Publication | November 2015
Norton Rose Fulbright’s global blockchain and cryptocurrency team has produced a global legal and regulatory guide to cryptocurrencies.
The guide is issued in a series of chapters, published monthly.
To date, most litigation involving cryptocurrency has related to breach of contract and fraud (the Butterfly Labs case) or insolvency (Mt Gox). However, as cryptocurrencies become more widely used it is reasonable to expect that the litigation risk surrounding them will also increase.
A common narrative in the cryptocurrency space is that the public ledger and cryptocurrency units are somehow beyond the reach of the state and the courts. This is partly because, from a practical point of view, decentralised peer-to-peer networks are governed and operated on the principle of distributed consensus and are designed to frustrate the possibility of third-party interference – including that of the courts. This narrative is misleading. In many cases, courts will be able to exert control over individuals in their jurisdiction to compel the disclosure of private keys and thereby access cryptocurrency. That process is a common thread which we will explore in this chapter.
In this chapter we will consider:
If you would like to discuss any aspect of this topic further, please get in touch.
The global reaction to the initial outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan City, China in December 2019 has already had devastating effects in Queensland, particularly on the tourism industry, with the Queensland Premier recently estimating that the Cairns region alone has lost $200 million in forward bookings, and Gold Coast operators were expecting to lose $400 million.
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