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All of the examples of having to trust the government in this article neglect the fact that trusting the government is not just trusting the government, and it’

by jolux 5y ago

All of the examples of having to trust the government in this article neglect the fact that trusting the government is not just trusting the government, and it’s not just the government storing a deed or giving you a Social Security Number that makes it real. It’s the whole complex web of laws and regulations that created these policies that make them real, and the people (your fellow citizens) who have collectively decided to run society by these rules. Your recourse when somebody runs afoul of these rules is the courts, which you may feel free to criticize, but pretending they don’t exist is just silly.

meken 5y ago
Yes, it seems like we need some kind of crypto police to enforce that people actually do what they say they will do on the blockchain.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
The government encompasses all of those things, so I think when the author says "trust the government", it implies all of those things.
- jolux 5y ago
  Right, but the government is not just some unaccountable third party that sits between you and the rest of society. It is meant to embody the society, and, in a democracy, represent its interests effectively.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    The government, and all of its institutions, are indeed a third party. The government is not some representative of the collective will. Thomas Sowell provides his experience at the Department of Labor in 1960 as a poignant demonstration of the fallacy of that notion: https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38 https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38 Another example would be the latest $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill. It was 1,500 pages long and no legislator read even an appreciable fraction of it. There were provisions in it that the public was discovering a week before it was voted on, like one threatening to classify cryptocurrency nodes as brokers with KYC requirements for any transaction they processed. Apparently Treasury had worked behind the scenes to get this provision in the bill, to give DeFi the Patriot Act treatment: https://twitter.com/jswihart/status/1422785103386669058?s=20 https://twitter.com/jswihart/status/1422785103386669058?s=20
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - nefitty 5y ago
      1500 pages to govern 330 million people. Was there ever a time in history when an individual understood all the laws of a country? The fact that the provision you mentioned was discovered is an argument FOR this system. The fourth and fifth estates need to play precisely this role, of parsing and communicating the actions of government and business. Living up to the unfortunate pun, cryptocurrencies make crypto-fascists giddy. No accountability. No transparency. No arbiters of justice. Every segment of society decouples from accountability to any other: individuals hide from governments, governments hide from the press, business hides from government... What exactly is the argument that you think would make that a worthwhile future to pursue?
      - CryptoPunk 5y ago
        One government should not be governing at such a micro-level for 330 million people. It's absurd and in practice becomes totally corrupt and undemocratic. >>The fact that the provision you mentioned was discovered is an argument FOR this system Being discovered a week before the vote meant that there was no time for all those affected to study its effects, let alone to negotiate an amendment for it, and furthermore, that it came within a hair's breadth of NOT being discovered. Other very worrying provisions were only discovered after the law's passing. >>Living up to the unfortunate pun, cryptocurrencies make crypto-fascists giddy. No accountability. No transparency. No arbiters of justice. Crypto systems are opt in. The government mandates are violently enforced on those who would prefer to opt out. This sophomoric socialist argument that private enterprise is fascist is totally shallow.
    - notahacker 5y ago
      The difficulty of parsing a 1500 page infrastructure bill isn't exactly reduceed by expressing each of its provisions and exceptions in a Turing complete programming language though...
      - 5y ago
  - errantmind 5y ago
    It represents the lowest common denominator of what everyone can agree on. Democracies have problems when that denominator gets really low, but are relatively great when it is high
    - jolux 5y ago
      Yeah. I’m not saying it’s perfect, there may actually be some limited use for blockchain technology, but casting it as an alternative to the modern liberal state beggars belief.
      - CryptoPunk 5y ago
        I don't think many people are suggesting that the blockchain can replace all of the functions of the nation-state. I think the most common sentiment among blockchain advocates is actually closer to your views, of it having utiltiy in specific use-cases.
        dools 5y ago
        This article is suggesting just that
  - infogulch 5y ago
