11 ms·

Levine constantly brings this up related to blockchain; people (for the most part) don't actually want completely and utterly binding contracts. We want things

Levine constantly brings this up related to blockchain; people (for the most part) don't actually want completely and utterly binding contracts. We want things that reflect what we bargained for and protects us when things go sideways, but not something that arbitrarily and absolutely enforces technicalities that perhaps weren't in the spirit of the agreement. Turns out it's useful to have wiggle room; it's a feature, not a bug.

MrEldritch 8y ago
Even without the "binding contract" aspect, the very concept of "put important code in the blockchain (where it can never be patched without the agreement of the entire community)" seems ... spooky. "Unpatchable code" is probably one of the most terrifying two-word phrases in the English language.
- paulmd 8y ago
  The 9 most terrifying words in the English language: "I work with Blockchain, and this contract is immutable." Turns out everyone likes government when it helps them, and Reagan was just a senile old man making memes.
  - barking 8y ago
    Your second sentence is a non sequitur as well as being ageist and possibly mocking of people with Alzheimer's disease. That's quite a lot for one sentence.
    - paulmd 8y ago
      Please don't shame the differently abled. Alzheimer's disease doesn't really hold you back these days. We've elected presidents with Alzheimer's three times in the last 4 decades. I mean, how much higher can you go than that? What better proof of their competence do you want? They managed to pass through our electoral system, right? How dare you judge their mental abilities? How dare you, sir? Let's see you get elected president, buster. What are you, some kind of doctor? Not that there's any trend as to which party keeps electing the "differently abled" to the highest office in the country, no sir... I mean, my heart and my best intentions say that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. /s After all, we all know that decorum is what's really important, in fact more important than saying what needs to be said. Which is that Republicans keep electing actual dementia patients to be President, and keeping them in office even when that becomes obvious. And, that the US political system is founded on broad assumptions of good faith and isn't built to handle intense partisanship to the extent that a Congress would refuse to deal with an obviously senile president. But hey, it probably worked reasonably well in an era when your average elite lived to be like 50 or something. We're no longer in that era, and it's time to put a maximum age limit on the Presidency as well as a minimum, and start enforcing the 25th.
    - ambicapter 8y ago
      The quote he's spoofing is from Reagan, and there is a not small group of Americans who think the original quote was unduly harmful to politics and by extension social and cultural mores in the US.
  - zaarn 8y ago
    One day, two companies who have a blockchain contract between them, will end up in a lawsuit. While the contract gives right to one company, the court disagrees and says the other party is right because of the law of the state. The court orders the company to give back the money the contract gave them. They refuse. What happens now? Which side will win? I'm not putting my bets on the blockchain contract.
    - JadeNB 8y ago
      > The court orders the company to give back the money the contract gave them. They refuse. This seems to have nothing to do with blockchains; the same situation could occur (and its consequences are important to investigate!) no matter what the circumstances that led up the court order.
      - zaarn 8y ago
        Yes but with the difference that without blockchain the corporations bank will then do the deed and push the money back on court order. And if not possible the company will (to my knowledge in german legal code) be dissolved, assets sold and the profits go to the other side until the damage is covered, which is usually not the case and the winning party still looses money. With blockchain there is no bank and if the company doesn't want to, the next option is nuclear as above. With blockchain there is no way for the party to obtain what is rightfully theirs other than to nuclearize the other party. Without there are options because banks and other intermediaries can intervene and correct.
        mcguire 8y ago
        Well, the blockchain computors could fork the blockchain, no? Not that that is much better or more likely. And if the ownership of the assets is recorded on the blockchain...
        zaarn 8y ago
        But if you just fork the blockchain over legal disputes... what have you gained over not having a blockchain? Blockchain removes all the nice stuff we have in our legal system to deal with disputes. Why put it back in? What does that gain us?
  - dang 8y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
shawn 8y ago
Heh, just experienced this myself. Spirit of a contract is important, and not really something that can be codified.
- mkirklions 8y ago
  It depends on the contract. Tbh, I would prefer if things government related were set in stone. No ambiguity, send the money, be done. The private sector can work with customers and are reliant on customers for business. This makes it so compromise and being reasonable is incentivized by additional profit.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    “Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution; justice without mercy is cruelty.” — Thomas Aquinas
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    I have this vague feeling that perfect contracts or laws would somehow contradict Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
forkerenok 8y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with this on a b2b case. But I have an impression that "wiggle-room" contracts are not scaleable, when you need to have the same contract with multiple parties with a significant chance of having an "adversary" among them.
- DannyBee 8y ago
