation, such as the architecture (i.e., software code), markets, and social norms, become more effective. This means, in short, there is a growing need to understand the different behaviors a new technology enables in a quantifiable way before designing regulatory frameworks that may or may not meet stated policy goals. Yet, many practical challenges have inhibited the ability of lawmakers to experiment with the way behavior is regulated, including lack of useful data, data security, and implementation costs. This article surveys early legal scholarship about the ways that behavior on the internet is regulated, explores the opportunity of blockchain and distributed ledger technology through an analysis of the first game built on the blockchain, Cryptokitties, and its associated apps and services, the Kittyverse, and examines the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches to regulating behavior that can be supplemented through the usage of a blockchain. ** Bryan is a Fellow in the MIT Connection Science research group, where he serves as Editor in Chief of the MIT Computational Law Report. Bryan's research focuses on Computational Law, or the processes by which law and legal functions are capable of being computed as computational systems. Bryan is a graduate of the UMKC School of Law and has formerly worked in the Operations team at RiskGenius, an Artificial Intelligence startup, and was an Innovation Fellow with the inaugural class of fellows with the ABA Center for Innovation. This article is dedicated to all of the teachers, family, and friends that helped inspire this work. 1 See AIRBNB, https://www.airbnb.com/ (last visited June 27, 2019). 2 See EBA Y, https://www.ebay.com/ (last visited June 27, 2019). See BUNGi, https://bungii.com/ (last visited June 27, 2019). 4 See SETI@HOME, https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ (last visited June 27, 2019) (SETI@lpme is a scientific experiment, based at UC Berkeley, that uses internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.).

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