Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

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The problem isn't the technology but the problems around legality and implementation and who it disrupts.

The immediate problem is that an "automatic" contract circumvents the regular legal system and thus is going to be ... not-legal. The larger problem is that this is how things should be.

That the regular system isn't automatic but rather includes considerations of intentions and individuals involves is not a bug but a feature, an extremely important feature (the non-enforceability of unconscionable contracts is pretty important today [1]). Unbreakable contracts open the door for unlimited abuses (how does an automatic contract system prevent contracts for illegal activity? Given legality is going to continue to depend on intentions, etc).

The Etherium Fork illustrated all this and essentially discredited the approach.

Also, it can take a while for successful tech to be successful. But there's also the tech that people spend years trying to get going without success.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability

The US might default. People still invest in the USD.

Sure everything can fall apart, nothing is perfect. But it doesn't need to be perfect to be useful.

The blockchain is, directly and indirectly, undermining nation states so I am under no illusion that it will be easy peasy spread.

But why should that ever be a bigger problem than spending millions of dollars on all sorts of foundational research that never goes anywhere?

Opportunity cost.

This is an excellent point. I've been looking into blockchain as used in supply chain integrity. Here is a company currently doing it: https://www.provenance.org/whitepaper I have been wondering about how this will circumvent the diminishing scope of regulations in the US food and textile industries, and how this will present much better provenance data for the principled consumer and how this might disrupt current interests of US corporations. This would be great for the consumer, but bad for the corporations' bottom line. I can see it somehow being legally derailed via what you just outlined since it could direct consumers to better options hurting the profits of corporations who paid hefty lobbying sums. I hope this won't be the case, because I like the use of blockchain to help with supply chain integrity. It is a path toward sustainability in an increasingly hostile-to-sustainability market.

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