Version 2.4.0 supersedes v2.3.0 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20355497) and is the sixth paper in the immo.quick Core technical series (10.5281/zenodo.19634279 → 19799660 → 19969948 → 20078326 → 20355497 → this paper). Overview This paper presents the complete institutional specification of immo.quick Core — a nine-layer deterministic compliance enforcement infrastructure operating across 47 jurisdictions. It is not a paper about technology. It is a paper about institutional legitimacy — about what it means, in a world of deterministic machines, for an institution to prove that it acted correctly. Every previous compliance document in history has answered the question: "Did we follow the process?" This paper answers a different question: "Can we prove, with mathematical certainty, that no impermissible movement produced a consequence — and that no unknown party could have caused one?" The answer is yes. The architecture enforces it. The enforcement is not optional. What v2.4.0 Adds to v2.3.0 v2.3.0 established the complete epistemological foundation, the nine-layer architecture, 15 jurisdictions, complete sector analysis, geopolitical dimensions, and the economic case. v2.4.0 adds four structural elements not present in v2.3.0: Element 1 — The Nine Gamechangers: The first systematic documentation of the capability advances that place immo.quick Core in a categorically different strategic position. These are not product features. They are architectural consequences of the nine-layer system — capabilities that emerge from the architecture and could not exist without it: EPA Offline-First Verification (SSL for compliance decisions), Bi-Temporal Legal State Replay (compliance time machine), Cross-Institution Proof Network (SWIFT for compliance verdicts), Regulatory DNA Sequencing (live law tracking to zero-downtime deploy), Intraday Settlement Finality (T+0 in under 2 seconds), Legal Pathway Optimizer (optimal jurisdiction in 9ms), Machine Law Constitution (immutable rule foundation on Ethereum and IPFS), Compliance Credit Score (compliance as a balance sheet asset), and Post-CMOS Governance Readiness (investor track — strategic roadmap signal). Element 2 — Law as Code / German Federal Government Initiative: The Bundesregierung's Digitalcheck program and the formal Law-as-Code initiative (2023–2026) represent the first sovereign government mandate for machine-readable law. immo.quick Core's Machine Law Engine is the only production implementation of this paradigm at institutional scale. This is not coincidence. It is architectural convergence. Element 3 — White House National Cybersecurity Strategy (2023) and EO 14028: The US Executive Order on Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity and the National Cybersecurity Strategy mandate zero-trust architecture, post-quantum cryptography migration, and SBOM requirements for critical infrastructure. immo.quick Core satisfies all three mandates simultaneously — by architectural construction, not by configuration. Element 4 — The Legacy Integration Protocol: Precisely how immo.quick Core connects to, validates, wraps, and structurally elevates existing compliance infrastructure without requiring system replacement. The anti-rip-and-replace architecture. Architecture Summary The nine-layer enforcement system comprises: Layer 0 (DEPE — Deterministic Execution Proof Engine, 49ms total from proposal to permanent proof), Layer 1 (PAS — Prior Admissibility Space, closed-world assumption with five mandatory conjunctive conditions), Layer 2 (BTL — Bi-Temporal Ledger, BFT quorum n=9 f=3 q=7, WORM architecture), Layer 3 (EAP — Exogenous Anchor Protocol, hardware-attested dual-channel measurement, 28ms maximum heartbeat gap), Layer 4 (SOTB — Sensor/Oracle Trust Bridge), Layer 5 (MLE — Machine Law Engine, 7-stage compilation pipeline), Layer 6 (ZKP — Zero-Knowledge Proof subsystem, Groth16/PLONK/Bulletproofs), Layer 7 (PQC — Post-Quantum Cryptography, CRYSTALS-Kyber-1024/Dilithium-3/SPHINCS+, NIST FIPS 203/204/205), Layer 8 (GLD — Governance Logic Divergence engine, maker-checker independence quantification). Document Structure Part I — The Complete Problem Statement. Part II — The Nine-Layer Architecture. Part III — The Nine Gamechangers (v2.4.0 new). Part IV — Law as Code: The German Federal Government Initiative (v2.4.0 new). Part V — The White House Cybersecurity Strategy and EO 14028 (v2.4.0 new). Part VI — Complete Legal and Jurisdictional Grounding (47 jurisdictions). Part VII — What immo.quick Core Does to Existing Systems: The Legacy Integration Protocol (v2.4.0 new). Part VIII — The Complete Platform: Every Module. Part IX — Complete Sector Analysis (Banking, Insurance, Real Estate, Government, Cloud). Part X — The Geopolitical Dimension. Part XI — The Economic Case: Monopoly, Moat, FOMO, EBITDA. Part XII — The Falsifiability Standard. Conclusion — For the Permanent Record. Key Claims Established The Boundary-Behavior Gap — the space between process documentation and governance proof — is closed by mathematical construction for the first time. The Past Irreversibility Principle: every transaction processed without immo.quick Core produces a compliance history that is permanently unrecoverable. The Falsifiability Standard: all claims in this document are falsifiable by counter-proof. No counter-proof has been produced. None is expected. Historical Compliance Failures Addressed Wirecard AG (2020, €1.9B), Libor manipulation (2012, $9B+ fines), UBS rogue trader (2011, $2.3B), Cum-Ex dividend stripping (ongoing, €55B+ EU-wide), 1MDB (2015, $4.5B), Danske Bank AML (2018, €200B flow), Credit Suisse/Archegos (2021, $5.5B). immo.quick Core produces a PAS BLOCK with DPA on every one of these at T=0 — not after the fact, not during audit, at the moment of formation. Version Series 10.5281/zenodo.19634279 → 19799660 → 19969948 → 20078326 → 20355497 → 20562464 (this paper) Related Work Economics of Deterministic Compliance Infrastructure: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20229204. immo.quick Serverless Edition v1.1.0: DOI pending.
