The author falls into many traps of the law vs code debate. There is a big difference between wet and dry code, as Nick Szabo, the original inventor of 'smart c

The author falls into many traps of the law vs code debate. There is a big difference between wet and dry code, as Nick Szabo, the original inventor of 'smart contracts' put it. Admittedly, it is very stimulating to entertain thoughts in the direction the author takes his description. But in the end it is not a fruitful approach to understand ethereum and other smart contract systems. Law has an open texture. It is deliberately broad and ambiguous to allow specific real life events to be subsumed under the conditions of a given regulation. Legal provisions do not have to be formulated in a natural language. They can be expressed in pictures or even in (pseudo) programming code. What is important is who (or what) parses and interprets the code. Wet code, i.e. legal provisions, are interpreted by humans. Nothing else can (currently) understand the "actual meaning" of a legal provision. Dry code is the opposite in that it is not interpreted by humans but by machines. Smart contracts - the official (but historically inaccurate) name of those programms that are hosted and executed on the ethereum distributed virtual machine - are written in dry code. Ethereum is a 'rich and trusted' execution environment for software. 'Rich' because the ethereum virtual machine has access to a whole bunch of data that carries deep meaning to specific individuals and human society in general (or rather might some day). Trusted because the code execution is performed in a way that is extremely reliable. Whatever the competing interests behind the outcome of a specific computation may be, influence over the network may only be gained through computational resources (and at a later point probably stake/ether) which - in the real world - means economic resources. The achilles heel of a network such as ethereum (and bitcoin) is that "the crypto-economy" needs to stay causally disconnected from the other economy, that uses blockchains as a tool to run trusted fiduciary code (currency, insurance, identity, reputation). "Law vs Code" is a very interesting talk to be had but there is no room for a "doomsday argument". Both are separate but intertwined domains. A fruitful approach to understanding the relationship between code and law may be Luhmann's system theory. [further reading] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann https://medium.com/@heckerhut/smart-contracts-platforms-and-intermediaries-c3d30f5182a6 https://medium.com/@heckerhut/smart-contracts-platforms-and-...