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This is adorably naive hacker thinking.

I agree with you. If the point of a smart contract is that "code is law" and "judges doesn't make decision, the protocol does", that surely sounds like naive hacker thinking.

If that's not the point of smart contracts then what is a smart contract? How is it different from that thing which we call just "contract"?

So either the smart contracts are just contracts, or they are product of naive hacker thinking.

I think the point is that they bundle together the agreement with the actual execution of the agreement. The execution is performed by public code that everyone can audit and verify for themselves.

No, the adorable naive hacker thinking is that one could actually write a contract that has no room for interpretation (see DAO). There is a very good reason we have judges and lawyers, which is that being 100% un-ambiguous is impossible, and smart contracts are no exception to this rule, only there every ambiguity will allow either one of the contracting parties or an outsider to make off with the loot.

So for now nobody appears to be willing to stand by 'the code is the law'.

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