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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

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

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.