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Right now contracts are enforced by lawyers who can interpret code that is not fully specified. I would guess that hiring a contract developer to create a wate

Right now contracts are enforced by lawyers who can interpret code that is not fully specified. I would guess that hiring a contract developer to create a water-tight contract the computer is capable of understanding would be much more expensive than a lawyer. This is in a similar vein to the fact that it's more expensive to have programmers create a perfect NLP app to translate something than it is to just hire a translator. Translating english into other languages is not a solved problem. Whether that other language is french or a smart contract does'nt seem that material. It does seem like it will be much cheaper to make contracts in bitcoin that don't require translating thousand-line-english-documents into a smart contract. However, you can already do that without a lawyer. If me and you sign a paper saying it's a contract that "I will pay you $200 for an item delivered on date X/Y, and if you're late I pay $20 less per day it's late", that's already legal and enforceable without a lawyer. Coding that same thing in bitcoin would be harder than writing it on a paper still I think.

stocknoob 6y ago
I'm sure creating the first spreadsheet application was more expensive than hiring an accountant. But not doing it 1 million times. Someone will make "contracts as a service" and competition will drive down the cost, until it's nearly free (as spreadsheets are today).
- TheDong 6y ago
  I think there may be a difference. Accountants are humans that are trying to be computers. Smart-contracts are computers trying to be human. Most contracts are flawed and only really matter when things go wrong. I'd rather that a human be there when things go wrong to understand the human intent behind the contract than have a computer which does not know the human intent, but is able to enforce the (likely flawed) computational representation of that intent.
  - stocknoob 6y ago
    That's a tradeoff left to the contractual parties. The same human process that infers ill-specified intent can be corrupted to not execute that intent. If you want a human bootstrap, you hire a lawyer as an oracle which decides whether to process the contract specified in the blockchain.

stocknoob 6y ago

I'm sure creating the first spreadsheet application was more expensive than hiring an accountant. But not doing it 1 million times. Someone will make "contracts as a service" and competition will drive down the cost, until it's nearly free (as spreadsheets are today).

TheDong 6y ago
I think there may be a difference. Accountants are humans that are trying to be computers. Smart-contracts are computers trying to be human. Most contracts are flawed and only really matter when things go wrong. I'd rather that a human be there when things go wrong to understand the human intent behind the contract than have a computer which does not know the human intent, but is able to enforce the (likely flawed) computational representation of that intent.
- stocknoob 6y ago
  That's a tradeoff left to the contractual parties. The same human process that infers ill-specified intent can be corrupted to not execute that intent. If you want a human bootstrap, you hire a lawyer as an oracle which decides whether to process the contract specified in the blockchain.