Ethereum Monthly Meetup: Swarm & Law Panel

Our next event will be Thursday, June 9th 2016 and will take place at the same, amazing venue, HMG Consulting, part of the Havas Media Group. The address is 60 St Martin's Lane, WC2N 4JS, London.

We’d like to thank the London Ethereum Meetup main event sponsor http://b9lab.com/ . B9lab is the independent provider of quality education, advice and research about blockchain technology and decentralised applications. Their clients are leading global institutions as well as talented independent developers around the world.

Thanks to our second sponsor, BTL (http://btl.co/), we’re also going to professionally record the event. BTL builds enterprise level solutions that enable businesses to increase efficiency and open new opportunities by harnessing the power of the blockchain in everyday transactions.

We’ll have one presentation and one panel with 15 minute breaks in between. There will also be up to 5 short (2-3 minutes) presentations at the end. If you have an amazing idea you have been working on or if you would like to tell everyone about how you are using Ethereum in your company, this is your chance! Email Vlad ([masked]) and he will add you to the schedule.

Viktor Trón & Nick Johnson , Ethereum DΞV - Swarm

Viktor Trón is a core developer of the go client working for the Ethereum Foundation, mainly on Swarm. He strongly believes in decentralisation supported by crypto 2.0 vision is a conduit for peaceful social change and brings new momentum towards a free voluntary society. A long-time contributor to the open source community he advocates free software, open source, open data and open collaboration models.He is against against copyright and patent laws. Viktor worked on Machine learning, AI, speech, language technology and big data.

Swarm is a serverless hosting and delivery solution that acts a native base layer service of the ethereum web 3 stack. It allows participants of the ethereum ecosystem to efficiently pool their storage and bandwidth resources in order to provide a robust distributed storage platform and content distribution service. Users can host dapps, store media, databases, blockchain and state, public archives or private backups. Due to Swarm being a decentralised peer-to-peer network, it is DDOS-resistant, zero-downtime, fault-tolerant and censorship-resistant as well as self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system.

Swarm is designed to deeply integrate with Ethereum and gives a unique setting to support the web3 vision of the internet where browsing no longer just clicking through links and rendering content but where contractual interactions are the norm.
In this talk, we demonstrate all the features of the web3 experience emerging from this synergy such as name services, versioning and update, contract verification, IP attribution and licensing, insuring availability and autoscaling for popularity.

Law & Ethereum Panel discussion, Stuart Mast, Stephen Palley, Lorna Brazell, Raoul Lumb & Sean Murphy

The Panel will be split into two sections. The first section Law and the DAO will be covering questions like:

• What is the DAO and what is the community of token holders?

• Who is legally responsible for and liable for acts or omissions of the DAO?

• Can the DAO or the token holders sue or be sued?

• Is the DAO creating (or can it create) a new legal paradigm, or will existing legal frameworks (legal corporate structure, etc) simply be applied onto/around the core automated processes of DAOs.

The second section Law and Blockchain will be addressing:

• Can smart contracts function as legal contracts and vis-a-versa.

• What will the practice of law look like in the era of smart contracts and blockchain? What will change? Will all lawyers be coders? Will human judgment still be required? Will courts and judges be replaced?

• How will DAOs, blockchains and smart contracts change the law itself (property law, IP law, tax law, criminal law)?

• Part of the vision of blockchain is freedom and empowerment, but with public blockchains, what happens to the right of privacy and the right to be forgotten?

The panel will be chaired by Stuart Mast - with over 15 years of experience practicing law at some of the biggest international law firms. He has been involved with startups as a founder, partner, investor and evangelist. As a lawyer, Stuart is particularly excited about the role law can play in helping to advance the developments in the blockchain ecosystem, as well as the remarkable opportunity we now have to think about how law, and the ways we regulate ourselves and resolve disputes, can be reinvented.

Stuart will be joined by:

• Stephen D. Palley is of counsel in the Washington D.C. office of Anderson Kill. He focuses his practice on litigation, trial practice and insurance coverage. He has recently published articles on determining jurisdiction when a DAO is sued, and on how to sue a DAO.

• Lorna Brazell is a partner at Osbourne Clarke. Her work includes litigation in the English courts, oppositions and appeals at the European Patent Office and the management of parallel actions across Europe and beyond, as well as IP diligence reviews, opinions, international portfolio management and patent licensing. She is a contributing author to Hoegner's 2015 book on the Law of Bitcoin.

• Raoul Lumb is an attorney in Hill Hofstetter’s Technology Team. He assists clients with a wide range of commercial contract issues, as well as advising on intellectual property and regulatory matters. He acts for clients drawn from all across the Technology sector, including software developers, online entrepreneurs and hardware manufacturers.

• Sean Murphy is a corporate partner in Norton Rose Fulbright's London office. He advises a broad range of clients on FinTech-related matters, including financial institutions, regulators, investors, start-ups and mature technology companies. Sean is the global co-chair of Norton Rose Fulbright's technology international business group and leads the global distributed ledger and blockchain practice group.

We're keeping with the tradition of no sales pitch, content-heavy, information rich presentations. Ideally we would like to keep this meetup focused on development and use cases. If you are passionate about the price movement, feel free to discuss it with the cryptocompare community here: https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/eth/forum/BTC

We're always looking for more speakers and sponsors.

We also have three speaker slots available per meetup (going fast - next available ones are in August!) so if you have topics that are fun and exciting, projects to demo, now is your chance!

Sponsors makes this event possible. Please make yourself known if you'd like to help via email to [masked].

We are also running a couple of Slack channels with newbie help on the DAO slack - anyone can get an invite at https://thedao.slack.com

Finally, we'd like to invite anyone willing to help to join us in coordinating the next one. PM us (vlad.cealicu, stephan.tual, singuratecu) for an invite to our Skype organizer channel.