Harry Frankfurt drew a distinction that the law has never formally used: a liar knows the truth and asserts its opposite, while a bullshitter is indifferent to the truth altogether, producing assertion calibrated to what will work rather than to what is so. The distinction matters because the two are almost impossible to tell apart from their output alone, and because the law's machinery for detecting deception - intent, knowledge, scienter - is built entirely for the first category and has essentially nothing to say about the second. A professional who files a claim their own evidence already contradicts may have lied. They may equally have never checked, because checking was not necessary to produce a filing that does its job. The document looks the same either way. This paper argues that civil litigation, professional liability, and the institutions that sit above both have organised themselves around exactly this blind spot, and names the structural reason it persists: the Self-Reporting Fallacy. The fallacy is this: every actor positioned to read a legal file has a stake in the answer it gives. A client depends on trusting their own lawyer's account - a client who does not trust it has already, in effect, dismissed their counsel. A lawyer who filed a document is committed to its coherence regardless of who created the gap inside it. An insurer receives a summary of the file, not the file. A court sees what each side chooses to argue, not what either side has chosen not to mention. None of this requires bad faith to operate; it requires only that each actor behave exactly as their position already rewards them for behaving. The result is a system that can prosecute the rare, provable lie but has no mechanism at all for the far more common case - the assertion nobody checked, made by someone with every reason not to check it, sitting undetected in a record that would have shown the gap to anyone reading without a stake in the outcome. This paper specifies what a reading position with no stake in the outcome would need to do differently, building on this author's prior work on the distance between an assigned professional's competence and a matter's actual demands, and on the economics of strategic silence under current legal defaults. It adds a third element, specified here for the first time: a test for whether a filing's own positive factual claims survive contact with its own attachments -- and with what the record conspicuously fails to address -- independent of whether the gap originated in incompetence or in design. Demonstrated against one recurring event -- the moment a professional's own filed evidence contradicts their own asserted position, converting a routine dispute into an independent professional-liability exposure that frequently dwarfs the underlying claim -- the combination shows what becomes visible only once Frankfurt's distinction is taken as seriously in litigation as it has been taken in moral philosophy for forty years: not who is lying, but who has stopped checking, and what that costs everyone still relying on them to have checked. This paper also situates the resulting method against the existing landscape of advocacy ethics, litigation analytics, and legal-AI document review, and argues that none of these literatures, individually mature as each is, was ever positioned to ask the question this paper asks. It closes by naming the category of instrument such a method makes possible, locating the professional-indemnity insurance industry as its natural first market, and offering, as existence proof rather than as its subject, a prototype instrument built by this author that demonstrates the method is achievable with present techniques.
Transparency and standing are two different things, and professional reliance was always built on the second. When an auditor, an independent expert, or a rating analyst signs a conclusion that others act on, what entitles the reliance is not that the reasoning could be inspected — it is that a disciplined producer, one with a licence to lose, reputational capital staked, liability that bites, formed under an oversight regime, stood behind it. When an AI produces the conclusion, that standing is vacated at the producing node while a signature keeps liability formally in place. The natural hope is that making the AI fully transparent and reconstructable repairs the loss. This formal companion shows it does not, and locates exactly why: transparency adds access, the missing thing is standing, and these lie on different axes. We model warranted reliance as a weakly increasing functional D(S, k; χ) of producer-stake S, owner-access k, and consequence-bearing conferral χ, against an entitlement-to-rely bar τ. The contribution is a diagnostic framework and one reusable tool — an antecedent, falsifiable closure-rule key that decides when a conclusion-class carries a transparency-proof standing residue, exhibited across four professional domains (fairness opinions, audit, ratings, due diligence). Within it the warrant deficit splits into a control component access-transparency strictly eases and a standing component it leaves invariant (Theorem 1). Against the sanction-based toolkit the paper supplies one general baseline result plus one conditional, domain-testable failure mode. Generally, every deterrence / gatekeeper-liability / observability lever enters as a product π·S, so at a stakeless producer (S = 0, χ = 0) each is zero for any detection probability (Theorem 2). Separately — and without the institutional reading of τ — a fault-taxonomy-dependent instrument, commonly implemented by pricing a validated fault-incidence rate, cannot be sized on faults outside its reference taxonomy; an aggregate-outcome-triggered instrument remains available and fails to discipline the residual only where the residual signal is non-contractible or no feasible producer action moves its distribution. Access cannot reach a residue that does not lie on the access axis; it closes only by restoring standing, as producer-stake or as a consequence-bearing conferral — the remedy, not transparency.