    Yes in theory. In practice, justice is expensive to procure even when you're in the right, and sometimes even then you can lose just by being out-monied. This leads to a more nuanced view of web3 and smart contracts: a way to acquire law-like order in business dealings at a vastly lower cost. Or put yet another way, if lawyers and the government got their act together and used technology to reduce the cost of their services (and actually passed on those savings) then smart contracts would never have been a thing.
    - nefitty 5y ago
      So like, if you don't deliver those shipping containers of hot sauce, I just click the "I was scammed" checkbox on my smart contract dashboard? Where exactly does the leverage of smart contracts come into play? The biggest reason libertarianism is a nonstarter is that it outright rejects the state monopoly on violence. Without a lone arbiter, societies fragment due to intragroup competition and violence. As a society fragments, the size of the monolithic projects it can engage in become smaller and smaller. International trade is already so fragile that a stuck tanker threatens swaths of the entire thing. Now picture how infinitely improbable a system like that is if there's no physical enforcement mechanisms backing contracts up.
      - _fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
        I think you hit the nail on the head. In my experience, if both parties are happy payment isn't really a problem anyway. Trouble always comes up when there is disagreement e.g. buyer claims that the hot sauce is not spicy enough and the seller says it's exactly as spicy as ordered. Now what?
        rdbell 5y ago
        You take the issue to a crypto court which controls the escrowed funds. If the crypto court makes an unfair ruling, you tell everyone to never trust their judgement. Now they’ve lost credibility and nobody will want to escrow funds with them in the future. Whichever court provides the most consistent fair rulings attains the best reputation and becomes the most utilized. By contrast, if government courts make an unfair ruling, they’re still going to be in business tomorrow and there’s nobody that can stop their monopoly on broken justice. Some people might argue that their western country has a fair justice system and that everyone should be glad to be subject to that system. That argument would be overly generous to even the most fair countries, and completely falls flat in the many countries where corruption is rampant.
- pjc50 5y ago
  I think this is kind of a misconception about how unitary the unitary state really is. Which is especially weird coming from America with its zillion decentralized police forces. The government is not necessarily a single entity that behaves with one purpose, that's what allows concepts like an independent judiciary to exist.
dzonga 5y ago
succinctly said. all these web3 / crypto folks forget complex laws exist to prevent and remedy situations that can't be simply solved by smart contracts. most of the laws are so complex, we've professionals who specialise in them.
- westoncb 5y ago
  I think there's also a substantial subset of cases that are simple/common/clear enough to have managed through an automated contract, and being able to cut out the cost of depending on the legal system would be game-changing for many people/projects/etc. So it seems like a good complement, not a replacement.
  - qaq 5y ago
    Yep cause the cost of people who can put together a smart contract without major bugs is peanuts :)
    - westoncb 5y ago
      Fair point :) I was admittedly thinking of more DIY scenarios, but it isn't really fair to only consider how it impacts programmers. OTOH—without knowing many concrete details myself—seems like there would be plenty of room for reuse of contracts? Maybe even something like a storefront where you can grab one that matches your scenario
      - qaq 5y ago
        I think you prob can raise a 10 mil seed round with this idea
      - robbedpeter 5y ago
        As open source successes start to accumulate, the costs will go down. Reuse is incentivized as development on the cryptocurrency as opposed to a perpetually monetized rent extraction by regulators or "professionals."
cormacrelf 5y ago
Democracy solves the Byzantine agreement problem just fine already. I like the aspects of decentralisation that help you preserve democracy, but beyond that it’s not necessary to replace every single aspect of a functioning democracy with a cryptographic commitment scheme. It would be worse if you did. That vision of society sounds terrible. (I can’t comment on this without noting that of all the interpretations of the name web3 I’ve seen so far, “a cryptographic commitment scheme” is the least novel idea, and the least to do with “the web” or anything related to it that I have seen. There is simply no way that is what web3 means. The author is describing smart contracts, and if that’s what it is, it is intellectually dishonest to be promoting “web3” as a new idea when smart contracts have been around for years and have had very little impact on society due to fundamental limitations like “not being capable of adjudication by a court, which is actually desirable and basically non-negotiable for 99% of people and corporations alike”. Talk about whether attempting to put better UX in front of them (a much more plausible definition of web3) is capable of remedying the basic flaws. Otherwise talking about it like this is a dishonest attempt to skirt around the debate that’s largely been had already, much like Facebook rebranding itself just as the PR heat got too much.)
