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Comment by ashtonkem | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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