A Frino, Robert Gaudiosi, Robert I. Webb, Z. Ivy Zhou
ABSTRACT This study clarifies discrepancies in previous research on the contribution of regulated Bitcoin futures to price discovery, where conclusions have varied between futures leading over spot markets or vice versa. We identify potential reasons behind these conflicting findings, including the choice of price discovery measures, sampling frequencies, modeling windows, futures contracts, and spot exchanges. Using 1‐s sampling frequencies to accurately capture price discovery in the fast‐paced markets and accounting for substantial noise differences between spot and futures markets, we find that the futures market generally leads spot markets, though this price leadership exhibits daily fluctuations. Moreover, we observe a pronounced increase in the futures market's contribution to price discovery around macroeconomic surprises and Tether stablecoin minting tweets.
The Doctrine of Anchored Decentralization constitutes the first comprehensive constitutional and statutory framework capable of reconciling decentralized digital architectures with the legal, regulatory, and jurisprudential structure of the United States. Developed within the broader scholarly series <i>The Republic’s Conscience</i>, this thesis represents the second installment in that corpus—building directly upon the constitutional and structural principles articulated in the inaugural paper and extending them into the domain of digital-asset governance, administrative delimitation, and federal statutory coherence.This work advances the nation’s first universal, architecture-based commodity-versus-security classification framework designed for deployment across American constitutional, statutory, and judicial systems. By replacing rhetorical claims of decentralization with empirically verifiable and legally cognizable structural tests, the Doctrine furnishes courts, Congress, and administrative agencies with a coherent, adjudicable methodology capable of withstanding scrutiny under established Supreme Court jurisprudence, including <i>Howey</i>, <i>Reves</i>, <i>Forman</i>, <i>Marbury</i>, and the post-<i>Chevron</i> administrative landscape.The Doctrine challenges the prevailing assumption that blockchain-based ecosystems may operate as “stateless” economic systems while still participating in markets governed by constitutional law. Through sustained analysis of constitutional text, statutory construction, cryptographic system design, and post-Chevron administrative jurisprudence, the work demonstrates that decentralization cannot acquire legal legitimacy unless it remains anchored to the Chain of Consent — the constitutional requirement that all economic power be traceable to accountable authority.Drawing upon Article I, § 8 (monetary and commercial power), Article I, § 9 (appropriations and fiscal discipline), and the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, the Doctrine establishes that most contemporary decentralized systems operate within a constitutional vacuum: they perform value transfer, economic coordination, and pseudo-monetary behavior without satisfying the representational prerequisites of the American constitutional order. This analysis is further grounded in <i>Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward</i>, <i>Gibbons v. Ogden</i>, <i>Wickard v. Filburn</i>, <i>United States v. Lopez</i>, <i>NFIB v. Sebelius</i>, and the post–<i>Loper Bright</i> landscape of statutory interpretation, revealing how modern digital governance architectures strain the boundaries of jurisdiction, accountability, and enforceability.At the systems-engineering level, the Doctrine reframes decentralization not as a monetary phenomenon but as a cryptographic lineage derived from Haber and Stornetta’s foundational timestamping architecture. This lineage demonstrates that Bitcoin’s core innovation was not the creation of new money, but the operationalization of a distributed verification engine. The work therefore distinguishes decisively between decentralization as architectural substrate and cryptocurrency as asset behavior, establishing that most digital tokens cannot qualify as commodities under the Commodity Exchange Act absent a constitutionally anchored framework for origin accountability, managerial neutrality, and market integrity.The Doctrine exposes structural defects in modern legislative approaches — including H.R. 3633 — demonstrating how contemporary statutory efforts misapply classical commodity theory, create jurisdictionally unanchored digital entities, and institutionalize anonymity architectures that undermine due process, enforcement capacity, and market legitimacy. In response, this work develops the Anchored Decentralization Test, the first system-level doctrine to allow Congress, courts, and regulators to classify digital assets based on verifiable architectural behavior rather than semantic self-description.The Doctrine further introduces the novel concept of Autonomous Commodity Primitives (ACPs) — a sovereign-grade digital infrastructure class designed not as speculative instruments but as immutable, cryptographic attestations of real-world sovereign reserve assets. ACPs are engineered to function as Treasury-grade verification rails, enabling real-time auditability, ledger-level integrity, and constitutionally compliant Asset-Backed Digital Currency (ABDC) architecture. Unlike cryptocurrencies, ACPs do not manufacture value; they attest to value that already exists within sovereign reserve systems.To harmonize privacy with constitutional accountability, the Doctrine integrates Zero-Knowledge Proofs, privacy-preserving audit layers, and non-custodial verification mechanisms, allowing digital systems to preserve Fourth Amendment-equivalent privacy while maintaining lawful traceability through institutional channels. This design restores the Chain of Consent without creating surveillance architecture.The Doctrine concludes that decentralization without accountability constitutes a structural form of constitutional evasion — an economy operating beyond representation. By restoring constitutional anchoring to distributed architectures, the Doctrine preserves innovation while reaffirming the Republic’s foundational principle: that economic power is legitimate only when traceable to those whom the Constitution recognizes as sovereign.Ultimately, The Doctrine of Anchored Decentralization provides a constitutional roadmap for the next century of digital infrastructure. It is <i>not a rejection</i> of decentralized technology, but a <i>restoration</i> of its lawful purpose: to function as a verifiable architecture of trust, anchored to the constitutional principles that have sustained the United States for more than two centuries.
