Topic: blockchain for contracts, corporate charter, stateless incorporation (Read 1126 times)

roman snitko gave an interesting talk at the san jose conference in may 2013 that was along these lines.

i think encoding corporate documents and agreements into a blockchain-like structure is a very interesting idea. however, it would have to necessarily be tied to a particular country/state since the legal concept of a corporate entity varies jurisdiction to jurisdiction. a big part of why people form corporate entities is that they afford legal protections against lawsuits, etc. to make this a 'stateless' concept would necessarily invalidate all such protections, meaning individuals could be exposed to direct legal risk.

I recently heard a presentation by Roger Ver suggesting the blockchain can be used for something like this - but it was just a brief mention with no details. I have since been digging trying to find more information on this - especially the concept of "incorporating" - or a new spin on creating proof of a businesses entity - using the blockchain. I have found little - this thread was one of the only things that popped up.

Is there really no one working on something along these lines?

Will keep digging meanwhile...

I'm still mulling it over, officers and directors can simply be addresses, where the bearer of the private key is the officer, but listing these things would be entirely optional

The key perk to enforcement is that everything (asset ownership) could be proven in the blockchain, where liquid assets which were bought have a record of being bought, and  illiquid assets which may have been acquired without payment of bitcoin would still be subject to the contract forming the incorporation and the divided liability of shareholders subject to the contract

practically any court could enforce it because once you set aside the industrial era contract formalities, most courts simply need proof to take a stance on a dispute, and the blockchain provides that

Interesting idea...

Hopefully someone here can shed some light on this as I would be interested in forming a 'BTC LTD' via this method to test it's viability.

Cheers...

I am interested in researching the idea stateless incorporation using a blockchain.

The idea being that incorporating within a jurisdiction/municipality is a leftover relic from the industrial era. In the United States there is no way to incorporate at the federal, except by an act of congress on a case by case basis, this is not available to citizens. So a citizen is left to choose a state to incorporate in, as if each state were their own country.

Since shareholders can be determined by an address in a blockchain, why not the official formation of a corporate structure, or any limited liability entity? How would this be done? The utility would be for having a separate entity from an individual, in a future where financial liability can be levied upon an entrepreneur. The address or transaction inputs forming the corporation would act to limit liability according to its charter.

So, my understanding is that this only involves the contract feature set of the blockchain, which I do not fully understand even with this article in the bitcoin wiki https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts

Instead, I guess this could be just a corporate charter developed as messages in one address, signed with transactions or PGP keys in the message? I haven't quite ironed this out, and for stakeholders I'm not clear how they could get to be part of this charter from inception. Having held shares of bitcoin companies, I understand that the necessity of detailing who the stakeholders are at inception is largely a moot point, because value from dividends can just be send out to eligible addresses.

Anyway, I hope someone can help me iron this idea out. For raising capital in a cryptocurrency and doing business in cryptocurrencies or simply holding titles, and collecting value from those titles, this structure can be ideal and cheaper than incorporation in any jurisdiction on the planet.