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Comment by jlrubin | Hacker News Reader

It's always fair to call someone out on the ethics of their work, but I don't think this is a particularly effective or positive way of engaging the creator.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for guidelines on HN comment expectations.

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I can't see my comment violating the linked guidelines.

My comment on smart contracts is detailed and well supported.

Of course it's an ethical critique. Ethical criticism can't be "positive" in some feel-good sense. All you can say if you think X is wrong is "Don't do X, please" or "how do you justify X".

Edit: the parent said "I would be more than happy to answer any questions here" and I asked a question. Now, the unstated assumption might have been technical questions about the project. But if we were operating by smart contracts and the overt request was "any questions", then the system would have to accept the comment. Something to thing about.

I disagree 100%, there is a lot of negativity in these comments and the downvotes seem to validate this.

I think problem is that your argument seems to come from a prior point of view, and doesn't assume good faith on the behalf of people working on smart contract problems (declaring them in whole fundamentally unethical). I would suggest that a better way to pose your point of view would be to ask, "Are there ways to mitigate the automatic triggering of actions in smart contracts?" Posing your point of view as a question like this would be more likely to foster a healthy discussion because there are certainly ways to mitigate the extent of automatic actions (multisigs etc...). And who knows, everyone might learn something as a result of the discussion!

Disclosure: I work in the cryptocurrency space and generally think hackernews doesn't know how to have productive discussions about cryptocurrency.

I should add, because it just occurred to me, that my question was clearly answerable - if smart contracts could be done ethically.

The GP or anyone could say, "glad you asked about ethics, here is how I think you can do smart contract ethically; [insert explanation for how to do this]". I mean, "How do you justify X" is calling for an answer, right? Some things even have good justifications.

> “How do you justify X" is calling for an answer, right?

That’s not what you wrote. There’s nothing in your comment interpretable as a question, it’s a rant.

Am I right in interpreting your stance as that any form of contract resolution or arbitration outside of the legal court system is unethical?

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