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I'm a lawyer and erstwhile software dev. Edits in italic: The idea that this will catch on in any non-trivial fashion is such flagrant nonsense that I don't kn

I'm a lawyer and erstwhile software dev. Edits in italic: The idea that this will catch on in any non-trivial fashion is such flagrant nonsense that I don't know where to start. Note that I didn't see the author of this page saying that it will, but a lot of comments seem to indicate that this is the hope. Most of law school is dedicated to being hammered over the head, repeatedly, with the fact that contracts constantly use this word: REASONABLE And many, many thick books written by a lot of very smart people have been dedicated solely to trying to define this word, which is hotly debated. Quite simply, contracts are semantic documents that are used as reference for judgment based processes. Syntactic interpretation simply is never going to work, and that is all blockchain is going to get you. The existence of closing conditions to big deals (e.g. company sales) require human judgment - they are often things like "the reasonable likelihood that there is no need for further tax indemnification" or "there is reasonable likelihood that there will be no further suits filed against [x]". How in the hell is a computer ever going to make determinations about the reasonable likelihood of human actors that are sufficient to have as bases for contract conditions? And even if they can, is that what you want? I still want a human's finger on the trigger. And either way, until you have true AI interpreting contracts for you, this is a completely hopeless task. It so fundamentally misunderstands what attorneys do that it is just worthy of being dismissed out of hand. Let's put it this way: saying that contracts can be 'coded' in this way is the exact same as thinking that all software developers do is write code. I spend at least as much time writing contracts as I do trying to figure out what the heck it is that is actually going on, investigating, documenting requirements, satisfying stake-holders - it is not, unlike, in fact, writing software. So, in essence, saying that contracts can be automated is literally the exact same statement that software development can be automated. Show me how. I will make you wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. NB: you may not read the TOS - but trust me, as someone who has written many, many website TOS's, people do read them. Important people, like states Attorneys General, representatives from acquiring companies and competitors, attorneys representing people who are trying to sue you and members of the general public who actually give a darn about their privacy. And, quite frankly, TOSs are a tiny fraction of what I do - and I have a very brisk software practice. The vast majority of actual commercial contract negotiation is in documents that are heavily worked upon by both sides and reviewed many times by multiple people. If you think you can get even 20% of these people to become effective at writing markdown much less learning logical operators, well, I have a bridge to sell you.

darawk 11y ago
I think the idea is that it would not replace all contracts, just certain contracts that happen to have narrowly definable and executable terms. E.g. An assurance contract a la kickstarter (for the most trivial case), options contracts, or multi-party escrow. And that perhaps the scope of its capabilities would expand incrementally over time as people got better at thinking about contracts in this way. An analogy might be to Squarespace/Wordpress for web developers. Sure, you can't make every website on there. But for a lot of simple cases you can, and those cases are expanding.
- libertymcateer 11y ago
  I follow, but what I deny is that there is a big overlap in people who are sophisticated enough to understand both the legal requirements of contracts, have the ability to work within this technical framework and still think that having these sorts of things be totally automated is a good idea. Putatively, I should be a prime candidate. I spend my nights and weekends (to the extent I have them) working in node and jquery, I cut my teeth on ANSI C two decades ago, I studied math and physics as an undergrad and now I'm a full time lawyer. I am deeply, deeply hesitant to use this kind of agreement. It is not that the systems we have are ideal - they are definitely flawed - so my attitude is not that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." The attitude is that of "this is likely to introduce way more risk and uncertainty into processes that are already risky and uncertain." Let's put it yet one other way: if the point of this language is to make things clearer - it fails at the starting line, for the simple reason that 90%+ - probably 99% + - of people that have to deal with contracts cannot make heads or tails of a logical operator, and teaching them to do so with enough comfort that they can parse and evaluate such statements at anything near the speed necessary for commercial applicability is a sisyphean undertaking.
  - darawk 11y ago
    While I agree, I think you could make similar arguments about the contents of legal contracts today. The overwhelming majority of users of say, Kickstarter or online stock brokerage systems do not read the contracts they are asked to agree to, and if they attempted to would be incapable of understanding them anyway. So I think that argument is a bit of a red herring. The advantages of Ethereum are in eliminating 3rd party trust and the costs that come with it. Right now if you want one of these simple financial services, there is both a direct financial cost associated with it and the implicit risk-expense of trusting someone else with your money. This is a drain on the global financial system that just doesn't need to exist anymore. The idea that Ethereum or things like it will supplant the legal system is of course, absurd on its face. That will not happen. But what we may start to see, in my opinion, is the co-mingling of the two, and contracts being written with deterministic, executable components alongside more traditional legal verbiage. Fundamentally there are some things that are amenable to mechanization and some things that are not. But right now both are encoded in human language. And the use of either one for the other's optimal purpose is perverse and unnecessarily expensive.

darawk 11y ago

I think the idea is that it would not replace all contracts, just certain contracts that happen to have narrowly definable and executable terms. E.g. An assurance contract a la kickstarter (for the most trivial case), options contracts, or multi-party escrow. And that perhaps the scope of its capabilities would expand incrementally over time as people got better at thinking about contracts in this way. An analogy might be to Squarespace/Wordpress for web developers. Sure, you can't make every website on there. But for a lot of simple cases you can, and those cases are expanding.

libertymcateer 11y ago
I follow, but what I deny is that there is a big overlap in people who are sophisticated enough to understand both the legal requirements of contracts, have the ability to work within this technical framework and still think that having these sorts of things be totally automated is a good idea. Putatively, I should be a prime candidate. I spend my nights and weekends (to the extent I have them) working in node and jquery, I cut my teeth on ANSI C two decades ago, I studied math and physics as an undergrad and now I'm a full time lawyer. I am deeply, deeply hesitant to use this kind of agreement. It is not that the systems we have are ideal - they are definitely flawed - so my attitude is not that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." The attitude is that of "this is likely to introduce way more risk and uncertainty into processes that are already risky and uncertain." Let's put it yet one other way: if the point of this language is to make things clearer - it fails at the starting line, for the simple reason that 90%+ - probably 99% + - of people that have to deal with contracts cannot make heads or tails of a logical operator, and teaching them to do so with enough comfort that they can parse and evaluate such statements at anything near the speed necessary for commercial applicability is a sisyphean undertaking.
- darawk 11y ago
  While I agree, I think you could make similar arguments about the contents of legal contracts today. The overwhelming majority of users of say, Kickstarter or online stock brokerage systems do not read the contracts they are asked to agree to, and if they attempted to would be incapable of understanding them anyway. So I think that argument is a bit of a red herring. The advantages of Ethereum are in eliminating 3rd party trust and the costs that come with it. Right now if you want one of these simple financial services, there is both a direct financial cost associated with it and the implicit risk-expense of trusting someone else with your money. This is a drain on the global financial system that just doesn't need to exist anymore. The idea that Ethereum or things like it will supplant the legal system is of course, absurd on its face. That will not happen. But what we may start to see, in my opinion, is the co-mingling of the two, and contracts being written with deterministic, executable components alongside more traditional legal verbiage. Fundamentally there are some things that are amenable to mechanization and some things that are not. But right now both are encoded in human language. And the use of either one for the other's optimal purpose is perverse and unnecessarily expensive.