That's not reason; it's emotion. A smart contract is pure reason (i.e., logic); if one misunderstands a contract, then the error is one's own, not the contract's. And if others say, 'that's not fair: give him back his money!' then that's just emotion.
I'm not downplaying emotion (indeed, I think that as a mover in human affairs it's far more powerful than reason); I'm just arguing for clarity in words.
The process of engineering requires trying something, failing, learning from the mistake, and reiterating.
Logic meant something like spoken word in the original Greek language, it eventually evolved into something close to reason, which is:
> the mental powers concerned with forming conclusions, judgments, or inferences. - Dictionary.com
so I certainly agree they are != and actually find the parent's definition of reason quite unreasonable.
edit: While the code itself will be difficult to write and have issues, much of what will really be the problem is how oracles use logic/reason to propogate settlement distinctions. The key problems are:
* creating a bulletproof contract [touched on above]
* tx/rx of the settlement information from the oracle's interpretation.
* interpreting the oracle's interpretation
* settling
Being able to opt out of the legal system would result in private "security" forces with the legal right to hold you upside down by the ankles and shake until you pay up (but, hey, the interest rate was better than the payday loan company that didn't make you sign away your rights, so you took the one with the opt-out). The result would be something out of "Snow Crash." Or a TV sketch:
But sometimes people really do know what they're doing with the code. Courts are slower than code, let the experts opt out.
You can't "opt in" to a system that exerts coercive power (in the dictionary-definition sense) over everyone in a jurisdiction. You are already in. The system will not let you out, because that would interfere with other civil and criminal processes (for example, bankruptcy proceedings) and in doing so harm society as a whole.
The purpose was to only rely on the code, and to never have to worry about subjective things like judges and the interpretation of the law.
If the code of a smart contract isn't "the law of the land" and you have to rely on messy things like the courts, then smart contracts are useless and you may as well just create a regular contract.
Bitcoin has done a pretty good job of being irreversible, despite all the illegal stuff that happens on it, and how much I'm sure all the governments would LOVE to shut it down.
But then, once a situation arises where code goes against logic, and where law goes against ethics, we should be able to override the artifact in favor of the model. This is where most libertarian utopias advocating a purely contract-enforced society fail.
That is in my opinion the reason why we shouldn't try to implement logic into a cryptographic blockchain. Blockchain already has a tremendous value as a safe event sourcing tool.
Hopefully no single person lost anything more that whatever they're willing to part with in a very-high-risk thrill investment.
As far as contracts and fairness goes, Judges DO TAKE fairness into consideration ALL THE TIME. If these smart contracts ever make it mainstream (and that's a big IF), gaming the system through loopholes won't be a sure-thing regardless of how much "pure logic" (smirk) is involved.
Pure logic is enough? Doesn't logic tell us this isn't the case? Isn't the Ripoff Problem reducible to the Halting Problem?
EDIT: Thinking on this a bit more, I have to conclude: No. But it's orders of magnitude worse!
That is to say they're imperfect and require human intervention to uphold intent when abstractions are incorrectly implemented over lower levels.
After all, otherwise we'll never truly be able to build very autonomous networks due to humans halting them all the time to reset some part of them.
In fact, I even think that should be the default for blockchains, letting the code be canonical, the authoritive source.
The better solution IMHO is to allow people to opt in to legal authority by declaring that a given human contract is the canonical declaration of intent, with the code declared as a tool built to help enforce it.
This way you also drop the uncertainty and ambiguity in meaning of the code and in most of the marketing, when you always have a primary document declaring what it is you're dealing with.
This will literally never happen, as it's the prerogative of the state to decide that circumstances that flatly override contracts - for example, bankruptcy (and specific things that are and aren't enforceable in regards to it), or nullifying of contracts by minors.