  (lawyer here, but i don't make a living at it so i have no care :P) Empirically, they are in fact scalable. The number of contracts litigated in the situation you are talking, as a percentage of overall contracts in those situations, is ridiculously small. (choose any metric, in fact, and you'll see they've scaled just fine) Meanwhile, the thinking you are espousing turns out to be pretty much impossible in practice even if you wanted it to be so. I get the desire by engineers, and even the desire in some forms of contracts. But in the general case, in fact, it makes it much much worse than we have now. In one case, you have a judge looking at the spirit of the contract and making some reasonable decision about what should happen. In the other, you have to have completed the often impossible task of thinking and codifying every edge case and possibility. If you get it wrong, too bad, so sad. I know which i'd want. One of the reasons we have judges in the first place is because the desire to codify all possibilities is not achievable. It's not a thing we sanely have achieved in thousands of years of law, contracts, etc. The idea that because we are now expressing it in a bytecoded language and not words, it will suddenly become possible to achieve, seems incredibly wrong headed, because the language was never the problem. The contracts you can effectively express this way were never a problem from the language perspective. It definitely makes them more automatic, but making these contracts more automatic is basically "meh" on the innovation scale[1]. [1] Though i'm not crazy and certainly believe there are many many billions of dollars to be had in doing this.
  - solveit 8y ago
    >It definitely makes them more automatic, but making these contracts more automatic is basically "meh" on the innovation scale. I don't know, sufficient automation allows for millions of contracts a second, all automatically generated, many relying on layers and layers of hundreds of other automated contracts being executed in real-time. That is, the difference could be as drastic as between computation algorithms for pen-and-paper, and the Internet as we know it now. Will it? No idea, but I think writing contract automation off as 'meh' is as shortsighted as thinking the Internet is basically a faster postal service that can't deliver packages.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
I agree. Similar thing applies to laws in general; I usually compare this "wiggle room" to grease in the gearbox. Without it, the gears of justice will stop turning, or even break down completely. Putting perfect laws as code is essentially a humanlike-AI-complete problem. That is, the necessary code would also have to implicitly and completely implement our intuitions about morality, and the mechanisms behind emotions and suffering. We can't do that, so we need some wiggle room, to enable humans to be humane.
- stingraycharles 8y ago
  A good example of this concept in action is actually the whole Ethereum / DAO fiasco, where the contract code actually contained a bug. Turns out the bug was not intended to be “binding”, and thus the Ethereum chain was forked to undo any damage of the bug. So seems like even the crypto / smart contract community agrees with this sentiment to some degree, although forking an entire block chain might be somewhat of a crude interpretation of “wiggle room”.
  - mrguyorama 8y ago
    The way I understand it, the people behind Ethereum had significant skin in the game, in the form of lots of money/assets that got stolen, and that might have tainted their opinion about what to do
    - yifanl 8y ago
      I recall that a second large theft [1] did not get a hard-fork resolution. Whether it's due to bias from the core team or a wish to stay away from being a final arbitration after the first event, I'm not in a position to judge. [1] https://www.coindesk.com/30-million-ether-reported-stolen-parity-wallet-breach/ https://www.coindesk.com/30-million-ether-reported-stolen-pa...
- nsomaru 8y ago
  That seems to imply we need two pieces of code for "perfect laws as code": 1) that which writes/defines the laws and 2) that which interprets the prevailing milieu and determines the application of law. Since we're speculating anyways, why not implement the whole system we currently have? Assuming humanlike-AI (heh!), the following services are imaginable: 1 AI Legislature 2 AI Judge 3 AI Lawyers Govt programmers handle (1) and (2), applicants and respondents (or prosecution and defence) handle (3). AI Legislature determines laws according to citizen referendum and policy upon consultation with the the AI Judges. Each AI Lawyer makes arguments to the AI Judge who evaluates each against the law and jurisprudence to arrive at a judgement. Wiggle away! As a final layer which arose out of the Luddite massacres of 2137-40, a group of rubber-stamping human judges at the top serving as final adjudicators and appellate court.
jankotek 8y ago
Absolutely not! There is way too much "wiggle room" when you deal with multiple nationalities, different cultures, foreign languages, jurisdictions... The only thing that is rock solid and predictable is contract written in programming code. But I am not saying that current implementations are best. (disclosure: I worked on ethereum related tech)
- hndamien 8y ago
  I think there is room for both. Start with very simple contracts first.
- Nursie 8y ago
  > The only thing that is rock solid and predictable is contract written in programming code. The only code that's 'rock solid and predictable' is code that's been formally proven. Are smart contracts doing that? Further, as described above, even if they were perfectly written every time, they'd still be a poor replacement for human law. We are squishy, imperfect and inconstant, we have legal protections and legal wiggle-room for a lot of reasons.
  - jankotek 8y ago
    Some smart contracts (and underlying VM) are formally proven. My former employer invests heavily in that direction. And it is very easy to verify "1+1=2" or "amount + amount X 0.12 X number_of_months". But my point is that meat contracts are very expensive to draft and enforce. It is not worth to sue someone in China over $50.
    - KSteffensen 8y ago