- derefr 5y ago
  > Democracy solves the Byzantine agreement problem just fine already. That’s nice when you and your counterparty are part of the same democracy, or potentially allied ones. But how do you enforce contracts when your government and their government are at war? (The governments say “you shouldn’t; they’re the enemy.” Well, screw the governments, I want to make positive-sum trades in the hopes of increasing global GDP and ratcheting us up out of the need for wars over unevenly-distributed scarce resources in the first place.) All the speculative value of cryptocurrencies is based on their utility in making and fulfilling the terms of contracts, when a government or governments don’t want to — or fundamentally aren’t able to — grant that contract any legal enforceability. And much of the rest of the value derives from the ability of Proof-of-Work mining to be used to convert local export-controlled assets into exportable digital assets. (The whole reason PoW has stuck around as long as it has is that capital flight in China still needs it for a few years yet.)
  - 5y ago
jgilias 5y ago
Also, it's important to realize the core reason why people trust the government with these things. It's because the government has the ability to actually _enforce_ the contracts if required. I mean, having a deed of owning some property on the blockchain is all cool and dandy. Provided that the polity where the property is located recognizes this. Otherwise you're still trespassing.
- fnoof 5y ago
  The example in the article had a way to enforce contract breaking - the person had to put up collateral until the work was done. There’s problems with that particular mechanism, but in general if contracts can automatically decrease someone’s money, reputation, access etc, they can do enforcement.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    No they can't, how could they? How is actionable events in the real world going to be translated without trust to a smart contract except by assessment by a third party?
  - soco 5y ago
    So I have to trust the other party they will report in good faith on my delivered work. How is that trust working for Amazon product reviews? Why would be that net of lies any different for smart contracts?
  - _fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
    All these schemes always still might need some higher authority in the end e.g. who decides when the work is done? Putting up collateral only ensures that someone has the money, it does not ensure that one actually gets the money. Because defining when "the work" is done, can be really complicated in real life projects. Contracts in real life are complicated. Real life is messy etc.
    - throwaway405769 5y ago
      > who decides when the work is done? This is part of the smart contract, which has to explicitly define the conditions on which the collateral is confiscated. Getting real life data reliably into the blockchain is hard, but there are different approaches to solve this.
TekMol 5y ago
Governments constantly break the contracts they sign. Take a look at the Maastricht Treaty and what it says about government debt in the European union. The government broke this treaty that was the basis for the union in the first place. You say "Your recourse when somebody runs afoul of these rules is the courts". For an individual this is not a practical approach. An individual has no way to get back financial stability and to undo the excessive government debt and inflation. The individual who held Euros throughout this process now holds way less buying power than someone who kept their assets out of the reach of governments.
- nudpiedo 5y ago
  Never forgetting the gold standard, that was just scandalous, against their own folk and allies. Not even against enemies, opinion or whatever geopolitical thing... not much margin here for flexible moral. They just do with us whatever they want, and forcing inflation onto the population is just as closed as evil an economy can be against the general interest of the whole population.
  - immibis 5y ago
    This is an ideological position. In reality, economies need money printing, although it comes with its own problems, must be carefully controlled, and since 1971 we have not yet learned the correct way to control it.
astoor 5y ago
I'd also add that one of the big fallacies/deceits of blockchain is that it does not allow trustless transactions as the article author suggests, it simply shifts the trust. In the author's example of gathering funds to renovate a neighbourhood park, you'd still need to trust that the contract developers hadn't made a unfixable bug or deliberate backdoor, you'd still have to trust your neighbours to not screw up when interacting with the smart contract, you'd still need to trust the blockchain platform because if your funds are lost or stolen transactions are by design irreversable and you have no recourse to the law, etc. In pretty much every case, you would be better off without the additional complexity, risks and points of failure of a blockchain solution. What this is really about is that the cryptocurrency enthusiasts distrust authority. They would rather put their trust in anonymous developers, shady mining cartels, exchanges which clearly engage in front running and wash trading, cryptocurrency scheme leaders who are convicted fraudsters, etc. If people genuinely want to put their trust in the less trustworthy, even if for no other reason than trying to get rich quickly, then we have a fundamental problem with our society.
