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Time for LawyerCoin (TM). The smart-contract is written in English (or other human language) and the oracles are powered by a bunch of lawyers who pinky swear t

Time for LawyerCoin (TM). The smart-contract is written in English (or other human language) and the oracles are powered by a bunch of lawyers who pinky swear to enforce them. I'm doing ICO next week, if anyone wants in.

whatshisface 5y ago
We can do better than pinky swearing. Each lawyer gets mining fees when they enforce a contract fairly. "Fairly" is defined by consensus, where each lawyer is forced to predict the consensus before voting in a private ballot that is only revealed when the rewards are issued. Lawyers who predict the consensus get rewarded. If you start it off with people who are trying to be fair then predicting fairness will lead to the most reward, and it will keep going until the majority defects. The collective is incentivized to continue being fair because if they weren't, nobody would use their coin, and the rewards issued to fair lawyers would be worthless.
- lisper 5y ago
  That's actually a pretty good idea. I had a similar idea to discourage the gaming of upvotes on sites like HN and Reddit: make each upvote cost a point, but then you get a point for everyone who upvotes after you, divided by the number of votes the item had at the time you upvoted (or something like that). So people who upvote popular stories early, i.e. people who successfully predict what people will like, get rewarded.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    Don't give me too much credit, I stole it straight from https://augur.net/ https://augur.net/ by swapping "truth" with "justice." ;) Fortunately for me the idea blockchain is irrevocable and my theft cannot be reversed.
  - falcor84 5y ago
    But why would we want to encourage such groupthink and discourage dissent?
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      Taking up the OP's side because it's interesting... Some kinds of groupthink are bad (like making an anti-vaccine subreddit that only ever shows articles about vaccine-related industrial accidents, instead of a vaccine subreddit that shows people a truly representative sampling of vaccine knowledge), but other kinds are arguably good (not seeing 4chan nasty stuff on /r/reallycutekittensandpuppies.) Only some group content coordination is filter bubbling, while other times it's filtering.
      - lisper 5y ago
        Yeah, this. A lot of good stuff submitted to HN never gets noticed because there's not much incentive to go through new submissions. It's basically volunteer work, so you get volunteer-quality results. The caliber of volunteer in HN is higher than most sites, but a lot of good stuff still falls through the cracks (like most of the stuff I submit ;-)
- gilgad13 5y ago
  This is good, but distributing the mining fees evenly across all lawyers will result in too low a fee for the work involved. What if, instead, the parties of the contract would each pick a small set of lawyers ("representing" lawyers) to receive their fees for enforcing the contract. Rather than relying solely on the mining lawyers for this contract to participate in consensus (as that number is now small and adversarially motivated), we would expand the consensus pool to all lawyers who participated in sufficiently similar contract enforcement in the past, using their votes on previous enforcements as an immutable record. In this design, determining the threshold for similarity may require the participation of a third-party "oracle" or "judge" component.
- hanniabu 5y ago
  > Lawyers who predict the consensus get rewarded. This is incentivizing what they think will be the most popular verdict vs what they think is the proper verdict. That's a very big difference and failures will be inevitable.
shadowgovt 5y ago
Did you just re-invent law from first principles? ;)
- spicybright 5y ago
  As long as you can pitch it as a new idea to SV, you'll be rolling in it!
notJim 5y ago
This, but unironically.

whatshisface 5y ago

We can do better than pinky swearing. Each lawyer gets mining fees when they enforce a contract fairly. "Fairly" is defined by consensus, where each lawyer is forced to predict the consensus before voting in a private ballot that is only revealed when the rewards are issued. Lawyers who predict the consensus get rewarded. If you start it off with people who are trying to be fair then predicting fairness will lead to the most reward, and it will keep going until the majority defects. The collective is incentivized to continue being fair because if they weren't, nobody would use their coin, and the rewards issued to fair lawyers would be worthless.

lisper 5y ago
That's actually a pretty good idea. I had a similar idea to discourage the gaming of upvotes on sites like HN and Reddit: make each upvote cost a point, but then you get a point for everyone who upvotes after you, divided by the number of votes the item had at the time you upvoted (or something like that). So people who upvote popular stories early, i.e. people who successfully predict what people will like, get rewarded.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  Don't give me too much credit, I stole it straight from https://augur.net/ https://augur.net/ by swapping "truth" with "justice." ;) Fortunately for me the idea blockchain is irrevocable and my theft cannot be reversed.
- falcor84 5y ago
  But why would we want to encourage such groupthink and discourage dissent?
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    Taking up the OP's side because it's interesting... Some kinds of groupthink are bad (like making an anti-vaccine subreddit that only ever shows articles about vaccine-related industrial accidents, instead of a vaccine subreddit that shows people a truly representative sampling of vaccine knowledge), but other kinds are arguably good (not seeing 4chan nasty stuff on /r/reallycutekittensandpuppies.) Only some group content coordination is filter bubbling, while other times it's filtering.
    - lisper 5y ago
      Yeah, this. A lot of good stuff submitted to HN never gets noticed because there's not much incentive to go through new submissions. It's basically volunteer work, so you get volunteer-quality results. The caliber of volunteer in HN is higher than most sites, but a lot of good stuff still falls through the cracks (like most of the stuff I submit ;-)
gilgad13 5y ago
This is good, but distributing the mining fees evenly across all lawyers will result in too low a fee for the work involved. What if, instead, the parties of the contract would each pick a small set of lawyers ("representing" lawyers) to receive their fees for enforcing the contract. Rather than relying solely on the mining lawyers for this contract to participate in consensus (as that number is now small and adversarially motivated), we would expand the consensus pool to all lawyers who participated in sufficiently similar contract enforcement in the past, using their votes on previous enforcements as an immutable record. In this design, determining the threshold for similarity may require the participation of a third-party "oracle" or "judge" component.
hanniabu 5y ago
> Lawyers who predict the consensus get rewarded. This is incentivizing what they think will be the most popular verdict vs what they think is the proper verdict. That's a very big difference and failures will be inevitable.

shadowgovt 5y ago

Did you just re-invent law from first principles? ;)

spicybright 5y ago
As long as you can pitch it as a new idea to SV, you'll be rolling in it!

notJim 5y ago

This, but unironically.