      That suing over legitimate claims is not worth it is an artifact of the legal system, not of the law or contract.
      - mcguire 8y ago
        That suing over (tiny) legitimate claims is not worth it is a feature of the legal system, not a bug.
hitekker 8y ago
Absolutely spot on. Code by itself can capture the letter of the law but never the spirit. On a broader, it seems to me the worship of paper and other proxies like code is borne out of weakness: that is, our fear of our own human nature. We see the animal within ourselves and the world, and so we run away.
tlrobinson 8y ago
I agree most contracts benefit from "wiggle room", however you can build wiggle room into blockchain-enforced smart contracts (e.x. by giving n-of-m arbiters/courts ability to override the outcome), but you can't build absolutely enforced "code as law" on existing legal systems. I don't claim to know how useful this will actually be, but it seems like a potentially interesting new capability.
- JoeSmithson 8y ago
  There's not many use cases where a purely technical solution has meaningful impact on the world, though. The "code-as-law" will generally have to be supported by "law-as-law" at some point, and that can be overturned arbitrarily. What good is having technical ownership of some private key if your government declares you have to give it over or face jail?
  - solveit 8y ago
    For suitably powerful privacy coins, the government shouldn't be able to tell if you used your private key or not. So you claim you lost your private key and spend away. Of course, there has to be an off-ramp into the real world at some point, so all this actually gets you is access to the black market. Opinions may vary on how useful that is, and how much blockchain can succeed if it insists on fighting regulation tooth-and-claw.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      Claiming you lost your key is called contempt in court. Judges generally don't take kindly to that tactic. A lot of people some how think they can "hack" the legal system...it generally doesn't work out so well for them.
balladeer 8y ago
Having dealt with a landlord when I vacated this previous week I would beg to differ :-)
philbarr 8y ago
Except you can still change something if it's on the blockchain, it's just that now you have an immutable record that it was changed. So now if things go wrong, the other party suddenly decides they liked the old contract (which you'd signed) and you have yourself a court battle. If it's on the blockchain you can point to it and say, "yes we signed this old contract but you can tell here we both agreed to change it."
- code_duck 8y ago
  How does that differ from a standard legal agreement? At any time two parties can make a new agreeement, with or without a court battle. Your immutable record is documents filed with the government on public record.
  - dspillett 8y ago
    > How does that differ from a standard legal agreement? > Your immutable record is documents filed with the government For people who don't necessarily trust the current and future government (to be both just and no inept at keeping accurate records), you've answered your own question. > on public record. One of the sales points of blackchain based contracts is that getting your details onto public record, and someone else verifying those details on the records, is easier. And in theory the record is not as easy to corrupt/disrupt/hide/block. Caveat: I'm not more than an intrigued bystander on the whole blockchain thing ATM, so the details as I understand them may be quite wrong.
aaron695 8y ago
> people (for the most part) don't actually want completely and utterly binding contracts. This was a "completely and utterly binding contract" but they changed it cause it was the right thing. Why would a blockchain contract be different?
xorcist 8y ago
That's because you conjure up a picture of complexity, but a contract can be trivial. If I were to swap 10 eur for 12 usd with a counterparty I'd shun any wiggle room in that contract.
- beagle3 8y ago
  That's true, but let's make it just slightly more complex: Our contract is to swap 10 EUR for whatever it is worth tomorrow in USD according to what "bloomberg.com" gives as the representative rate at 12:34pm. Now, this is easily codified, but ... a) Someone could hijack the "bloomberg dns" b) Someone could hijack bloomberg's BGP both the above would likely be defended by using https, but CAs have been hacked before, and there are questionable state controlled ones. c) Someone could hack inside Bloomberg itself to give the wrong rate d) Bloomberg might have a bug that is struck exactly at 12:34pm on that day, which shows the wrong rate. All these 4 things may happen independently of our contract - Bloomberg is not a side to our agreement, and other actors might have reasons to try to make it give wrong data. In "The real world", if the rate is really off (say, half what you expect), you'd look at Thomson/Reuters and Yahoo, realize Bloomberg is borked, and react accordingly - and a court would likely support that court of action. This is the kind of wiggle room you want, because in the real world, it is impossible to lock down all of these improbable, weird, but possible, outcomes. Contracts that are so simple that there's no potential need for wiggle room aren't very useful. In real world contracts, the more money is involved, the more both sides try to protect themselves against such weirdness; and yet, courts are sometimes involved, either because interpretation is disputed (comparable to "code has underfined behaviour") or due to events not covered in the original contract.
dooglius 8y ago
Speak for yourself! If I am a party to a contract, I don't want the other party to be able to "wiggle" their way out, and I'd certainly give up my ability to in exchange. Especially given the American Rule [0], in a system where contracts can be disputed and modified, someone who has much more monetary and legal resources than I do can effectively force any change in the agreement (though a binding arbitration clause would ameliorate this). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fees) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fe...
- pjc50 8y ago