- josaka 5y ago
  True, but there's value in reducing the number of parties you must trust to get something done. It's easy to imagine that, at the margin, there are a subset of collective action problems that will get solved if you can reduce the number of parties that must be trusted. Worrying about the need to sue 3 people has to be better than worrying about the need to sue 6.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    If that were the case, then decentralization would be the explicit opposite: instead of trusting a central party you've got N machines owned by M parties involved, most of whom you couldn't take to court if you wanted if a "smart contract" was misinvoked or a blockchain transaction was screwed up. Sure, most chains require attacks to be 51% or more collusion, but if a 51% attack happened, how many third parties did you trust that you probably can't sue? Millions of machines with thousands of owners? That is by far the opposite of "trust as few parties as possible".
- 5y ago
pennaMan 5y ago
>It’s the whole complex web of laws and regulations that created these policies that make them real, and the people (your fellow citizens) who have collectively decided to run society by these rules. Don't forget the whole violent kidnapping thing your fellow citizens let governments do. The mythology of laws running society is cute but laws are made real by constant threats of violence and caging.
- ogogmad 5y ago
  Your comment is a kind of virtue signalling. What is your alternative? To not jail murderers or thieves? [edit] Just to check if you're serious or not, would you be happy to move next to a prison and then have all the inmates released?
  - mattsahr 5y ago
    To someone with a hammer, every problem is a nail. Web3 seems like it's primarily a horde of crypto-maxis running around hitting every damn thing with a smart contract, and see what sticks. This is, arguably, going to be better than violently caging people, in some circumstances. I take the GF comment to be maybe virtue-signally, but mostly pointing out that our legacy law system has an awwwwwful lot of people in jail. Maybe that jail-shaped hammer is not as useful as you think it is?
    - pennaMan 5y ago
      What is the virtue that I am signaling? Is the ability to have objective opinions outside of the socio-cultural mythology a virtue? To give another perspective on my "the current legal system exclusively works via the use of force" argument, look how effective the legal system is against banks, Google, Facebook, etc where use of forceful caging is not applied.
  - pennaMan 5y ago
    What virtue am I signalling? Are objective observations about how the world and society functions considered some kind of virtue now? I was responding to the argument that "courts" and "fellow citizens" make the legal system work, when in fact courts are just proxies for use of force. Use of force makes the legal system work, everything else around it is just the cushy stories about law, order and justice we cooked up for ourselves to collectively agree with. And this is in stark contrast to how a contract running on the Ethereum VM gets enforced. I am certainly not suggesting we should implement laws against violence like the murderers you mention on a blockchain. I am talking about laws governing financial transactions, companies, and other economic related activities between nonviolent but nonetheless potentially fraudulent actors.
jhanschoo 5y ago
All of the examples of having to trust the whole complex of laws and regulations and people that you mention neglect the fact that crypto doesn't rid you of them: the technology may be willing, but you're still a citizen bound by them, and your use of crypto can be regulated; just like how the technology of paper currency allows it to be transferred from anyone to anyone, but laws exist that make mugging someone else for their paper notes criminal.
Nemi 5y ago
Web3.0 is just one big real world example of Chesterson’s Fence in action. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence
landemva 5y ago
'giving you a Social Security Number' Actually, you or your parents took action to apply for a SSN. No requirement to be American and have the mark. Once you take the mark, it is nearly impossible to undo it.
coldtea 5y ago
>and the people (your fellow citizens) who have collectively decided When did this happen?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
isamuel 5y ago
Law is like a border after a war: a description of where it was that conflicting forces could not advance without retreating somewhere else that mattered more. It is history, not code: it describes where the last conflict ended. Which by the way, I mean: I agree with you