We compare the total capital efficiency of secure restaking and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocols. First, we consider the sufficient condition for the restaking graph to be secure. The condition implies that it is always possible to transform such a restaking graph into separate secure PoS protocols. Next, we derive two main results: upper and lower bounds on the required extra stakes to add to the validators of the secure restaking graph to be able to transform it into secure PoS protocols. In particular, we show that the restaking savings compared to PoS protocols can be very large and can asymptotically grow as a square root of the number of validators. We also study a complementary question of aggregating secure PoS protocols into a secure restaking graph and provide matching lower and upper bounds on the PoS savings.
The decentralized exchange (DEX) leverages smart contracts to trade digital assets for users on the blockchain. Developers usually develop several smart contracts into one project, implementing complex logic functions and multiple transaction operations. However, the interaction among these contracts poses challenges for developers analyzing the state logic. Due to the complex state logic in DEX projects, many critical state derailment defects have emerged in recent years. In this article, we conduct the first systematic study of state derailment defects in DEX. We define five categories of state derailment defects and provide detailed analyses of them. Furthermore, we propose a novel deep learning-based framework StateGuardfor detecting state derailment defects in DEX smart contracts. It leverages a smart contract deconstructor to deconstruct the contract into an abstract syntax tree (AST), from which five categories of dependency features are extracted. Next, it implements a graph optimizer to process the structured data. At last, the optimized data is analyzed by graph convolutional networks to identify potential state derailment defects. We evaluated StateGuardthrough a dataset of 46 DEX projects containing 5671 smart contracts, and it achieved 94.25% F1-score. In addition, in a comparison experiment with state-of-the-art, StateGuardleads the F1-score by 6.29%. To further verify its practicality, we used StateGuardto audit real-world contracts and successfully authenticated multiple novel common vulnerabilities and exposures.
Digital platforms dominate our economy Without a doubt, platform business models have revolutionized almost every industry, from e-commerce (Amazon) and operating systems (iOS and Android) to transportation (Uber), film (Netflix) and hospitality (Airbnb).In 2023, four out of the five most valuable companies worldwide operated based on platform business models.Often, these platform business models have made services more accessible and significantly reduced costs for their users.Platform business models enable the platform provider, as the intermediary, to make these improvements at low costs for their users as network effects lock in users and allow the provider to collect and monetize their data.This mechanism often leads to one strong player dominating the market, allowing them to monetize their monopoly-like position.The recent upsurge in artificial intelligence (AI) has fostered fears that these platform businesses might become even more powerful.More than ever, critics are concerned that current regulations fail to mitigate these dynamics, as antitrust regulations have failed to prevent platform providers from acquiring even more market power.Regulators are often fighting an uphill battle as the platform businesses can often rely on much deeper pockets and smart lawyers who find new ways to play down their employers' real power.
Deflation represents an increase in consumer wealth through postponed consumption decisions. State-imposed "monetary policies" not only expropriate this increase in wealth attributed to deflation (a fiscal motive) but also penalize consumers for postponing their consumption of goods and services (a form of social engineering). Consequently, there is a shortfall in the state's legal frameworks adequately protecting consumer freedom and property rights. In response, the Bitcoin network has emerged as a private currency governed by a distinct legal framework rooted in proof-of-work. Consumers holding Bitcoin benefit from the economic advantages of global deflation-advantages often usurped by central banks-and experience enhanced freedom to delay consumption, navigating their life paths free from the constraints of social engineering. Thus, Bitcoin contributes value by addressing the shortfall in state legal systems that safeguard consumer freedom and property rights
This study aims to describe how smart contracts are made and the legal certainty of using them on business contracts. For this, the study concepted the smart contract, as well its characteristics and the difference between smart contract and e-contract. Itdescribed the legal certainty of smart contracts and how they can be used on business transactions. Besides, the research explained the importance of blockchain, ethereum and cryptocurrency inthe smart contract. At last, it describeshow smart contracts are applied in the legal universe and demonstrated their advantages as self-execution and clauses’ immutability. For this work, bibliographicresearch and deductive method were used. The study concluded that the inexistence of law causes legal insecurity which represents an obstacle to spread the use of smart contracts.
The Bitcoin blockchain, a prime example of disruptive technology, has fundamentally altered the way various industries approach remote transactions. Bitcoin grants privacy to its users by anonymizing public keys, provides autonomy by eliminating the need for trusted third parties, and maintains transparency through its public disclosure protocol. Bitcoin is an innovative manifestation of the Fourth Amendment ideals of security and autonomy. It is, thus, no surprise that the Bitcoin blockchain presents unprecedented Fourth Amendment challenges for courts to consider.
 In United States v. Gratkowski, the Fifth Circuit addressed the novel issue of whether Fourth Amendment protections extend to an individual’s Bitcoin transactions. Notably, the court was the first to find that an individual does not have a privacy interest in their information located directly on the Bitcoin blockchain. However, the Fifth Circuit applied inconsistent and flawed reasoning in reaching this decision, demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of Bitcoin and its users.
