Can the Internet deliver timely, impartial, and reasonably priced justice in a way that traditional justice systems frequently fail to do? A developer from Buenos Aires thinks so.

Federico Ast is working on Crowdjury, a new form of dispute-resolution based on the blockchain–the distributed ledger technology behind Bitcoin. Instead of lawyers, judges, and endless reams of paper, he would simplify legal squabbles to a couple of algorithms, a few expert jurors picked randomly, and some crypto-currency to pay people for their time.

“Living in Argentina, one gets used to a lot of corruption in the justice system,” he says. “What’s wrong is that it’s very old technology. It’s like using technology of the newspaper era to solve conflicts of the Internet time.”

Ast gives an example of how his system, which is still in its early stages of development, would work. Say you want to build a website and you hire a developer in another country to do it. The developer codes it, but you’re not happy with the result, saying it fails to meet the contract requirements. The developer disagrees, saying he’s done his job, and now you’re stuck in limbo: an unfinished site and no payment made or received.

Using Crowdjury, the two sides put all relevant evidence (contract, emails, website, and so on) into an immutable ledger on the blockchain, giving it a timestamp and making it resistant to tampering by either side. An algorithm then searches automatically (say, via LinkedIn) for people with certain expertise: in this case, they need to know about Javascript, say. The 10-person jury convenes online, reviews the evidence for a set period of time, and votes. The side with the most votes wins, with a pre-arranged settlement delivered automatically when the jury reaches a decision.

Last year, Ast wrote a paper outlining the idea in detail. He’s since been accepted to the Singularity University’s graduate program, and he hopes to have Crowdjury ready for public use this year.

“In the short term, we think Crowdjury will be used by existing platforms such as eBay or Airbnb. It would be like an insurance for their users. If there’s a dispute, the system would solve it for them. In the long term, we think it will be perfect for distributed communities like social networks,” Ast says.