2 ms·

That's because they are not contracts per se, smart or otherwise. They are autonomous agents that act as your counterparty.

grey-area 5y ago
Wow, that sounds fancy and sounds almost like an AI counterparty when you put it that way. Did you mean counterparty (the other person in the transaction) or trusted third party (the third leg of most transactions, like lawyers who negotiate then witness a deal). My understanding was smart contracts attempt to replace the trusted third party with a trusted system. But are they autonomous and do they really have any agency outside the very limited confines of a scripted response to known situations (like if x happens send x ETH)? Are they able to send contract disputes to arbitration or courts in case of disagreement? If not that doesn't strike me as particularly useful. I do really like the concept of standard contracts though which everyone agrees to just use - could save a lot of lawyer fees on contracts for M&A for example which really should have been standard components plugged together with very little customisation but instead take 6 months of bickering and use copy-pasted contracts inherited from 100 former deals at those lawyers with all sorts of archaic language. If I were in that space I'd be trying to attack that problem and partner with a law firm to take on either very small contracts like wills or very large contracts like M&A in a given vertical.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  I meant as the other "person" in the transaction. I believe Japanese regulators adopted the term "person-to-machine" or "machine-to-machine" transactions in order to describe "smart contracts", as they are not contracts in the legal sense. The reason I called them "autonomous agents" because they don't really fulfill any part of a standard contract. No choice of jurisdiction, no severability clause etc. More of a judge&jury&executioner all in one. They are rather rigid and somewhat limited today, but I'd guess they are autonomous in the sense you can make them nearly unalterable once deployed. I suppose wih time we will be interacting with AI-agents at some point, there are some rather wild projects trying to do just that. It may not strike you as particularly useful, but some decentralized exchanges (uniswap, dydx) that now clear more trading volume than Coinbase, a 100 billion dollar company. This has to mean something. I have no idea if they could ever supercede legal contracts. Maybe in a 100 years.

grey-area 5y ago

Wow, that sounds fancy and sounds almost like an AI counterparty when you put it that way. Did you mean counterparty (the other person in the transaction) or trusted third party (the third leg of most transactions, like lawyers who negotiate then witness a deal). My understanding was smart contracts attempt to replace the trusted third party with a trusted system. But are they autonomous and do they really have any agency outside the very limited confines of a scripted response to known situations (like if x happens send x ETH)? Are they able to send contract disputes to arbitration or courts in case of disagreement? If not that doesn't strike me as particularly useful. I do really like the concept of standard contracts though which everyone agrees to just use - could save a lot of lawyer fees on contracts for M&A for example which really should have been standard components plugged together with very little customisation but instead take 6 months of bickering and use copy-pasted contracts inherited from 100 former deals at those lawyers with all sorts of archaic language. If I were in that space I'd be trying to attack that problem and partner with a law firm to take on either very small contracts like wills or very large contracts like M&A in a given vertical.

inter_netuser 5y ago
I meant as the other "person" in the transaction. I believe Japanese regulators adopted the term "person-to-machine" or "machine-to-machine" transactions in order to describe "smart contracts", as they are not contracts in the legal sense. The reason I called them "autonomous agents" because they don't really fulfill any part of a standard contract. No choice of jurisdiction, no severability clause etc. More of a judge&jury&executioner all in one. They are rather rigid and somewhat limited today, but I'd guess they are autonomous in the sense you can make them nearly unalterable once deployed. I suppose wih time we will be interacting with AI-agents at some point, there are some rather wild projects trying to do just that. It may not strike you as particularly useful, but some decentralized exchanges (uniswap, dydx) that now clear more trading volume than Coinbase, a 100 billion dollar company. This has to mean something. I have no idea if they could ever supercede legal contracts. Maybe in a 100 years.