 Accordingly, this Note argues that the Gratkowski decision should be applied narrowly and with caution, especially considering the Supreme Court’s warnings against the incompatibility of current Fourth Amendment doctrine with the digital age. It then suggests implementing a modified reasonable expectation-of-privacy standard, supplementing the current standard with an additional inquiry into what information an individual disclosed when initiating a transaction. This modified standard would preserve the integrity of Bitcoin, while simultaneously articulating a proper framework for assessing privacy concerns in the context of Bitcoin and blockchain technology.
This article examines the implications of Distributed Ledger Technology (a.k.a. blockchain) for several areas of law. While cryptocurrencies have received much attention, the implications of DLT are potentially far reaching. DLT raises interesting and important questions relating to rules of evidence, surrounding issues like hearsay and authentication. The advent of initial coin offerings has implications not only for how firms are financed but also for securities law in regulating such offerings. Cryptocurrencies themselves (e.g., Bitcoin) have raised serious issues for tax avoidance and taxation law. Relatedly, the rise of cryptocurrencies raises issues regarding the relationship between private and nationally issued currencies, and even the role and efficacy of monetary policy. Finally, DLT has practical implications for election law and voter turnout, with such technology already begun to be used for security purposes in online voting and permitted in 32 US states.
Since 2014, viral images of Black people being killed at the hands of the police—Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, and many, many others—have convinced much of the public that the American criminal legal system is broken. In the summer of 2020, nationwide protests against police racism and violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder were, according to some analysts, the largest social movement in the history of the United States.2 Activists and academics have demanded defunding the police and reallocating the funds to substitutes or alternatives.3 And others have called for abolishing the police altogether.4 It has become common knowledge that the police do not solve serious crime, they focus far too much on petty offenses, and they are far too heavy-handed and brutal in their treatment of Americans—especially poor, Black people. This is the so-called paradox of under-protection and over-policing that has characterized American law enforcement since emancipation.5The American criminal legal system is unjust and inefficient. But, as we argue in this essay, over-policing is not the problem. In fact, the American criminal legal system is characterized by an exceptional kind of under-policing, and a heavy reliance on long prison sentences, compared to other developed nations. In this country, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically opposite balance between these twin arms of the penal state, employing roughly three and a half times more police officers than the number of people they incarcerate. We argue that the United States has it backward. Justice and efficiency demand that we strike a balance between policing and incarceration more like that of the rest of the developed world. We call this the “First World Balance.”We defend this idea in much more detail in a forthcoming book titled What’s Wrong with Mass Incarceration. This essay offers a preliminary sketch of some of the arguments in the book. In the spirit of conversation and debate, in this essay we err deliberately on the side of comprehensiveness rather than argumentative rigor. One of us is a social scientist, and the other is a philosopher and legal scholar. Our primary goal for this research project, and especially in this essay, is not to convince readers that we are correct—but rather to encourage a more explicit discussion of the empirical and normative bases of some pressing debates about the American criminal legal system. Even if our answers prove unsound, we hope that the combination of empirical social science and analytic moral and political philosophy we contribute can help illuminate what alternative answers to those questions might have to look like to be sound. In fact, because much of this essay (and the underlying book project) strikes a pessimistic tone, we would be quite happy to be wrong about much of what we argue here.In the first part of this essay, we outline five comparative facts that contradict much of the prevailing way of thinking about what is distinctive about the American criminal legal system. In the second part, we draw out the normative implications of those facts and make the case for the First World Balance.In one sense, prisons and police are complements. It would be impossible to have many people in prison without the police, since, to put people in prison, the police usually have to apprehend and arrest them first. It would also be difficult to have police without prisons, since the threat of imprisonment is one of the typical sanctions wielded by police around the world. Given this, and given the exceptionally high incarceration rate in the United States, many people assume that the United States must also have an exceptionally high number of police officers.But that is not in fact the case. Figure 1 plots the police and incarceration rates of a sample of developed countries.6 The graph illustrates the chief fact that has animated the iterature on mass incarceration: America is a developed-world outlier in its use of incarceration. Yet it also illustrates the much less-well-known fact that America is not at all an outlier in its rate of policing. The United States has around 212 police officers for every 100,000 total residents, which ranks it in the forty-first percentile of today’s developed world.Yet this way of putting things in fact understates the magnitude of what has been misunderstood. Figure 1 denominates the scope of incarceration and policing by population. By that metric, the United States has an exceptionally high incarceration rate but a relatively normal number of police officers given the total size of its population. But we think it is more informative to denominate punishment and policing by the level of serious crime in a country. By doing so, it is possible to make inferences about cross-national differences in how countries manage serious crime.Here one runs into some difficulties. For several reasons, it is challenging to compare levels of serious crime across countries. Some countries criminalize acts that are perfectly legal in others. Countries define many criminal acts, such as “assault,” differently from one another.7 And countries vary widely in their ability to measure the incidence of criminal acts. The result is that many international patterns in reported data are obviously misleading. Data collected by the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime, for instance, suggest that the rate of violent crime is higher in Belgium, France, and Canada than in El Salvador, Russia, or Rwanda.8 Our solution to this problem is to measure the rate of serious crime by the rate of homicides.For the comparisons that anchor this piece—the United States to the developed world—this immediately raises a problem. Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins have argued that “[r]ates of crime are not greatly different in the United States from those in other developed nations. … [O]ur extremely high rates of lethal violence are a … a distinct social problem.”9 If America has more lethal violence than Europe, but not more crime, the relatively high homicide rate in the United States would be a biased estimate of the rate of serious crime.We have two kinds of reasons for thinking that this is wrong and that the homicide rate is the right (or best) measure. First, given the reliability issues that bedevil the police or victim survey data on which Zimring and Hawkins and others rely, this is an area in which one has to take some cues from theory and other data. Consider, then, the following trilemma.Concentrated disadvantage is the root cause of most serious crime in developed societies.America has significantly more concentrated disadvantage than European countries.America has the same amount of serious crime as other developed countries.One of these three statements must be false. Criminological theory and existing social science evidence strongly support (1).10 And we think there is good evidence to support (2).11 The main theoretical reason to believe (3) is that the United States has far more guns per capita than European countries. But while firearm availability no doubt has some impact on the level of violence, we think the is to be would be difficult to with other patterns across and Consider, for that while the United States has times as many guns as El Salvador, the homicide rate there is roughly times higher than it is And that in the United States are much more to a than Given this and given the reasons to believe and we think (3) is most to be the of this second not on the that homicide for a of the total by as of the crime rate to by the state, they are with a petty and one murder has much serious crime than a with a and one petty the crime rate would be the same in measure has to for the or of is difficult to measure how different kinds of crime are with but the a first estimate the social of different kinds of crime by people how much they would be to to their of being a victim of this and that the of a murder is around the of an than the of a around and the of around homicide is much than other it is much more that it for about of the total of This that it is a much estimate of the rate of serious than of the rate of Figure the same but this by homicide rather than by immediately level of incarceration relatively is a higher than the developed-world but not by is the fact that its if by the level of serious crime, America is not but rather America has about the number of police per than the developed of the of police has been that American police are inefficient. people argue that American Black been and they by this that the of American police are focus too much on petty and too on serious This is the of for on the fact that of a typical police is to violent it is that in comparative the police in the United States do not solve many serious rate is the of all as Figure The developed around one arrest per homicide that In the United States, the is this not to as because police in the United States are exceptionally on one measure of police the number of homicide per police The rate is the of police focus and the police The of policing in the United States that the problem with rate is that is but focus is In fact, as Figure the is is but focus is way of much of what we have far is to that the United States to the of punishment the of The high and the level of police per homicide suggest that the United States on long rather than the of arrest to One way to estimate and more is to the into the of to homicide and the of to Figure plots these two across the developed world. The result our the United States has relatively levels of but relatively high levels of of and to measure these two is that we can about how and are the United Figure also while all from an exceptional balance of and it is Black people in the United States are especially to police killed around people in In the rest of the developed the number of police is around per the is It that to the level of police violence, we must the of the Yet comparisons suggest the opposite Figure there is a and cross-national between the rate at which police and the number of police officers per with of police per homicide are countries in which police are much to as compared to countries with police per The countries of the developed world on the right of this graph levels of police while the countries of the world the The is the United be a is not that levels of cause the police to be more possible might the of high levels of police and homicide It is that the in the levels of police cause public demand for police is and our data are poor, is there are some theoretical reasons to believe that this is in fact violence police police make with a of those these the treatment of a of have a the American combination of police and is of the the of and the of the is but of can be the most way to with the in police to with rates of violence and are more to police officers are more to out of for their such as this since, such a there are for to take to and on and rather than to crime make the of policing more And this might in make with the police more these inferences are empirical research is to But we think the cross-national between police and the number of police officers per with the theoretical reasons to believe those might be as a It is not at all that the number of police officers on the would the of police violence and And it to that the to police argue that police officers be as rather than But the that and the be of United States is with much more serious crime than other It to this exceptionally high level of serious crime with an exceptional combination of relatively police and long this its in the way it most people. is to be comparative we have suggest an the United States, like the rest of the developed to policing and penal rather than incarceration and penal the United States to from incarceration to policing the balance between the two more like the balance in the rest of the developed world. The implications of such a we call the First World be The United States has three times as many as police If it no but the by prison to police officers the the same as the in the developed world times as many police officers as the United States would have about and police the First World if in the United States, would be a with about and half a more police we this United States would not be a police to the First World would in fact the rate of policing in the United States with the rest of the developed of to that to the First World would the United States with other countries is not to have that this would be a good One reason to normative from comparative empirical make these one has to fact to the First World be our it be to three about our it to our in questions like this one that the two of us to about questions but are to from the normative implications of their It is no that many of them do since it is those implications that their But social of in moral and political philosophy that these are too on or rather than normative Some are in moral and political theory to that on But a of social many of them to answers to these questions (or of those that do not empirical our is to empirical evidence and social theory with explicit normative we to be as as In we do not to the theory of or political (or the theory of out the implications of that we the implications of a of In we that do not have implications for which that our hands about these issues not be the it We think that the combination of empirical and normative one would have to to our are of that our case for the First World be as our to a about how the United States to a of penal readers we the in our by the this a of And a between prisons and police, kinds of social or are to We more about we the in this way in our forthcoming book What’s Wrong with