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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

I would add one more point: even if both participants in a contract fully understand and agree to the contract, the contract could still be thrown out under contract law for many reasons -- unconscionability, agreement to commit a crime, etc.

If Ethereum becomes popular enough, one day the participants in an Ethereum contract are going to sue each other, and the judge is not going to be impressed by arguments that the contract is intended to be immutable. You can't opt out of contract law just by saying that you opt out of contract law.

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Right. Ethereum is just a medium for recording a contractual agreement. Using ethereum should not make contracts any more enforceable in the eyes of the law.

In many cases I would assume the opposite will occur: plaintiffs will claim that there was no contract formation because because the technical mumbo-jumbo of computer code is incomprehensible to a layman.

I suspect that courts will react quite favorably to this argument seeing as how they have a natural interest in maintaining their jurisdiction.

I'm just amazed that people want to cut the courts out of jurisdiction over contracts. The courts are a legal recourse if you get screwed.

Why give up those rights and let a computer program (or rather, it's creators) dictate that you're screwed if you make a mistake? I mean, contract law exists because that kind of strict arrangement proved unsatisfactory in real life in the past.

The legal mumbo-jumbo of written contract is also incomprehensible to lay people..

Ok, and now what if the two parties are anonymous or one lives in Russia?

In that case the judge can't do shit.

If you want the protections of courts, there is already a perfectly easy way to do that. And that is to use a real contract.

But if you explicitly do NOT want that, and explicitly DO want code to be law, that is what ethereum is for.

a judge can't take away the crytocurrencies of some anonymous other party.

> Ok, and now what if the two parties are anonymous or one lives in Russia?

> In that case the judge can't do shit.

In the latter case, I'm pretty sure that (even leaving aside other mechanisms that might apply), judges and courts exist in Russia. Agreements where the parties are based indifferent countries have long been a thing, and long been enforceable by courts.

Unmasking anonymous parties, obviously, can be (though it is not always, even where it must be done) a prohibitive burden to legal action, OTOH.

They may be enforceable but for many cases, it's just not cost effective to pursue legal action.

If we enter a contract that we all know is intended to be immutable, why would a judge not enforce that? I can understand buried and obfuscated immutability clauses, but if the parties know exactly what they're getting into, the parameters of justice are contained.

the parameters of justice are contained

It just doesn't work like this.

Thank you for this.

I guess that settles it then!

We (tech geeks) tend to think of situations like this as analogous to code, where the local declaration supercedes the global one. We see a specific investment platform with specific terms and rules and our gut says those override more general ideas about how it should work because they're more immediate to the context.

But civil society is the opposite: Contracts cannot violate the law; the law cannot violate the constitution. The justice system would care about the terms of the DAO only insofar as those terms fail to conflict with the law, which includes a massive body of precedent in contracts and torts.

There can be an immutable smart contract which is in compliance with the law (though you have to be more specific with which law, but for these purposes I know we mean US law).

Point being, immutability is not sufficient to demonstrate that a contract is in conflict with the law.

But it's impossible to prove that a smart contract (or any contract, for that matter) is in compliance with the law until it goes in front of a judge and all possible appeals have been exhausted, and that's what matters here.

Judges throw out contracts that both parties agreed to on a regular basis, even if both parties knew exactly what they were getting in to.

Agreement is not the only prerequisite for a legally enforceable contract. The contract also needs to avoid certain unenforceable things like unconscionable clauses, or agreements to do things that are illegal.

> why would a judge not enforce that?

Because the purpose of a judge is to interpret the law, not enforce Ethereum software invariants.

Every single second, mountains of new information becomes relevant. Parties cannot know what they are getting into, because they cannot see the future. They can only make assumptions.

But that's basically obvious to anyone not hinging their personal identities on peddling technocratic revolution.

But history is full of successful unmodified contracts despite non-omniscient actors.

History is full of everything.

Omniscience has never been a requisite for mutual material success.

Neither have contracts.

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