6 ms·

I think you outlined a bigger issue: It is now clear that the community will ultimately decide what is right, and the 'community' is actually a much smaller sub

• drcode 10y ago
  > If the miners lose a bunch of money due to X, and your contract happens to also be based on X, what do you expect to happen? If the rest of the community doesn't agree, then they will take they economic power away from the miners, change to a different mining/staking strategy, and leave the miners to mine an abandoned fork with a greatly decreased market cap.
• twblalock 10y ago
  > The issue is that ethereum isn't the only option here - standard legal contracts exist, and are by far more common. The only real advantage ethereum offers is the immutability aspect - that no one can go back and argue the contract is wrong or invalid. A court would not see it that way. Contract law would apply to these contracts if the parties to the contract sued each other. The legal system applies to all contracts, whether on Ethereum or not. Ethereum does not get to exist in its own reality outside of the law. Therefore, the immutability of an Ethereum contract won't matter very much, because a judge can still invalidate part of it, or all of it, if it contains unconscionable provisions, lack of disclosure, agreement to commit criminal acts, fraud or misrepresentation, simple mistakes, or any one of the many other reasons contracts can be rendered legally unenforceable. So, I don't see how immutability offers any advantage over standard legal contracts. It won't prevent the courts from determining that a contract is wrong or invalid.
  • pash 10y ago
    You have vastly oversimplified the matter. In common-law jurisdictions, contract law pertains only to agreements which are made with the intent to contract, i.e., with the intent that the agreement should be enforced by law. In the case of agreements made without that intent, and particularly when an agreement explicitly stipulates that legal enforcement should not apply, common-law tradition says (with some major caveats) that a judge should dismiss suits related to the enforcement of the provisions of the agreement. Further, even in the case that a so-called "smart contract" is deemed to be subject to contract law (whether because the parties made that intention clear, or because their intention was vague and a judge consequently rules that to be the case), it is reasonable to argue that the intention of the parties was to be bound by the rules of the system in which they chose to express their agreement, e.g., within a system in which it is broadly understood that "the code is the contract", and that the execution of the code according to the parameters of the execution environment at the time of the agreement should dictate the outcome of the agreement. In other words, it is perfectly plausible from a legal point of view that a judge could find that the primary intent of the parties was to be governed by the rules of the system in which they chose to execute the agreement (e.g., Ethereum under its pre-fork consensus rules), rather than ruling on their intent at the lower level of the code expressing the contract itself. Such an interpretation would go little further than the already well established legal precedents of allowing contracting parties to bind themselves to the decision of an arbiter other than a court of law, or of one court acceding to the jurisdiction of another as stipulated by the contract itself. A judge might therefore plausibly rule in a way that enhances rather than degrades the promise of immutability in a technically enforced consensus system. That is, a judge might reasonably find that changing the rules of the game halfway though (e.g., with an unanticipated hard fork that changes the system's state or execution parameters) is contrary to the intent of the contracting parties, and that therefore the agreement should be interpreted under the rules of the status quo ante (pre-fork). One of the basic philosophical foundations of contract law, dating to Adam Smith, is that free people should have the power to bind themselves in enforceable agreements. There are many qualifications to this idea, but it an important justification for the existence of contract law and for the way it has evolved over the centuries: the whole point is that contract law should empower parties to make agreements and to be bound by those agreements, and (within some bounds) that includes the power to decide how disputes about the terms of those agreements are adjudicated. Choosing a mechanism of enforcement de machina rather than de jure fits into this philosophical framework just fine.