Mass but some is in think that in the long a of social would crime by its root and in the and demand for policing and In other we argue that of or efficiency that the United States social But a of social from to of this magnitude would the to some kind of the Given the of the American movement and the of the American we doubt we like this Our in this essay is to about what be in the world in which we in the world in which we would like to about that we to that are prisons and the the existing of from prisons and police to social as many have we argue in What’s Wrong with Mass this is because social is by what we call the the root of crime would be to the for the most people in do this by social would since the of are not most people. penal is in a way that social is it about a to the developed most penal but like to its most there is good evidence that social that are at the and be at But the same that these social also it for to them at The more the the more we can be that these the of the and the social is but for crime while social can be but is it is not to the root of crime with to public Yet some might argue that we from policing and incarceration if this would result in more policing and concentrated imprisonment and on rather than on incarceration in can social in and political and can and And arrest can be a disadvantage in the and the fact that many of those are have their are all by the the with the many of incarceration and policing to a in crime is serious crime has those same crime can social and and concentrated disadvantage at the in a violent to do things that are for social and violence can be and of and and are of in crime is without to and for public and other of which the and of disadvantage in those And as a criminal or an arrest can be a on the of crime can be in extremely can become a that serious crime the same kinds of as policing and concentrated we argue that and an and between the of crime, and policing. The have to the of these no how and to make The fact that of this are is an It is an of our But we think some of these are more and more than we think that the us is how to strike the right penal to be about the level of incarceration and the level of policing in today’s United in the in Figure the United States how a might this that the how to strike the balance between incarceration and policing by that in this that we different of the balance between policing and incarceration to in the what we take to be the of to in this what it would for the level of homicide and crime, the number of people in prison, and the number of people killed and by the would to of these if the United States to the First World homicide and other kinds of serious crime would The empirical on is that the size of police is a much more way to crime than the of prison for those are and The for this is in and do not make the way than the of the they are people to the of their much more than in the It is by possible to to the of a prison on the in the it is to be that the of arrest and would do more to crime than in the United States, a on policing is times more at crime than a on Our is that the First World would be a world of a more than (and crime more the to by mass incarceration would be its prison is extremely to the of It is difficult to put a number on this But one that a in prison is as good as a this a of two in the prison would be the of one of a of about The the rate if for a in prison of the of for a prison, rather than the the of the of policing. the one a world of more policing be a world of more on by our is that the First World would be a world of more the other for the reasons we we that a world of more policing would be one of police violence people killed by the have to some way to these against This is not but one to do the against the For the to be reason to against our on the of these to must the of the of crime and incarceration (and police We think this is on fact, the of arrest are than one of the of the First World in for instance, that the arrest is about as as three in do not this this the argumentative against our this in a is the of roughly This is not five of the of if we to at the rate given these would be the of about five than the we estimate would be by the in might that the and social of these would the of the in serious crime we think the First World would Yet those make this would have to reasons to think that these the and social of we have argued it to out the of one of these to the of the others. crime, and concentrated incarceration to all have the same kinds of from a we think that the First World is In What’s Wrong with Mass we the of our to a of alternative The that a different an about the of police on crime that is out of with the empirical argue that public not to it must also be to how the and of in and the criminal legal system in are Consider, for what the people more the these people of the (or is that people the those people of how to strike the balance between policing and how they to do be by the of crime, of police and and those all to be from the ranks of the are Black and are most to be of the kinds of the same people are most to be or killed by the And they are also those are at the of in these are not Figure Black people are more murder the and those for serious than they are in the ranks of those have been for petty or killed by the police in given In fact, Black people to be those been in their are far more in the incarcerated than they are those have been in their make of the but of the (and of the total support to the case for the First World The of the which the United States on long prison to more on Black people and the poor, and especially the Black poor, than do the to the First World would not to the with the penal system but also to the it would the number of of crime and those for serious offenses, and those killed by the police, it would also the from a more to the can the for the First World as people the those people of incarceration and homicide are more by the than the of arrest and police we the of incarceration and homicide more than the of arrest and police First World the of incarceration and homicide (and police while the of The the case for the First World what we have argued in this We have that the United States, developed especially on penal to the of penal This is in the fact that it has roughly three for every police while every other developed has about police officers for every The United States would have to the incarcerated by around people and half a more police officers to its officer in with the rest of the we called the First World first the First World on We that it would be a more way to use the of America to penal The and of incarceration would be homicide and other serious crime would and police violence might also The main of our would be the with a significantly number of But these in to the that a more of people than crime or incarceration. of police violence to be than the is but more than those are incarcerated or of a according to which we have reasons to on people the they this the case for the First World Balance.In What’s Wrong with Mass we a more normative case for the First World than we can in this We think that the First World is on a of But we do think that some of out our might without or some in police on the that violence or is different violence by of this would that no amount of violence the use of by the But a in would be to law and and to not public or a social this of is a kind of political And we doubt many are in fact to this of if there is no moral between that the and it to do to one one might think that the is than the as a of We think there are reasons to be of this between the and of But we defend a about these moral