David Sofge is an attorney in Holland & Knight's
Fort Lauderdale office.
In the wild and lawless lands of the blockchain, settlers are
coming. A sign is the R3 Consortium's recent announcement that
it raised more than $100 million in funding from a group of banks
and technology companies, sending a powerful signal of support for
its effort to fence off and cultivate sections of the new
environment created by blockchain technology.1
Early pioneers beginning with "Satoshi Nakamoto"2 in
2008 were drawn by a vision – the prospect of a distributed
ledger software running simultaneously on thousands of computers
around the world, with information formed into mathematical
"blocks" that, when linked into a chain, would be
computationally unbreakable and therefore free from tampering or
fraud. This "blockchain" would be transparent to all
nodes on the network, verifiable immediately at all times and
incorruptible. Payments could be immediate and essentially
cost-free (no