  There's an entire genre of stories about deals with the devil or supernatural items ("Monkey's Paw"), where the deal is binding - and the punishment is getting exactly what you asked for.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    There's also a famous play by Shakespeare about whether it's reasonable to hold someone to the letter of a contract...
- jfk13 8y ago
  That didn't work out so well for Shylock.
- xyzzy123 8y ago
  It seems to me that the set of useful contracts you can write that are completely unambiguous is very small. Consider an employment contract on a blockchain. There doesn’t seem to be any way to do this without relying extensively on oracles that reflect fuzzy human judgement about what the terms of the contract really mean, let alone whether certain actions took place, let alone whether those met or violated the terms.
  - nsomaru 8y ago
    Oracles seem to be a good solution. A lot of the time people just need some boilerplate to conduct a transaction and will need to refer back to the contract in the case of a dispute only. Contract as code allows us to naturally standardise on boilerplate for common cases whilst allowing for specialised code in specialised cases. The 1% of contracts that are disputed could be conditionally successively escalated until human arbitration, settlement or a trial is reached. Oracle reports and contract executes accordingly.
comex 8y ago
A bunch of replies to your comment, but none have (clearly) pointed out that this isn't actually an example of "wiggle room" in action. The mistake was corrected because both parties agreed to change the contract. If they hadn't agreed and the issue had been brought to court, the $400 million number almost certainly would have been enforced. In cases where contract text is ambiguous, unclear, or just self-evidently illogical, the legal system does grant some wiggle room for a judge to try to tease out the intent. But a mere disagreement between the text and some email(s), AFAIK, wouldn't meet that standard. On the other hand, even on the blockchain it's not hard to make a contract amendable with unanimous consent.
- Drdrdrq 8y ago
  > On the other hand, even on the blockchain it's not hard to make a contract amendable with unanimous consent. This. Both proponents and critics of blockchain often seem to forget that it's just technology. Entities trading on it and performing other actions are still subjects to applicable laws, whether they like it or not.
- Radle 8y ago
  After the last email said $425 million? Probably only in America.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  > even on the blockchain it's not hard to make a contract amendable with unanimous consent. Unanimous consent is nice when it happens, but we typically want the ability to make amendments without unanimous consent, too. Concrete examples: I wouldn't want to use an electronic payment card that doesn't have some sort of chargeback mechanism. My mutual funds want the exchanges they operate on to have some mechanism for busting erroneous trades, and I'm glad that they do. When I check in at a hotel, they want a credit card on file, so that they can charge me if I steal the towels. All of these mechanisms involve retroactively altering the financial terms of a contract in a way that causes one person to lose some money without their consent. For the most part, people agree that this is just and desirable, because they also value fairness. That said, I agree on the point at hand -- I don't think that the example from the story is particularly relevant here.
justonepost 8y ago
And there sometimes we don't want wiggle room, thus the blockchain is good for that.
snowwrestler 8y ago
An example of a contract in which it is useful have wiggle room is hiring a company to build a website for you. The best process for building a website necessarily includes discovery and continuous decision-making about what to build, so a long and prescriptive contract that spells out every product feature on day one will most likely result in a crappy final product and/or a ton of change orders and amendments. Yes, it's possible to change contract language when the parties mutually agree. But in a company with any sort of process around contracts, it will be a pain in the ass to make lots of changes.
- JadeNB 8y ago
  > An example of a contract in which it is useful have wiggle room is hiring a company to build a website for you. The best process for building a website necessarily includes discovery and continuous decision-making about what to build, so a long and prescriptive contract that spells out every product feature on day one will most likely result in a crappy final product and/or a ton of change orders and amendments. The discussion seems to be about allowing wiggle room in an otherwise 'non-wiggly' contract, which doesn't seem to be the situation you're describing. Your suggestion clearly isn't that the long and prescriptive contract should be drawn up and then repeatedly amended, but presumably is rather that the initial contract itself should provide a mechanism for easy changes; and contracts enforced by technology, like any others, can be created in this way.
scott_s 8y ago
The other part is that contracts are built on civil trust, not technology. I don't think blockchain will ultimately be all that useful because it doesn't solve the trust problem.
mcguire 8y ago
These aren't entirely uncommon in real estate deals. Party A needs some money for some part of the deal, but Party B isn't supposed to pay for that. Party B hands Party A a check, possibly while the real estate lawyer is out of the room making copies or something. It's cute.
- Raidion 8y ago
  I was really surprised by that when my friend bought his house. It's a sneaky way to get around the fact that the bank won't finance anything that's not secured by the house. So say you are buying a house for 200k, but after the down payment, you don't have the money to redo the kitchen like you wanted. No problem, the seller adds 3k to closing costs and hands you a check for 3k. Your bank hands you a check for 203k, You pay the seller, and suddenly you have 3k that your bank wouldn't finance directly to redo your kitchen.