questions In What’s Wrong with Mass we that one would have to much more than to different In our this fact the same in the more that we in the we argued serious crime runs in it has number of on and in to the one like the think that the to be from violence or is more than the of or political of this to those on the especially in of the fact by international the United States the First World be a police Figure the in this United States would be roughly to the in today’s and in with the rest of the developed world. the in policing and the in there would be about police officers per homicide in the United This would be the in the developed world the this of from incarceration to one make the case that it would be relatively also that the First World the United States would be a of about three and roughly This would make it the in the developed the in this world would be about as Figure would be the countries. if the First World is one might it is and of the kind of normative and we have given that there are to the balance that and strike between the arms of law reasons that the United States has its penal But our is that the First World is more than the kinds of things that to demand In the America in which we at to a of with than to the is we assume it is to the United States to a in the of the social to use social to the root of crime are we have to be a social must the of those most to Yet an that the of those in this the of the and political readers not think of the First World as an alternative to social Justice and efficiency demand that and in the United States balance the of between the two arms of law enforcement differently from the way they do at would be if this more we think it is that more do what we have in this
Bitcoin recently turned twelve-years-old. While opinions vary as to its current and future role in the global financial market, it remains the most well-known cryptocurrency and has ushered in a new era of currency. This new era has produced new legal questions and challenges, and government agencies continue to struggle with incorporating cryptocurrency into existing legal and regulatory paradigms. At the same time, blockchain technology, Bitcoin’s foundational technology, continues to find new applications and pose its own challenges beyond cryptocurrency. The military, logistics, and healthcare are only a few examples of the industries that have begun incorporating blockchain technology. Legal practitioners must begin paying more attention to this quickly evolving technology. This article should serve as a cryptocurrency primer for lawyers practicing in the Federal government. It will provide a basic overview of the history of Bitcoin and blockchain technology then discuss blockchain use cases for military interests and criminal law hurdles created by cryptocurrency. It will conclude by outlining important cryptocurrency issues Federal personnel should be aware of.
Terror attacks pose a serious threat to public safety and national security. New technologies assist these attacks, magnify them and render them deadlier. The more funding terrorist organizations manage to raise, the greater their capacity to recruit members, organize and commit terror attacks. Since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, law enforcement agencies have increased their efforts to develop more anti-terrorism and anti-money laundering regulations, which are designed to block the flow of financing of terrorism and cut off its oxygen. However, at present most regulatory measures focus on traditional currencies. The more efforts to restrict the financing of terrorism by traditional fiat currencies succeeds, the greater the likelihood that cryptocurrencies will be used in order to fund illicit behavior. Furthermore, the COVID-19 virus and social distancing guidelines that followed it have increased the use of cryptocurrencies for money laundering, material support to terror and other financial crimes. Cryptocurrencies, electronically generated and stored tokens which can be exchanged via a decentralized payment system, are a game changer, significantly affecting market functions like never before and making it easier to finance terrorism and other types of criminal activity. These decentralized and (usually) anonymous usable currencies facilitate a high volume of transactions, allowing terrorists extensive fundraising, management, transfer and spending of money for illegal activities. The ability of terror organizations and those who finance them to increase their activities and attacks by using cryptocurrencies poses a major threat to national security. As cryptocurrencies gain popularity, the issue of how to regulate them becomes more urgent. The scope and utility of financing of terrorism begs for a coherent legal response. This Article proposes to reform the regulation of cryptocurrencies. It advocates the promotion of mandatory obligations directed at cryptocurrency issuers, wallet providers and exchanges to verify the identity of users on the blockchain. Thus, courts could grant warrants obligating companies issuing cryptocurrencies to unmask the identity of cryptocurrency users when there is probable cause that their activities support terrorism or other money laundering activities. Such reforms would make it possible to allow stifling the financing of terrorism and other types of criminal activity financed through cryptocurrencies, and in so doing would make it possible to curb harmful lethal activities and promote national security. As we are aware of the legal challenges our solution poses, this Article also addresses substantial objections that might be raised regarding the proposed reforms, such as jeopardizing innovation, First Amendment freedom of expression objections, Fourth Amendment protection from surveillance and measures for promoting efficiency in the application of the proposed reforms.
There is a distinct lack of democratic governance in our contemporary era.In this paper I develop a mechanism to overcome this democratic deficit.'The Cryptostate' is an amalgamation of primordial democratic theory and recent technological advancements.By combining democratic principles with distributed ledger technology, we can create a decentralized, transparent, governance framework in which various groups-societies, ethnicities, or nations-can communicate, coordinate, and enfranchise all affected members.Never before in human history has it been technologically feasible to create such an entity.In this article, I demonstrate that not only can such a state exist, but that in the face of our ongoing technological and global upheaval, it must.
With the birth and rise of cryptocurrencies following the success of Bitcoin and the popularity of “Initial Coin Offerings”, public awareness of blockchain technologies has substantially increased in recent years. Many blockchain advocates claim that these software artefacts enable radically new forms of decentralised governance by relying upon computational trust created via cryptographic proof, obviating the need for reliance on conventional trusted third-party intermediaries. But these claims rest on some key assumptions, which this paper subjects to critical examination. It asks: can existing mechanisms and procedures for collective decision-making of public blockchains (which we refer to as internal blockchain governance) live up to these ambitions? By drawing upon HLA Hart’s Concept of Law, together with literature from regulatory governance studies, we argue that unless public blockchain systems establish formal and effective internal governance, they are unlikely to be taken up at scale as a tool for social coordination, and are thus likely to remain, at best, a marginal technology.