Happy Tuesday, blockchain engineers (and counsel)!

In today’s update we notice the Solidity open source dev community is busy, I invite you to join me at the first LA Smart Contract Meetup, and Jimmy Wales says blockchain can’t be banned. But he’s wrong.

Some Solidity updates for your Tuesday

There’s an updated or refreshed guide on Truffle migrations on Sitepoint, which is kind of helpful. Speaking candidly, my truffle migrate command has been failing me of late. Maybe this guide, which I think I’ve worked with before, will help me out. And you too.

The Solidity developers are hard at work - 25 commits today alone.

There’s some extended discussion about how to target EVM versions in syntax tests, which I wonder is becoming more important with the new changes being planned (e.g., Casper). Of note, one of the commenters reminds that you can target a version with soltest --evm-version.

Also, a plug for my upcoming the first LA Smart Contract Meetup conference call. Free for anyone to join. If you want the bridge number but don’t want to register for Meetup drop me a note (email coming up below).

Hey let me know if you’re out there and struggling with Truffle migrate too or looking forward to 0.5.0 (or not) or wanna listen in on my lunch update call: michael@michaelricelaw.com.

Surfing the web (web1, not web2, and certainly not web3)

Apla issued a press release on something kind of baffling to me. They’re promoting something they call “smart laws,” which seem to be different from smart contracts in that they’re mutable in some way – able to respond to technical or even policy flaws in the original deployments. Kind of interesting but seems to open a can of worms to me. If you know more about what they’re doing or planning, please let me know.

An article on CCN cites a study by a YouTube guy (see how I’m qualifying its veracity there) saying that “the Ethereum community already has more than 250,000 developers and 94 out of the top 100 blockchain projects have launched on top of the Ethereum network.” Whatever the true numbers are, I thought that was an interesting statistic to share with your friends.

In the Ripple litigation, Mary Jo White, the former (tough!) SEC commissioner, was officially admitted pro hac and the plaintiff agreed to give Ripple until June 22 to file an answer; however, they’ll probably extend that further. The plaintiff is planning to file a motion to send back to state court, as I expected.

Malta’s making a name for itself in the ICO space and this Mondaq article has a decent, if brief, analysis of some of the pending legislation over there across the pond.

Jimmy Wales said recently, “you can’t ban blockchain because it’s math” (I’m paraphrasing). That’s absurd. Of course a government can. Don’t take word for it, read Prof. Wright’s Blockchain and the Law.

While governments should regulate is a whole ‘nother question and the article a short read with some interesting points from Wales.

That’s all I’ve got for you today. See you tomorrow.