MrEldritch 8y ago

Even without the "binding contract" aspect, the very concept of "put important code in the blockchain (where it can never be patched without the agreement of the entire community)" seems ... spooky. "Unpatchable code" is probably one of the most terrifying two-word phrases in the English language.

paulmd 8y ago
The 9 most terrifying words in the English language: "I work with Blockchain, and this contract is immutable." Turns out everyone likes government when it helps them, and Reagan was just a senile old man making memes.
- barking 8y ago
  Your second sentence is a non sequitur as well as being ageist and possibly mocking of people with Alzheimer's disease. That's quite a lot for one sentence.
  - paulmd 8y ago
    Please don't shame the differently abled. Alzheimer's disease doesn't really hold you back these days. We've elected presidents with Alzheimer's three times in the last 4 decades. I mean, how much higher can you go than that? What better proof of their competence do you want? They managed to pass through our electoral system, right? How dare you judge their mental abilities? How dare you, sir? Let's see you get elected president, buster. What are you, some kind of doctor? Not that there's any trend as to which party keeps electing the "differently abled" to the highest office in the country, no sir... I mean, my heart and my best intentions say that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. /s After all, we all know that decorum is what's really important, in fact more important than saying what needs to be said. Which is that Republicans keep electing actual dementia patients to be President, and keeping them in office even when that becomes obvious. And, that the US political system is founded on broad assumptions of good faith and isn't built to handle intense partisanship to the extent that a Congress would refuse to deal with an obviously senile president. But hey, it probably worked reasonably well in an era when your average elite lived to be like 50 or something. We're no longer in that era, and it's time to put a maximum age limit on the Presidency as well as a minimum, and start enforcing the 25th.
  - ambicapter 8y ago
    The quote he's spoofing is from Reagan, and there is a not small group of Americans who think the original quote was unduly harmful to politics and by extension social and cultural mores in the US.
- zaarn 8y ago
  One day, two companies who have a blockchain contract between them, will end up in a lawsuit. While the contract gives right to one company, the court disagrees and says the other party is right because of the law of the state. The court orders the company to give back the money the contract gave them. They refuse. What happens now? Which side will win? I'm not putting my bets on the blockchain contract.
  - JadeNB 8y ago
    > The court orders the company to give back the money the contract gave them. They refuse. This seems to have nothing to do with blockchains; the same situation could occur (and its consequences are important to investigate!) no matter what the circumstances that led up the court order.
    - zaarn 8y ago
      Yes but with the difference that without blockchain the corporations bank will then do the deed and push the money back on court order. And if not possible the company will (to my knowledge in german legal code) be dissolved, assets sold and the profits go to the other side until the damage is covered, which is usually not the case and the winning party still looses money. With blockchain there is no bank and if the company doesn't want to, the next option is nuclear as above. With blockchain there is no way for the party to obtain what is rightfully theirs other than to nuclearize the other party. Without there are options because banks and other intermediaries can intervene and correct.
      - mcguire 8y ago
        Well, the blockchain computors could fork the blockchain, no? Not that that is much better or more likely. And if the ownership of the assets is recorded on the blockchain...
        zaarn 8y ago
        But if you just fork the blockchain over legal disputes... what have you gained over not having a blockchain? Blockchain removes all the nice stuff we have in our legal system to deal with disputes. Why put it back in? What does that gain us?
- dang 8y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

shawn 8y ago

Heh, just experienced this myself. Spirit of a contract is important, and not really something that can be codified.

mkirklions 8y ago
It depends on the contract. Tbh, I would prefer if things government related were set in stone. No ambiguity, send the money, be done. The private sector can work with customers and are reliant on customers for business. This makes it so compromise and being reasonable is incentivized by additional profit.
- mcguire 8y ago
  “Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution; justice without mercy is cruelty.” — Thomas Aquinas
- perl4ever 8y ago
  I have this vague feeling that perfect contracts or laws would somehow contradict Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

forkerenok 8y ago

I wholeheartedly agree with this on a b2b case. But I have an impression that "wiggle-room" contracts are not scaleable, when you need to have the same contract with multiple parties with a significant chance of having an "adversary" among them.

