The blockchain idea favored by Mercedes-Benz executives actually solves a legal pain point

At the "Mercedes-Benz (China) Technology Marathon" held on September 3-4, 2016, our team "Team B Point" won the second place. Our project is called " BenzSharing ", which provides a platform that allows multiple people to own a Mercedes-Benz car and share the use of the Mercedes-Benz car according to their needs. This is a sharing economy idea that claims to "let everyone become a Mercedes-Benz owner", which can bring new markets and new users to Mercedes-Benz. Creativity brings joy, but also worries. The biggest worry comes from whether the scenario of the project is feasible. The first thing to bear the brunt is whether the project is legal or whether it can be connected with existing laws. As the captain of the team and a member with a legal background, it is necessary for me to continue to think about and sort out related issues after the game and to demonstrate them from a theoretical perspective.

In the BenzSharing project, the ownership share of a vehicle can be arbitrarily divided into several shares, each of which is held by a different owner (this project only refers to "shared ownership" and does not involve other forms of shared ownership); and the use of a vehicle by a certain owner is considered to be leasing a portion of the shares to other owners. No rent is required for the leased shares (cash, bank card or Alipay), only the owners' vehicle ownership share ratio needs to be changed. Here, the ownership of the vehicle requires refined and dynamic management, so we use blockchain technology to store the ownership share status in real time, and deploy smart contracts to plan the owner's vehicle use rights and the profit and loss settlement of vehicle use behavior.

The first question that this idea brings is: the law stipulates that there can only be one registered owner of a motor vehicle, but there are multiple owners of the same car in BenzSharing. Isn't there a conflict? There is no conflict. In this regard, I would like to explain it from two aspects: First, it is not uncommon for multiple people to share a motor vehicle in daily life, such as husband and wife, business partners, relatives and friends. Vehicle registration does not conflict with actual co-ownership. When a dispute occurs, the co-ownership agreement is the basis for the subdivision of rights and responsibilities under registration, and it is also legally effective and protected by law. Second, motor vehicle registration is only a specific provision in the law, and the macro-legal principles are of course positive and protective of shared property rights. The main reason why the law does not allow more than one registered owner of a motor vehicle is that if the default state of motor vehicle owners is multiple people, it will increase the complexity of the management model, thereby increasing the difficulty of legislation. The current law is mainly expressed in words and language, which is very laborious to adjust precise and dynamic things. Writing lengthy specific operational clauses to repeatedly express the same set of legal concepts is one method. When the complexity of the problem increases dramatically, it is often necessary to simplify the problem through some abstract models in order to express it well and be understood by others. This method seems to be more sophisticated, but it sacrifices accuracy and often leads to a disconnect between legal provisions and the actual situation. The registered owner of a motor vehicle can only be one person. In summary, the fact that a motor vehicle can only be registered as one person does not mean that the law does not protect shared property rights. It is just because of the characteristics of the law itself and in consideration of saving management costs, it does not accept the registration of multiple owners of motor vehicles for the time being.

Rather than saying it is a feature of the law, it is better to say it is the limitation of using words to legislate. This statement seems quite different. Can legislation be made with anything else besides words? The answer is yes. Let's imagine a scenario where the legal text stipulates that vehicles must drive on the right, but in fact, some vehicles dare to drive on the opposite lane; imagine another scenario, if a long guardrail is erected in the middle of the road, this guardrail makes it impossible for vehicles to cross, and they can only go their own way. So, I would like to ask, does the comparison of these two scenarios mean that in addition to using words, "guardrails" can also be used to legislate, and the latter seems to be more effective in execution. We might as well summarize the use of "guardrails" for legislation as the act of using industrial design for legislation. In addition, legislation can also be made through information technology (for example, you cannot withdraw money from the bank without the correct password), including the refined and dynamic management of vehicle property rights achieved by the BenzSharing project using blockchain, which is actually "legislation" using the blockchain value network protocol.

However, the "legislation" outside of these legal texts is not arbitrary: the guardrail in the middle of the road still needs to have the provisions of driving on the right in the legal text; the legitimacy of your use of passwords to withdraw money from the bank still comes from the text of the law and contract terms; as for the behavior of multiple people owning a car and sharing the use of the car in the BenzSharing project, it is actually just a means of extending the legal provisions for protecting shared property rights, but the influence of the law has been expanded through new technologies and can be concretized in applicable scenarios. Therefore, when we talk about "Code is Law", we actually have to add an attributive. Only when the code complies with the law, the code is law: Code as Law, so Code is Law . Just as the law needs to rely on the supplement of text (judicial interpretation, supplementary clauses), the supplement of industrial design (guardrails), and the supplement of information technology (passwords), in the BenzSharing scenario, the supplement of value transmission technology such as blockchain is needed, but the supplement is only a means and branches, and the basic value criteria can only come from the main vein, that is, national laws.

Thus, a new question arises: our ideas are complete, but the national law has not yet explicitly recognized blockchain technology. When a dispute occurs, can the data on the chain be accepted as evidence by the court? Our answer is that this is not a real question. The reason why BenzSharing's core business is designed on the blockchain is not to keep up with the trend, but because the blockchain has the characteristics of natural notarization. Data can certainly be stored on a centralized server according to traditional methods, but this will increase the cost of the authoritative self-certification of the operating company. When a dispute occurs, blockchain data is easier to obtain and preserve than general electronic evidence. Therefore, when a judge faces evidence from the blockchain, if he does not understand it, he can ask professional technicians to identify it like he does when facing general electronic evidence, instead of rejecting it because he does not understand it. For data that is naturally notarized, I believe that professional technicians will not make mistakes. In this way, we see that the fear that judges do not understand blockchain and have a negative attitude towards the technology is really because they do not understand the laws of the operation of the law.