by jolux 5y ago

meken 5y ago

Yes, it seems like we need some kind of crypto police to enforce that people actually do what they say they will do on the blockchain.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

The government encompasses all of those things, so I think when the author says "trust the government", it implies all of those things.

jolux 5y ago
Right, but the government is not just some unaccountable third party that sits between you and the rest of society. It is meant to embody the society, and, in a democracy, represent its interests effectively.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  The government, and all of its institutions, are indeed a third party. The government is not some representative of the collective will. Thomas Sowell provides his experience at the Department of Labor in 1960 as a poignant demonstration of the fallacy of that notion: https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38 https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38 Another example would be the latest $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill. It was 1,500 pages long and no legislator read even an appreciable fraction of it. There were provisions in it that the public was discovering a week before it was voted on, like one threatening to classify cryptocurrency nodes as brokers with KYC requirements for any transaction they processed. Apparently Treasury had worked behind the scenes to get this provision in the bill, to give DeFi the Patriot Act treatment: https://twitter.com/jswihart/status/1422785103386669058?s=20 https://twitter.com/jswihart/status/1422785103386669058?s=20
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - nefitty 5y ago
    1500 pages to govern 330 million people. Was there ever a time in history when an individual understood all the laws of a country? The fact that the provision you mentioned was discovered is an argument FOR this system. The fourth and fifth estates need to play precisely this role, of parsing and communicating the actions of government and business. Living up to the unfortunate pun, cryptocurrencies make crypto-fascists giddy. No accountability. No transparency. No arbiters of justice. Every segment of society decouples from accountability to any other: individuals hide from governments, governments hide from the press, business hides from government... What exactly is the argument that you think would make that a worthwhile future to pursue?
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      One government should not be governing at such a micro-level for 330 million people. It's absurd and in practice becomes totally corrupt and undemocratic. >>The fact that the provision you mentioned was discovered is an argument FOR this system Being discovered a week before the vote meant that there was no time for all those affected to study its effects, let alone to negotiate an amendment for it, and furthermore, that it came within a hair's breadth of NOT being discovered. Other very worrying provisions were only discovered after the law's passing. >>Living up to the unfortunate pun, cryptocurrencies make crypto-fascists giddy. No accountability. No transparency. No arbiters of justice. Crypto systems are opt in. The government mandates are violently enforced on those who would prefer to opt out. This sophomoric socialist argument that private enterprise is fascist is totally shallow.
  - notahacker 5y ago
    The difficulty of parsing a 1500 page infrastructure bill isn't exactly reduceed by expressing each of its provisions and exceptions in a Turing complete programming language though...
    - 5y ago
- errantmind 5y ago
  It represents the lowest common denominator of what everyone can agree on. Democracies have problems when that denominator gets really low, but are relatively great when it is high
  - jolux 5y ago
    Yeah. I’m not saying it’s perfect, there may actually be some limited use for blockchain technology, but casting it as an alternative to the modern liberal state beggars belief.
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      I don't think many people are suggesting that the blockchain can replace all of the functions of the nation-state. I think the most common sentiment among blockchain advocates is actually closer to your views, of it having utiltiy in specific use-cases.
      - dools 5y ago
        This article is suggesting just that
- infogulch 5y ago
  Yes in theory. In practice, justice is expensive to procure even when you're in the right, and sometimes even then you can lose just by being out-monied. This leads to a more nuanced view of web3 and smart contracts: a way to acquire law-like order in business dealings at a vastly lower cost. Or put yet another way, if lawyers and the government got their act together and used technology to reduce the cost of their services (and actually passed on those savings) then smart contracts would never have been a thing.
  - nefitty 5y ago
    So like, if you don't deliver those shipping containers of hot sauce, I just click the "I was scammed" checkbox on my smart contract dashboard? Where exactly does the leverage of smart contracts come into play? The biggest reason libertarianism is a nonstarter is that it outright rejects the state monopoly on violence. Without a lone arbiter, societies fragment due to intragroup competition and violence. As a society fragments, the size of the monolithic projects it can engage in become smaller and smaller. International trade is already so fragile that a stuck tanker threatens swaths of the entire thing. Now picture how infinitely improbable a system like that is if there's no physical enforcement mechanisms backing contracts up.
    - _fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
      I think you hit the nail on the head. In my experience, if both parties are happy payment isn't really a problem anyway. Trouble always comes up when there is disagreement e.g. buyer claims that the hot sauce is not spicy enough and the seller says it's exactly as spicy as ordered. Now what?
      - rdbell 5y ago
        You take the issue to a crypto court which controls the escrowed funds. If the crypto court makes an unfair ruling, you tell everyone to never trust their judgement. Now they’ve lost credibility and nobody will want to escrow funds with them in the future. Whichever court provides the most consistent fair rulings attains the best reputation and becomes the most utilized. By contrast, if government courts make an unfair ruling, they’re still going to be in business tomorrow and there’s nobody that can stop their monopoly on broken justice. Some people might argue that their western country has a fair justice system and that everyone should be glad to be subject to that system. That argument would be overly generous to even the most fair countries, and completely falls flat in the many countries where corruption is rampant.
pjc50 5y ago
I think this is kind of a misconception about how unitary the unitary state really is. Which is especially weird coming from America with its zillion decentralized police forces. The government is not necessarily a single entity that behaves with one purpose, that's what allows concepts like an independent judiciary to exist.

