I’ve been remiss in updating the blog for the last week or so – my bad. It’s not without good reason:
- first there was preparation for and attendance at the EU digital currency associations’ co[i]nfab and Bitcoin 2014 in Amsterdam – which was awesome. Easily the most fun I’ve ever had in a professional setting. I’ve never met a more welcoming, more interesting, or more committed group of individuals in my entire life.
- I was up for a Blockchain Award for Bitcoin legal expert of the year. Didn’t win. Fair deuce, considering I’m a relatively new arrival and (with apologies to regulatory lawyers everywhere) less interested in plain-Jane compliance and personal tax issues upon which the industry is currently focused than in structuring deals with DACs and smart contract protocols (and Dogecoin). Furthermore, the Bitcoin Foundation’s regulatory work, led by Marco Santori and Patrick Murck, has been truly outstanding and was wholly deserving. Next year, though…
- Also, I gave my first full-length interview, this time to Epicenter Bitcoin. Will link to it here when it goes up;
- in the wake of the conference there’s been a bunch of encouraging follow-up;
- then back to the office and straight into a mountain of securitisation work;
- then City AM cited the New Statesman piece I wrote a year ago as the definitive reasoned statement of opposition to the Legal Aid practitioners’ lobby in the wake of the Court of Appeal’s decision in R v Crawley and ors. (#freemarketsFTW); and
- to top it all off, the Wall Street Journal directly quoted the paper Sam Bowman and I wrote for the Adam Smith Institute last April (published in September to coincide with conference season), in the context of saying we were absolutely, 100% right in asserting that the Help to Buy programme was, is, and will continue to be irredeemably insane.
…despite the fact that the Prime Minister has gone on record as recently as January saying that Help to Buy isn’t causing a housing bubble.
Adam Smith Institute 2-0 The Government.
And it’s only Wednesday.
Now, if only I could kick this writer’s block before the weekend…
