5 ms·

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

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.
- pash 10y ago
  Everyone in the space who was paying attention knew the DAO was likely to be a debacle, which is a major secondary reason that many people opposed forking to save it. This is what moral hazard looks like in the world of cryptographic "smart contracts".
  - grandalf 10y ago
    > This is what moral hazard looks Yes, and I would have hoped/expected the curators of the Ethereum ecosystem to have greater respect for moral hazard.
crispyambulance 10y ago
Well, clearly, the folks involved have not bothered to "run a simulation" to have predicted the situation where someone has made money out of nothing. He didn't "mine" it, he didn't invest it, he didn't exchange goods or services for it. He merely exploited an unforeseen complexity to his benefit and everyone else's detriment. And that's the core reason this rubs people the wrong way: it smells like financial shenanigans. We don't like it when people do that stuff in real life, and we don't like it when it happens in a "funny-money" system that deigns to become serious. The good news is that (as far as I can tell) no serious real money has been poured into or out of this system. If it has, the money was hopefully treated as a highly speculative investment-- thrill money if you like. Not counting Watt-hours and personal time as money, obviously.

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.

pash 10y ago
Everyone in the space who was paying attention knew the DAO was likely to be a debacle, which is a major secondary reason that many people opposed forking to save it. This is what moral hazard looks like in the world of cryptographic "smart contracts".
- grandalf 10y ago
  > This is what moral hazard looks Yes, and I would have hoped/expected the curators of the Ethereum ecosystem to have greater respect for moral hazard.

crispyambulance 10y ago

Well, clearly, the folks involved have not bothered to "run a simulation" to have predicted the situation where someone has made money out of nothing. He didn't "mine" it, he didn't invest it, he didn't exchange goods or services for it. He merely exploited an unforeseen complexity to his benefit and everyone else's detriment. And that's the core reason this rubs people the wrong way: it smells like financial shenanigans. We don't like it when people do that stuff in real life, and we don't like it when it happens in a "funny-money" system that deigns to become serious. The good news is that (as far as I can tell) no serious real money has been poured into or out of this system. If it has, the money was hopefully treated as a highly speculative investment-- thrill money if you like. Not counting Watt-hours and personal time as money, obviously.