dzonga 5y ago

succinctly said. all these web3 / crypto folks forget complex laws exist to prevent and remedy situations that can't be simply solved by smart contracts. most of the laws are so complex, we've professionals who specialise in them.

westoncb 5y ago
I think there's also a substantial subset of cases that are simple/common/clear enough to have managed through an automated contract, and being able to cut out the cost of depending on the legal system would be game-changing for many people/projects/etc. So it seems like a good complement, not a replacement.
- qaq 5y ago
  Yep cause the cost of people who can put together a smart contract without major bugs is peanuts :)
  - westoncb 5y ago
    Fair point :) I was admittedly thinking of more DIY scenarios, but it isn't really fair to only consider how it impacts programmers. OTOH—without knowing many concrete details myself—seems like there would be plenty of room for reuse of contracts? Maybe even something like a storefront where you can grab one that matches your scenario
    - qaq 5y ago
      I think you prob can raise a 10 mil seed round with this idea
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      As open source successes start to accumulate, the costs will go down. Reuse is incentivized as development on the cryptocurrency as opposed to a perpetually monetized rent extraction by regulators or "professionals."

cormacrelf 5y ago

Democracy solves the Byzantine agreement problem just fine already. I like the aspects of decentralisation that help you preserve democracy, but beyond that it’s not necessary to replace every single aspect of a functioning democracy with a cryptographic commitment scheme. It would be worse if you did. That vision of society sounds terrible. (I can’t comment on this without noting that of all the interpretations of the name web3 I’ve seen so far, “a cryptographic commitment scheme” is the least novel idea, and the least to do with “the web” or anything related to it that I have seen. There is simply no way that is what web3 means. The author is describing smart contracts, and if that’s what it is, it is intellectually dishonest to be promoting “web3” as a new idea when smart contracts have been around for years and have had very little impact on society due to fundamental limitations like “not being capable of adjudication by a court, which is actually desirable and basically non-negotiable for 99% of people and corporations alike”. Talk about whether attempting to put better UX in front of them (a much more plausible definition of web3) is capable of remedying the basic flaws. Otherwise talking about it like this is a dishonest attempt to skirt around the debate that’s largely been had already, much like Facebook rebranding itself just as the PR heat got too much.)

