Aaron Daniel wadaniel

The Open Source Justice Foundation is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt public charity dedicated to spreading access to justice globally through open-source protocols and technology. Learn more about OSJF's work at opensourcejustice.org. Most people in the world are denied access to justice. An estimated four billion people live outside the protection of the law. Fifty-four percent of the world's population lives under some form of authoritarian rule.

I’m an attorney. As soon as I found Bitcoin I began thinking about how it would change the justice system, the rule of law, and the ways in which society resolves disputes.

This is an opinion editorial by Aaron Daniel, an appellate attorney and author of “The Bitcoin Brief," and William D. Mueller, an appellate attorney with a nationwide practice. Following a multi-week trial in Manhattan’s United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Ross Ulbricht, the creator and operator of the Silk Road — one of the first marketplaces to exclusively utilize bitcoin — was sentenced to die in prison.