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Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

This armchair legal theory is rather pleasantly eviscerated by Matt Levine today on Bloomberg.[1] In short, you do not get immunity from real world contract law with a one paragraph disclaimer.

[1] "Blockchain Company's Smart Contracts Were Dumb" http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/blockchain...

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I'm really confused. So Slock.it (DAO) made their "customers" sign a contract/terms that contradicted their marketing of the DAO. Because the marketing takes precedence the contract would likely be declared invalid in a court. Usually when a contract is declared invalid it's because it tricks the customers and benefits the creators of the contract, but in this case the invalidation seems to benefit both.

However, what if I actually read the contract and only became "a customer" because of the content of the contract?

It seems weird if it would be my responsibility as a customer to verify that they didn't advertise the content of the contract is misleading ways elsewhere.

So you're asking what if a customer signs a contract with hidden fatally exploitable flaws, but that is the reason why they signed it? It's a nonsensical scenario. The general investor population does not intend to enter into such contracts, and that is who contract law seeks to protect.

But what if they market only to those who do?

What if I walk into an "all you can eat" buffet and I have a digestive disorder that enables me to eat hundreds of pounds of foods in one hour?

Am I liable for taking too much food?

Quote from the article:

"You can't really base the financial system of the future on computers rather than humans, on trusting to immutable code no matter what happens. Financial systems are supposed to work for humans. If the code rips off the humans, something has gone wrong."

Isn't that what HFT is doing all the time ;)?

Aren't the blog post and the journalist both non-lawyers? How do you decide who is right. They both make good points.

"eviscerated" seems a bit too strong, when two non-experts are arguing on the internet regarding any topic.

The journalist is a former lawyer and Wall Street banker[0]:

> [Levine] has worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. He spent a year clerking for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and taught high school Latin. Levine has a bachelor's degree in classics from Harvard University and a law degree from Yale Law School. He lives in New York.

If you want to understand finance and law from the perspective of an expert in both who also takes an interest in tech, I would highly recommend going back and reading his articles[1]. He's a very prolific writer on Bloomberg View and has previously written several articles on Bitcoin, Ethereum, the blockchain, and related topics[2,3,4].

0: http://www.bloomberg.com/view/contributors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matth...

1: http://www.bloomberg.com/view/contributors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matth...

2: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-17/blockchai...

3: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-23/bailout-f...

4: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-31/complianc...

Some of the lawyers in here are making highly dubious arguments. This is an area no one has expertise in, yet.

Previous discussion on HN - not sure why it got killed as a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11926084

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