It has come to my attention that my article "Implications of the Blockchain Technology for the UNCITRAL Works" had been published from the United Nations in November last year. The 50th anniversary Congress was a big occasion for UNCITRAL and it was my great honour to be part of it. Here is my article excerpted from the...

I will be presenting my thoughts on the subject above in the upcoming Congress of the UNCITRAL for the celebration of its 50th anniversary (4-6 July 2017).My paper currently on the Congress website is a version which I sent to the UNCITRAL Secretariat some months ago and which no longer represents my latest thinking...

The bitcoin addresses are randomly generated long alphanumeric strings and prone to be mistyped. If bitcoin is transferred to a wrong address by mistake, what law is applicable to a restitutionary claim by the transferor against the transferee?This post will consider this question under the Rome II Regulation (Regulation...

As I mentioned in my earlier post, the Tokyo District Court in its judgment on 5 August 2015 denied the ownership (more precisely, "shoyûken" in Japanese) of bitcoins. In that post, I have also noted that translating "shoyûken" into the English word "ownership" may be misleading. In this post, I will look at the choice-of-law...

In my earlier post, I have noted the difficulty of localising cryptocurrency for the purpose of choice of law for proprietary issues.The difficulty of localisation in choice of law is not unique to blockchain. The high seas and outer space, too, present the same difficulty since no nation exercise sovereignty over such...

In my earlier post, I have noted why legal ownership of cryptocurrency matters. The use of cryptocurrency as a collateral is also imaginable. The prerequisites for acquiring such proprietary rights and their effect are to be determined by legal rules. In the absence of internationally uniform rules, an applicable...