One of the central reasons for Bitcoin’s success is that lawyers never touched the Bitcoin white paper.
Watching now how legal professionals are trying to identify themselves as “crypto lawyers” and to offer legal support to blockchain startups, I came up with a thought: How would these same “services” have changed the original Bitcoin white paper?
There are many legends and rumors surrounding Bitcoin’s pseudonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto. It is a mystery whether they were Japanese or American, whether they acted alone or through a group of people, and many more questions.
One hypothesis is that Satoshi, whoever they were, is now dead. And, as a lawyer myself, I think that would be best for them now. Otherwise, they would have been sentenced to serve jail time or been bankrupted through legal fees a long time ago.
What would have happened if Satoshi had originally hired lawyers to develop the Bitcoin white paper? At the very least, they would have died before those lawyers finished their work. A “good” lawyer would never allow Bitcoin to happen.
To begin with, there isn't a trademark registered for the word “Bitcoin.” Just based on the number of times (through texts, logos, games, etc.) that businesses and people use that word, the world owes Satoshi a decent amount of money. Lawyers would never miss a document that wasn't laden with trademarks to the max. Instead of a transaction fee, we would have had to pay a royalty every time we pronounced the word "Bitcoin." A good lawyer would have driven the white paper through the intellectual property hopper.
In fact, intellectual property would be the first bullet that would completely kill the idea of bitcoin. A lawyer's first reflex when looking at such technology is to register everything. Copyright the