DannyBee 8y ago
(lawyer here, but i don't make a living at it so i have no care :P) Empirically, they are in fact scalable. The number of contracts litigated in the situation you are talking, as a percentage of overall contracts in those situations, is ridiculously small. (choose any metric, in fact, and you'll see they've scaled just fine) Meanwhile, the thinking you are espousing turns out to be pretty much impossible in practice even if you wanted it to be so. I get the desire by engineers, and even the desire in some forms of contracts. But in the general case, in fact, it makes it much much worse than we have now. In one case, you have a judge looking at the spirit of the contract and making some reasonable decision about what should happen. In the other, you have to have completed the often impossible task of thinking and codifying every edge case and possibility. If you get it wrong, too bad, so sad. I know which i'd want. One of the reasons we have judges in the first place is because the desire to codify all possibilities is not achievable. It's not a thing we sanely have achieved in thousands of years of law, contracts, etc. The idea that because we are now expressing it in a bytecoded language and not words, it will suddenly become possible to achieve, seems incredibly wrong headed, because the language was never the problem. The contracts you can effectively express this way were never a problem from the language perspective. It definitely makes them more automatic, but making these contracts more automatic is basically "meh" on the innovation scale[1]. [1] Though i'm not crazy and certainly believe there are many many billions of dollars to be had in doing this.
- solveit 8y ago
  >It definitely makes them more automatic, but making these contracts more automatic is basically "meh" on the innovation scale. I don't know, sufficient automation allows for millions of contracts a second, all automatically generated, many relying on layers and layers of hundreds of other automated contracts being executed in real-time. That is, the difference could be as drastic as between computation algorithms for pen-and-paper, and the Internet as we know it now. Will it? No idea, but I think writing contract automation off as 'meh' is as shortsighted as thinking the Internet is basically a faster postal service that can't deliver packages.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

I agree. Similar thing applies to laws in general; I usually compare this "wiggle room" to grease in the gearbox. Without it, the gears of justice will stop turning, or even break down completely. Putting perfect laws as code is essentially a humanlike-AI-complete problem. That is, the necessary code would also have to implicitly and completely implement our intuitions about morality, and the mechanisms behind emotions and suffering. We can't do that, so we need some wiggle room, to enable humans to be humane.

stingraycharles 8y ago
A good example of this concept in action is actually the whole Ethereum / DAO fiasco, where the contract code actually contained a bug. Turns out the bug was not intended to be “binding”, and thus the Ethereum chain was forked to undo any damage of the bug. So seems like even the crypto / smart contract community agrees with this sentiment to some degree, although forking an entire block chain might be somewhat of a crude interpretation of “wiggle room”.
- mrguyorama 8y ago
  The way I understand it, the people behind Ethereum had significant skin in the game, in the form of lots of money/assets that got stolen, and that might have tainted their opinion about what to do
  - yifanl 8y ago
    I recall that a second large theft [1] did not get a hard-fork resolution. Whether it's due to bias from the core team or a wish to stay away from being a final arbitration after the first event, I'm not in a position to judge. [1] https://www.coindesk.com/30-million-ether-reported-stolen-parity-wallet-breach/ https://www.coindesk.com/30-million-ether-reported-stolen-pa...
nsomaru 8y ago
That seems to imply we need two pieces of code for "perfect laws as code": 1) that which writes/defines the laws and 2) that which interprets the prevailing milieu and determines the application of law. Since we're speculating anyways, why not implement the whole system we currently have? Assuming humanlike-AI (heh!), the following services are imaginable: 1 AI Legislature 2 AI Judge 3 AI Lawyers Govt programmers handle (1) and (2), applicants and respondents (or prosecution and defence) handle (3). AI Legislature determines laws according to citizen referendum and policy upon consultation with the the AI Judges. Each AI Lawyer makes arguments to the AI Judge who evaluates each against the law and jurisprudence to arrive at a judgement. Wiggle away! As a final layer which arose out of the Luddite massacres of 2137-40, a group of rubber-stamping human judges at the top serving as final adjudicators and appellate court.

jankotek 8y ago

Absolutely not! There is way too much "wiggle room" when you deal with multiple nationalities, different cultures, foreign languages, jurisdictions... The only thing that is rock solid and predictable is contract written in programming code. But I am not saying that current implementations are best. (disclosure: I worked on ethereum related tech)

hndamien 8y ago
I think there is room for both. Start with very simple contracts first.
Nursie 8y ago
> The only thing that is rock solid and predictable is contract written in programming code. The only code that's 'rock solid and predictable' is code that's been formally proven. Are smart contracts doing that? Further, as described above, even if they were perfectly written every time, they'd still be a poor replacement for human law. We are squishy, imperfect and inconstant, we have legal protections and legal wiggle-room for a lot of reasons.
- jankotek 8y ago
  Some smart contracts (and underlying VM) are formally proven. My former employer invests heavily in that direction. And it is very easy to verify "1+1=2" or "amount + amount X 0.12 X number_of_months". But my point is that meat contracts are very expensive to draft and enforce. It is not worth to sue someone in China over $50.
  - KSteffensen 8y ago
    That suing over legitimate claims is not worth it is an artifact of the legal system, not of the law or contract.
    - mcguire 8y ago
      That suing over (tiny) legitimate claims is not worth it is a feature of the legal system, not a bug.

hitekker 8y ago

Absolutely spot on. Code by itself can capture the letter of the law but never the spirit. On a broader, it seems to me the worship of paper and other proxies like code is borne out of weakness: that is, our fear of our own human nature. We see the animal within ourselves and the world, and so we run away.

tlrobinson 8y ago

I agree most contracts benefit from "wiggle room", however you can build wiggle room into blockchain-enforced smart contracts (e.x. by giving n-of-m arbiters/courts ability to override the outcome), but you can't build absolutely enforced "code as law" on existing legal systems. I don't claim to know how useful this will actually be, but it seems like a potentially interesting new capability.

