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There is a weird belief-system in the ethereum/DAO chatter that I can't quite place my finger on. Not even sure if "libertarian" covers it. I've heard it said

There is a weird belief-system in the ethereum/DAO chatter that I can't quite place my finger on. Not even sure if "libertarian" covers it. I've heard it said that these folks are a form social-darwinists who have decreed (in their sandbox) that "code is law" and that, as such, any and all manipulation of the working code is perfectly acceptable without regard to external factors such as ethics, intent, and reasonable behavioral mores. Its like they've taken the WORST aspects of the real financial systems such as money begetting money, rampant speculation, intractably complex and arbitrary rules, etc and jacked it up to the Nth degree for their monopoly-money world and are now taking it dead seriously (and getting offended when people suggest that their "coins" aren't _really_ worth what they think they're worth-- because, yep, conversion to REAL money is a problem for them). I like the concept of a crypto currency as a way to exchange goods, services (and possibly contracts), but the players thus far leave me completely turned off.

grandalf 10y ago
I think you are missing the point. If the code isn't the law, then what is? The beauty of a "code is law" system is that its behavior is not subject to human interpretation and human biases... we can run a simulation on a test instance of the VM to test whatever scenario we choose, and we may review code and decide whether or not to trust it. Systems like this are inherently adversarial. The idea of a "code is law" sort of system is that code could be developed to deal with the myriad adversarial situations in far more efficient and predictable ways than the way humans have historically dealt with them. Legal uncertainty is a transaction cost and an existential risk in all contracts. In order for Ethereum to avoid this added cost, it would reduce the unpredictability of a contract's outcome. If a hard fork might happen to nullify a transaction, then anyone who is expecting to depend on it must add some uncertainty to his/her portfolio. There there would still be risk of code bugs in a code-is-law system, but over time contract code would be discovered to be trustworthy in the same way that apache's source code is considered largely to be devoid of major security holes.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > If the code isn't the law, then what is? The law is the law. And, when effective steps have been taken to prevent real remedies under the law, then, in practice, the war of all against all is the law.
  - grandalf 10y ago
    > The law is the law. Well, in a decentralized distributed system, the "law" may not be clearly part of any jurisdiction, and enforcement may be impossible, making the law somewhat less helpful at resolving disputes.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      Well, yeah, there's a reason I included the second paragraph -- it was intended to be directly applicable to the situation at hand, not just a general observation.
      - grandalf 10y ago
        Do you have a sense of whether any nations' laws are applicable to the DAO attack situation?
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    Whose law? Your country? My country? The USA, just because? North Korea because they have the most restrictive laws? All unworkable. Your country's law applies to you, as you use the system, but not to the contracts themselves. If you contract for something illegal you can be tossed in your country's prisons but the contract can't be altered.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  > The idea of a "code is law" sort of system is that code could be developed to deal with the myriad adversarial situations in far more efficient and predictable ways than the way humans have historically dealt with them. Then this debacle has been a spectacular failure on that front, and given the fact that no system can be perfectly secure, this will happen again in the future.

grandalf 10y ago

I think you are missing the point. If the code isn't the law, then what is? The beauty of a "code is law" system is that its behavior is not subject to human interpretation and human biases... we can run a simulation on a test instance of the VM to test whatever scenario we choose, and we may review code and decide whether or not to trust it. Systems like this are inherently adversarial. The idea of a "code is law" sort of system is that code could be developed to deal with the myriad adversarial situations in far more efficient and predictable ways than the way humans have historically dealt with them. Legal uncertainty is a transaction cost and an existential risk in all contracts. In order for Ethereum to avoid this added cost, it would reduce the unpredictability of a contract's outcome. If a hard fork might happen to nullify a transaction, then anyone who is expecting to depend on it must add some uncertainty to his/her portfolio. There there would still be risk of code bugs in a code-is-law system, but over time contract code would be discovered to be trustworthy in the same way that apache's source code is considered largely to be devoid of major security holes.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> If the code isn't the law, then what is? The law is the law. And, when effective steps have been taken to prevent real remedies under the law, then, in practice, the war of all against all is the law.
- grandalf 10y ago
  > The law is the law. Well, in a decentralized distributed system, the "law" may not be clearly part of any jurisdiction, and enforcement may be impossible, making the law somewhat less helpful at resolving disputes.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    Well, yeah, there's a reason I included the second paragraph -- it was intended to be directly applicable to the situation at hand, not just a general observation.
    - grandalf 10y ago
      Do you have a sense of whether any nations' laws are applicable to the DAO attack situation?
- EdHominem 10y ago
  Whose law? Your country? My country? The USA, just because? North Korea because they have the most restrictive laws? All unworkable. Your country's law applies to you, as you use the system, but not to the contracts themselves. If you contract for something illegal you can be tossed in your country's prisons but the contract can't be altered.
smallnamespace 10y ago
> The idea of a "code is law" sort of system is that code could be developed to deal with the myriad adversarial situations in far more efficient and predictable ways than the way humans have historically dealt with them. Then this debacle has been a spectacular failure on that front, and given the fact that no system can be perfectly secure, this will happen again in the future.