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Comment by sharkweek | Hacker News Reader

My moral compass would get real wobbly if I had (insert some unfathomable number here) in my bank account following an acquisition.

Probably not a great thing to confess to but I doubt I’d find myself caring what my acquirer was doing with their new real estate.

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Those who say they can’t be bought are either saints (rare), or have never had a reasonable chance of being offered their price.

Most humans will get very morally flexible once offered enough resources; this is precisely why we have contracts and courts, to create structural systems more capable of upholding agreements than individual humans can do alone.

It's also why we have immutable smart contracts on the blockchain. Can't be evil > don't be evil

Immutability doesn't actually solve much in the way of real-world problems. Most contract lawsuits don't concern accusations of secretly forging altered contracts, or any disparity between copies: they concern interpretations. And if you've ever read a typical boilerplate contract for most any serious transaction, you'll see they cover "if-then" situations about as much as can be reasonably be done.

Explain the mechanism by which a smart contract in this instance would both have made it impossible for Facebook to make this move and, if they did anyway, avoided the necessity of Palmer to sue them over it.

Blockchain contracts definitely do not somehow preclude "evil", for almost any reasonable definition of evil. They preclude forgery and very specific categories of fraud — but beyond that the sky is the limit.

It's auditable, open source, and immutable. It's neutral. Neither good nor evil. It's your responsibility or the community's responsibility to audit the code and assess the risks.

So is a contract written in legalese English.

That's great at and all, but I honestly don't understand how that would help in this situation. Unless you write something absurd like "Mark Zuckerberg's stock will be transferred to Palmer Luckey if this promise is broken", which just about no one in Mark's position would agree to, how are you going to actually prevent something like this from happening?

edit: and as ComputerGuru stated - such a clause can just as easily be put into a traditional contract

Will a blockchain contract block FB from committing the code in the Occulus software that requires to login in Facebook?

I guess it won't, so...

And this is why blockchains will never replace courts.

The problem with block chain is it requires the whole stack be on chain (at least if it is to be referenced in a contract). If that's the case, then you can definitely do this. E.g. a smart contract that represents the login functionality and you can hard-code it has to be some other immutable contract, and can't be changed to FB login.

On second thought, the whole issue is weird because blockchain doesn't have a login concept.

Serious question - how do blockchain contracts enforce real world constraints?

Say I sell you some rope and as part of our contract I say that it shouldn't be used to execute people and you go and use it to hang someone.

How would you even go about expressing that in the world of a blockchain?

How does the blockchain world get to know that you have broken your side of the contract.

How does a blockchain contract enforce penalties for breaking a contract?

This is known as the “oracle problem”; actually getting the correct real world inputs into an immutable smart contract is a serious hurdle to adoption.

If you pay attention to most smart contract pitches, they polite side step this issue.

Humans are still humans.

Or have never been in a situation where their mother, father, or themself has a serious medical condition requiring over $1,000,000 and many years of fighting to treat it. "I can't be bought" is a failure of imagination.

This is either never or very rarely the case in the developed world outside the US.

This is very rarely the case outside the US.

I put the "developed world" declaimer as I figured in some poor countries you wouldn't be able to get good treatment without paying for it but I imagine even then you will not pay as much as in the US.

In Western Europe such things are generally free.

Generally free or not available at all to that specific patient, no? At least from the publicly funded system; some Western European countries also allow private practice of medicine where the availability criteria are different.

If it's a treatment that is required for the patient to survive it will generally be available & free. E.g. getting cancer treatments here will be free & almost certainly expensive in the US (even with insurance they will find something the insurance doesn't cover, and/or will charge you for stuff like ambulance rides).

There may be some rare exceptions where you'd be able to pay a lot of money in the US for some experimental treatment not yet available in the public EU system but this is the exception not the rule. What you possibly won't get for free are non-critical treatments.

I will give one declaimer though that I live in Germany & the healthcare system is not in the same quality/extensiveness throughout the EU (the German system is among the best).

It is a failure of imagination to think that everything can be bought. Many things do not have a monetary equivalent.

Some things cannot be bought. Many things have a monetary equivalent, though.

As would most people, so I wouldn't lose sleep over it. The big mistake is to try to pull the wool over the users' eyes knowing full well he would lose control over that and so was in absolutely no position to promise anything.

If you take GP at face value he didn't intentionally pull the wool over people's eyes. He was just rather naive.

GP has since started a defense contractor. I highly doubt this is a naive person.

That's a non sequitur and your viewpoint is vindictive, uncharitable, and unreasonable.

Palmer Luckey was in his very early 20s and had never been involved in an acquisition before. He acknowledged his mistake and his explanation makes complete sense. Even much more experienced people are prone to making this kind of mistake in the honeymoon period of an acquisition.

No kidding. I'm shocked that all these perfect and wildly successful people even have time to post on hacker news :p

Can you explain the leap from someone starting a defense contractor to them not being naive a few years earlier in their life about corporate acquisitions?

Without commenting on this situation, if you're worried about selling something to a large entity who might later change their mind about how they use your thing, you don't usually start selling to militaries.

Sorry, who's GP?

Grandparent - In this context, that’s Palmer Luckey.

It's probably real easy to tell yourself you'll donate a couple million to charities that try to help with actual horrific things and that's way more important than some people having to use a different account/login system for their new luxury game system.

Who knows, maybe some (small amount) of people in similar positions actually follow through afterwards and do that.

There's (at least) two reasons why they call it "fuck you money"...

There is nothing immoral about a lawful business transaction to purchase a VR company. If this device required some signing of an EULA that has given away all your consumer rights then the onus is on you, no one forced you to buy it and many organisations and individuals have been warning about these business practices unheeded.

As an anecdotal example, many companies are now using instagram for image hosting that pester/ requires me to sign up. I say no thank you and move on, I'm not adversely affected but maybe that company loses some business.

I bought a Rift and I knew the risks. I wanted to try it and in case I don't like it, at least I didn't spend too much money compared to competitors. I hate their app, you cannot even uninstall it by conventional means (you have to do it withing the app).

Headsets are not cheap, but I am not really crying for not attaching it to my PC ever again. I just wonder who would want to develop against that environment. Not that there was that much available as it is.

You bought a thing with a certain agreement then the agreement is changed under you . Will they reimburse the buyers? If not, then this is nuts and immoral.

If they do reimburse you, then it's just scary. The fact an unscrupulous entity like Facebook have such a strong hold in people life and business, opinions and privacy is a recipe for an Orwellian future (present?)

Virtual reality is the next frontier of cyberspace, a much more engulfing and immersive (if successful), I don't want Facebook to have so much power.

Did they change the EULA? Do we have the info to make that claim?

Even more interesting is I can remember having many a conversation about which headset to buy, always stating avoid oculus because facebook and yet the person buys oculus anyway only to later complain profusely about having a VR headset from facebook. In recent years this seems to be a problem, likely with current generations. Capitalism fails when you don’t exercise your freedom to make smart purchase decisions. If you don’t want facebook to have so much power stop buying them, stop using them, get your friends and family off and make them actually work for their customers.

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