JoeSmithson 8y ago
There's not many use cases where a purely technical solution has meaningful impact on the world, though. The "code-as-law" will generally have to be supported by "law-as-law" at some point, and that can be overturned arbitrarily. What good is having technical ownership of some private key if your government declares you have to give it over or face jail?
- solveit 8y ago
  For suitably powerful privacy coins, the government shouldn't be able to tell if you used your private key or not. So you claim you lost your private key and spend away. Of course, there has to be an off-ramp into the real world at some point, so all this actually gets you is access to the black market. Opinions may vary on how useful that is, and how much blockchain can succeed if it insists on fighting regulation tooth-and-claw.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    Claiming you lost your key is called contempt in court. Judges generally don't take kindly to that tactic. A lot of people some how think they can "hack" the legal system...it generally doesn't work out so well for them.

balladeer 8y ago

Having dealt with a landlord when I vacated this previous week I would beg to differ :-)

philbarr 8y ago

Except you can still change something if it's on the blockchain, it's just that now you have an immutable record that it was changed. So now if things go wrong, the other party suddenly decides they liked the old contract (which you'd signed) and you have yourself a court battle. If it's on the blockchain you can point to it and say, "yes we signed this old contract but you can tell here we both agreed to change it."

code_duck 8y ago
How does that differ from a standard legal agreement? At any time two parties can make a new agreeement, with or without a court battle. Your immutable record is documents filed with the government on public record.
- dspillett 8y ago
  > How does that differ from a standard legal agreement? > Your immutable record is documents filed with the government For people who don't necessarily trust the current and future government (to be both just and no inept at keeping accurate records), you've answered your own question. > on public record. One of the sales points of blackchain based contracts is that getting your details onto public record, and someone else verifying those details on the records, is easier. And in theory the record is not as easy to corrupt/disrupt/hide/block. Caveat: I'm not more than an intrigued bystander on the whole blockchain thing ATM, so the details as I understand them may be quite wrong.

aaron695 8y ago

> people (for the most part) don't actually want completely and utterly binding contracts. This was a "completely and utterly binding contract" but they changed it cause it was the right thing. Why would a blockchain contract be different?

xorcist 8y ago

That's because you conjure up a picture of complexity, but a contract can be trivial. If I were to swap 10 eur for 12 usd with a counterparty I'd shun any wiggle room in that contract.

beagle3 8y ago
That's true, but let's make it just slightly more complex: Our contract is to swap 10 EUR for whatever it is worth tomorrow in USD according to what "bloomberg.com" gives as the representative rate at 12:34pm. Now, this is easily codified, but ... a) Someone could hijack the "bloomberg dns" b) Someone could hijack bloomberg's BGP both the above would likely be defended by using https, but CAs have been hacked before, and there are questionable state controlled ones. c) Someone could hack inside Bloomberg itself to give the wrong rate d) Bloomberg might have a bug that is struck exactly at 12:34pm on that day, which shows the wrong rate. All these 4 things may happen independently of our contract - Bloomberg is not a side to our agreement, and other actors might have reasons to try to make it give wrong data. In "The real world", if the rate is really off (say, half what you expect), you'd look at Thomson/Reuters and Yahoo, realize Bloomberg is borked, and react accordingly - and a court would likely support that court of action. This is the kind of wiggle room you want, because in the real world, it is impossible to lock down all of these improbable, weird, but possible, outcomes. Contracts that are so simple that there's no potential need for wiggle room aren't very useful. In real world contracts, the more money is involved, the more both sides try to protect themselves against such weirdness; and yet, courts are sometimes involved, either because interpretation is disputed (comparable to "code has underfined behaviour") or due to events not covered in the original contract.

dooglius 8y ago

Speak for yourself! If I am a party to a contract, I don't want the other party to be able to "wiggle" their way out, and I'd certainly give up my ability to in exchange. Especially given the American Rule [0], in a system where contracts can be disputed and modified, someone who has much more monetary and legal resources than I do can effectively force any change in the agreement (though a binding arbitration clause would ameliorate this). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fees) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fe...