derefr 5y ago
> Democracy solves the Byzantine agreement problem just fine already. That’s nice when you and your counterparty are part of the same democracy, or potentially allied ones. But how do you enforce contracts when your government and their government are at war? (The governments say “you shouldn’t; they’re the enemy.” Well, screw the governments, I want to make positive-sum trades in the hopes of increasing global GDP and ratcheting us up out of the need for wars over unevenly-distributed scarce resources in the first place.) All the speculative value of cryptocurrencies is based on their utility in making and fulfilling the terms of contracts, when a government or governments don’t want to — or fundamentally aren’t able to — grant that contract any legal enforceability. And much of the rest of the value derives from the ability of Proof-of-Work mining to be used to convert local export-controlled assets into exportable digital assets. (The whole reason PoW has stuck around as long as it has is that capital flight in China still needs it for a few years yet.)
- 5y ago

jgilias 5y ago

Also, it's important to realize the core reason why people trust the government with these things. It's because the government has the ability to actually _enforce_ the contracts if required. I mean, having a deed of owning some property on the blockchain is all cool and dandy. Provided that the polity where the property is located recognizes this. Otherwise you're still trespassing.

fnoof 5y ago
The example in the article had a way to enforce contract breaking - the person had to put up collateral until the work was done. There’s problems with that particular mechanism, but in general if contracts can automatically decrease someone’s money, reputation, access etc, they can do enforcement.
- XorNot 5y ago
  No they can't, how could they? How is actionable events in the real world going to be translated without trust to a smart contract except by assessment by a third party?
- soco 5y ago
  So I have to trust the other party they will report in good faith on my delivered work. How is that trust working for Amazon product reviews? Why would be that net of lies any different for smart contracts?
- _fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
  All these schemes always still might need some higher authority in the end e.g. who decides when the work is done? Putting up collateral only ensures that someone has the money, it does not ensure that one actually gets the money. Because defining when "the work" is done, can be really complicated in real life projects. Contracts in real life are complicated. Real life is messy etc.
  - throwaway405769 5y ago
    > who decides when the work is done? This is part of the smart contract, which has to explicitly define the conditions on which the collateral is confiscated. Getting real life data reliably into the blockchain is hard, but there are different approaches to solve this.

TekMol 5y ago

Governments constantly break the contracts they sign. Take a look at the Maastricht Treaty and what it says about government debt in the European union. The government broke this treaty that was the basis for the union in the first place. You say "Your recourse when somebody runs afoul of these rules is the courts". For an individual this is not a practical approach. An individual has no way to get back financial stability and to undo the excessive government debt and inflation. The individual who held Euros throughout this process now holds way less buying power than someone who kept their assets out of the reach of governments.

nudpiedo 5y ago
Never forgetting the gold standard, that was just scandalous, against their own folk and allies. Not even against enemies, opinion or whatever geopolitical thing... not much margin here for flexible moral. They just do with us whatever they want, and forcing inflation onto the population is just as closed as evil an economy can be against the general interest of the whole population.
- immibis 5y ago
  This is an ideological position. In reality, economies need money printing, although it comes with its own problems, must be carefully controlled, and since 1971 we have not yet learned the correct way to control it.

astoor 5y ago

I'd also add that one of the big fallacies/deceits of blockchain is that it does not allow trustless transactions as the article author suggests, it simply shifts the trust. In the author's example of gathering funds to renovate a neighbourhood park, you'd still need to trust that the contract developers hadn't made a unfixable bug or deliberate backdoor, you'd still have to trust your neighbours to not screw up when interacting with the smart contract, you'd still need to trust the blockchain platform because if your funds are lost or stolen transactions are by design irreversable and you have no recourse to the law, etc. In pretty much every case, you would be better off without the additional complexity, risks and points of failure of a blockchain solution. What this is really about is that the cryptocurrency enthusiasts distrust authority. They would rather put their trust in anonymous developers, shady mining cartels, exchanges which clearly engage in front running and wash trading, cryptocurrency scheme leaders who are convicted fraudsters, etc. If people genuinely want to put their trust in the less trustworthy, even if for no other reason than trying to get rich quickly, then we have a fundamental problem with our society.

