Written by a former cryptocurrency dev who later joined Lyft.
Some choice quotes:
"Context—and wide margins—are the bedrock of every white paper."
"We’re living in a world where developers are Kickstarting Pets.com every week"
A very smart but non-engineering friend of mine was asking about cryptocurrencies, and - in trying to explain why i think ethereum's "improvements" over bitcoin are anything but - I directed him to read about The DAO.
He promptly rabbit-holed and came up an hour or so later with your gem of a paper.
So ... nice work! A sanskrit professor found, understood, and thoroughly enjoyed the paper. And then hipped his programmer friend to it :)
I seem to recall that there was another more fundamental difference at the blockchain level, was wondering whether there was any link for that ...?
It's the 'smart contracts' that I think are foolish.
Replacing the legal system with code only makes sense if all of the following obtain:
(a) the code is 100% bug-free (b/c accidents cannot be rewound)
(b) all code-writers are 100% honest (their code does what they say)
(c) all contract participants are 100% perfet code readers (so as to not enter into fraudulent contracts)
(Strictly speaking, only one of (b) and (c) needs to be true).
None of these conditions will ever obtain.
(And, actually, even transactions entirely within the blockchain may trigger legal consequences, so even for them you've merely supplemented, rather than replaced, the legal system.)
This is pretty great.