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“When people tell you that cryptocurrency will enable smart contracts on the blockchain that supersede traditional court systems and automate trust, allowing fr

by kgwgk 7y ago

“When people tell you that cryptocurrency will enable smart contracts on the blockchain that supersede traditional court systems and automate trust, allowing frictionless commerce with no need for archaic subjective state justice systems, remember the time people asked the police to dig up a corpse to ask it who stole their Bitcoins!”

yarrel 7y ago
Yes it's a great example of how not using those systems leads to problems. "Not your keys, not your coins" is an old cryptocurrency motto. Would-be critics of cryptocurrency seem to be slowly rediscovering it.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  The very first paragraph of the section on Quadriga is about that: "For a while Bitcoin people got really into putting their Bitcoins in “cold storage” on hardware wallets disconnected from the internet, etching the private keys for the wallets on metal plates, and burying the plates in their backyards. Because Bitcoin was the future of money, see, and the future of money is burying metal in your backyard." You don't of course need crypto to bury precious metal in a secret spot. You could call it "security through obscurity"...
jkoudys 7y ago
I'm CTO of a legal tech company, and we've set pretty realistic goals: define a good schema to describe contracts, link them to relevant knowledge, and track how they change over time like git. We use some NLP for figuring out how a contract is structured and identifying clauses. The number of competitors we saw start up 2+ years ago, promising a fully-automated lawyer, predicting outcomes to cases, building smart-contracts that would somehow be perfect and not ever be contested or need to keep up with case law, getting funded was shocking. Less shocking is how many of them I've seen collapse under their utterly unworkable premise over the past 6 months. Worst part is, this is actually bad for us, because all the baseless hype has eroded trust in the industry.
- woodnich 7y ago
  Just curious - what company is that?

by kgwgk 7y ago

yarrel 7y ago

Yes it's a great example of how not using those systems leads to problems. "Not your keys, not your coins" is an old cryptocurrency motto. Would-be critics of cryptocurrency seem to be slowly rediscovering it.

perl4ever 7y ago
The very first paragraph of the section on Quadriga is about that: "For a while Bitcoin people got really into putting their Bitcoins in “cold storage” on hardware wallets disconnected from the internet, etching the private keys for the wallets on metal plates, and burying the plates in their backyards. Because Bitcoin was the future of money, see, and the future of money is burying metal in your backyard." You don't of course need crypto to bury precious metal in a secret spot. You could call it "security through obscurity"...

jkoudys 7y ago

I'm CTO of a legal tech company, and we've set pretty realistic goals: define a good schema to describe contracts, link them to relevant knowledge, and track how they change over time like git. We use some NLP for figuring out how a contract is structured and identifying clauses. The number of competitors we saw start up 2+ years ago, promising a fully-automated lawyer, predicting outcomes to cases, building smart-contracts that would somehow be perfect and not ever be contested or need to keep up with case law, getting funded was shocking. Less shocking is how many of them I've seen collapse under their utterly unworkable premise over the past 6 months. Worst part is, this is actually bad for us, because all the baseless hype has eroded trust in the industry.

woodnich 7y ago
Just curious - what company is that?