josaka 5y ago
True, but there's value in reducing the number of parties you must trust to get something done. It's easy to imagine that, at the margin, there are a subset of collective action problems that will get solved if you can reduce the number of parties that must be trusted. Worrying about the need to sue 3 people has to be better than worrying about the need to sue 6.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  If that were the case, then decentralization would be the explicit opposite: instead of trusting a central party you've got N machines owned by M parties involved, most of whom you couldn't take to court if you wanted if a "smart contract" was misinvoked or a blockchain transaction was screwed up. Sure, most chains require attacks to be 51% or more collusion, but if a 51% attack happened, how many third parties did you trust that you probably can't sue? Millions of machines with thousands of owners? That is by far the opposite of "trust as few parties as possible".
5y ago

pennaMan 5y ago

>It’s the whole complex web of laws and regulations that created these policies that make them real, and the people (your fellow citizens) who have collectively decided to run society by these rules. Don't forget the whole violent kidnapping thing your fellow citizens let governments do. The mythology of laws running society is cute but laws are made real by constant threats of violence and caging.

ogogmad 5y ago
Your comment is a kind of virtue signalling. What is your alternative? To not jail murderers or thieves? [edit] Just to check if you're serious or not, would you be happy to move next to a prison and then have all the inmates released?
- mattsahr 5y ago
  To someone with a hammer, every problem is a nail. Web3 seems like it's primarily a horde of crypto-maxis running around hitting every damn thing with a smart contract, and see what sticks. This is, arguably, going to be better than violently caging people, in some circumstances. I take the GF comment to be maybe virtue-signally, but mostly pointing out that our legacy law system has an awwwwwful lot of people in jail. Maybe that jail-shaped hammer is not as useful as you think it is?
  - pennaMan 5y ago
    What is the virtue that I am signaling? Is the ability to have objective opinions outside of the socio-cultural mythology a virtue? To give another perspective on my "the current legal system exclusively works via the use of force" argument, look how effective the legal system is against banks, Google, Facebook, etc where use of forceful caging is not applied.
- pennaMan 5y ago
  What virtue am I signalling? Are objective observations about how the world and society functions considered some kind of virtue now? I was responding to the argument that "courts" and "fellow citizens" make the legal system work, when in fact courts are just proxies for use of force. Use of force makes the legal system work, everything else around it is just the cushy stories about law, order and justice we cooked up for ourselves to collectively agree with. And this is in stark contrast to how a contract running on the Ethereum VM gets enforced. I am certainly not suggesting we should implement laws against violence like the murderers you mention on a blockchain. I am talking about laws governing financial transactions, companies, and other economic related activities between nonviolent but nonetheless potentially fraudulent actors.

jhanschoo 5y ago

All of the examples of having to trust the whole complex of laws and regulations and people that you mention neglect the fact that crypto doesn't rid you of them: the technology may be willing, but you're still a citizen bound by them, and your use of crypto can be regulated; just like how the technology of paper currency allows it to be transferred from anyone to anyone, but laws exist that make mugging someone else for their paper notes criminal.

Nemi 5y ago

Web3.0 is just one big real world example of Chesterson’s Fence in action. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence

landemva 5y ago

'giving you a Social Security Number' Actually, you or your parents took action to apply for a SSN. No requirement to be American and have the mark. Once you take the mark, it is nearly impossible to undo it.

coldtea 5y ago

>and the people (your fellow citizens) who have collectively decided When did this happen?

deleted 5y ago
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isamuel 5y ago

Law is like a border after a war: a description of where it was that conflicting forces could not advance without retreating somewhere else that mattered more. It is history, not code: it describes where the last conflict ended. Which by the way, I mean: I agree with you