pjc50 8y ago
There's an entire genre of stories about deals with the devil or supernatural items ("Monkey's Paw"), where the deal is binding - and the punishment is getting exactly what you asked for.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  There's also a famous play by Shakespeare about whether it's reasonable to hold someone to the letter of a contract...
jfk13 8y ago
That didn't work out so well for Shylock.
xyzzy123 8y ago
It seems to me that the set of useful contracts you can write that are completely unambiguous is very small. Consider an employment contract on a blockchain. There doesn’t seem to be any way to do this without relying extensively on oracles that reflect fuzzy human judgement about what the terms of the contract really mean, let alone whether certain actions took place, let alone whether those met or violated the terms.
- nsomaru 8y ago
  Oracles seem to be a good solution. A lot of the time people just need some boilerplate to conduct a transaction and will need to refer back to the contract in the case of a dispute only. Contract as code allows us to naturally standardise on boilerplate for common cases whilst allowing for specialised code in specialised cases. The 1% of contracts that are disputed could be conditionally successively escalated until human arbitration, settlement or a trial is reached. Oracle reports and contract executes accordingly.

comex 8y ago

A bunch of replies to your comment, but none have (clearly) pointed out that this isn't actually an example of "wiggle room" in action. The mistake was corrected because both parties agreed to change the contract. If they hadn't agreed and the issue had been brought to court, the $400 million number almost certainly would have been enforced. In cases where contract text is ambiguous, unclear, or just self-evidently illogical, the legal system does grant some wiggle room for a judge to try to tease out the intent. But a mere disagreement between the text and some email(s), AFAIK, wouldn't meet that standard. On the other hand, even on the blockchain it's not hard to make a contract amendable with unanimous consent.

Drdrdrq 8y ago
> On the other hand, even on the blockchain it's not hard to make a contract amendable with unanimous consent. This. Both proponents and critics of blockchain often seem to forget that it's just technology. Entities trading on it and performing other actions are still subjects to applicable laws, whether they like it or not.
Radle 8y ago
After the last email said $425 million? Probably only in America.
bunderbunder 8y ago
> even on the blockchain it's not hard to make a contract amendable with unanimous consent. Unanimous consent is nice when it happens, but we typically want the ability to make amendments without unanimous consent, too. Concrete examples: I wouldn't want to use an electronic payment card that doesn't have some sort of chargeback mechanism. My mutual funds want the exchanges they operate on to have some mechanism for busting erroneous trades, and I'm glad that they do. When I check in at a hotel, they want a credit card on file, so that they can charge me if I steal the towels. All of these mechanisms involve retroactively altering the financial terms of a contract in a way that causes one person to lose some money without their consent. For the most part, people agree that this is just and desirable, because they also value fairness. That said, I agree on the point at hand -- I don't think that the example from the story is particularly relevant here.

justonepost 8y ago

And there sometimes we don't want wiggle room, thus the blockchain is good for that.

snowwrestler 8y ago

An example of a contract in which it is useful have wiggle room is hiring a company to build a website for you. The best process for building a website necessarily includes discovery and continuous decision-making about what to build, so a long and prescriptive contract that spells out every product feature on day one will most likely result in a crappy final product and/or a ton of change orders and amendments. Yes, it's possible to change contract language when the parties mutually agree. But in a company with any sort of process around contracts, it will be a pain in the ass to make lots of changes.

JadeNB 8y ago
> An example of a contract in which it is useful have wiggle room is hiring a company to build a website for you. The best process for building a website necessarily includes discovery and continuous decision-making about what to build, so a long and prescriptive contract that spells out every product feature on day one will most likely result in a crappy final product and/or a ton of change orders and amendments. The discussion seems to be about allowing wiggle room in an otherwise 'non-wiggly' contract, which doesn't seem to be the situation you're describing. Your suggestion clearly isn't that the long and prescriptive contract should be drawn up and then repeatedly amended, but presumably is rather that the initial contract itself should provide a mechanism for easy changes; and contracts enforced by technology, like any others, can be created in this way.

scott_s 8y ago

The other part is that contracts are built on civil trust, not technology. I don't think blockchain will ultimately be all that useful because it doesn't solve the trust problem.

mcguire 8y ago

These aren't entirely uncommon in real estate deals. Party A needs some money for some part of the deal, but Party B isn't supposed to pay for that. Party B hands Party A a check, possibly while the real estate lawyer is out of the room making copies or something. It's cute.

Raidion 8y ago
I was really surprised by that when my friend bought his house. It's a sneaky way to get around the fact that the bank won't finance anything that's not secured by the house. So say you are buying a house for 200k, but after the down payment, you don't have the money to redo the kitchen like you wanted. No problem, the seller adds 3k to closing costs and hands you a check for 3k. Your bank hands you a check for 203k, You pay the seller, and suddenly you have 3k that your bank wouldn't finance directly to redo your kitchen.