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Comment by Tinyyy | Hacker News Reader

You can already create legal contracts easily - sign on a piece of paper. This piece of paper is interpreted by a relatively robust legal system with a long history. How is Ethereum going to do better than that if a disagreement is settled not by inspecting the code, but by the opinion of an arbitrary community of miners?

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> Ethereum going to do better than that if a disagreement is settled not by inspecting the code, but by the opinion of an arbitrary community of miners?

Ethereum can guarantee that the sum total of the enforcement costs will always be a few pre-paid pennies (or fraction of a penny) and not the hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands it costs to enforce a contract in a traditional legal system- Even if the community steps in, this will be the case.

(This ignores the fact that ethereum has applications that go well beyond legal contracts)

Ethereum cannot guarantee anything about enforcement costs if the real-life courts get involved. They have jurisdiction, and will definitely end up being involved if two parties to an Ethereum contract sue each other in real life. Ethereum does not exist in some kind of alternate reality outside of the legal system and contract law.

Sure, but by the same token, if Ethereum effectively automates the 1) specification and 2) execution of contracts in the vast majority of cases, then the expected probability of ending up in a courtroom falls compared to doing transactions elsewhere.

Unfortunately, it's still too early to say whether that will happen or not.

I always read this "few pre-paid pennies" statement, but that does not seem to include energy cost and carbon footprint of the miners doing proof-of-work?

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