Of Bitcoins, Independently Wealthy Software, and the Zero-member Llc

An innovative software technology known as Bitcoin has been in the news recently, though mostly for the wrong reasons. The financial press, as it typically does, aims to fuel speculative predictions on future market prices, and Bitcoin has captured the press’s attention largely because of an extremely rapid growth in the price of the scarce units of account that the Bitcoin technology creates. Worth essentially nothing four years ago, bitcoins recently have helped individuals make and lose fortunes. This Essay is not concerned with the price of a bitcoin; indeed, though I have followed the technical details of the software from its early days, I have no useful personal price speculation to offer, and I doubt anyone else does either. In fact, it’s surprising how readily experts continue to try to predict the financial future. Instead, this Essay introduces to the legal community a fascinating, decreasingly farfetched technological possibility that the Bitcoin software promotes, and it offers suggestions for how the law might interact with that possibility. In short, Bitcoin allows autonomously operating software—such as a computer virus or the software that manages a network of vending machines—to exercise control over significant wealth, not as an intermediary for individuals or companies but rather, in a functionally meaningful sense, in its own right.