Comment by canoebuilder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by canoebuilder | Hacker News Reader

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>However the fact that we now have a global consensus over the ownership of digital assets that's something new and valuable.

It's also completely contrived. Being digital means infinitely replicable, or thereabouts. Do we really need this game of artificial scarcity?

People used to talk about things like property records, but if this realm of artificial scarcity is going to interface with the realm of actual scarcity in the real world, it's still going to need the systems of adjudication that already exist in the real world.

Code is law. But law is not code, otherwise legal disputes would have long since been settled and we wouldn't need systems of courts and various legal avenues to surface new areas of contention and revisit old areas in new light.

If the above wasn't an issue. How do you get past the resource hogginess? These things are currently handling a minuscule portion, if that, of what their proponents propose they take on, and they are already comically massive resource hogs. How can they scale?

> Code is law

Oh please! Remember the Ethereum fork? It's mob rule at best.

If code was law then the founders of Ethereum would be broke having lost their fortunes to the genius that exploited a bug in their code.

For the record, I don't think code will be law, ie. that blockchains will replace our current system of adjudication. Rather smart contracts will be changed to allow for an interface with the current system, for example via a master key held by the originator of the smart contract.

Regarding your second point: Look into newer projects like Solana, Polkadot or Cardano which are already live and have much better scalability.

That's an interesting idea, but in what situations is it superior or preferable to just signing a traditional contract, and taking any disputes to a court?

Cross border maybe, but then what court would you go to?

> Look into newer projects like Solana, Polkadot or Cardano

Are these newer projects more or less built with the same vision? What is their reason for being?

Censorship resistance would be nice, so would laws against private censorship in certain areas. Distributed mechanisms of censorship resistance would be more trustworthy and transparent. But people find information in centralized locations, be it a library, or Twitter, etc.

Is there legit headway towards combining beneficial aspects of distribution with the efficacy of centralized platforms? What are the mechanisms that keep it running and the incentives involved?

> Code is law.

What does this mean?

It was something “smart contract” proponents used to say, maybe still do.

When I say code is law, I mean “law” in the physics sense. We can code, print “hello world”, and know exactly what the code will do. We can write code up to some threshold of complexity and know exactly what it will do in all cases. Like how given certain information about a physical system we can calculate trajectories or whatnot up to some threshold of complexity.

I was making the point that civil law is a different kind of law from this physics sense of the word.

With more clarity, code is physics law, but civil law is not physics law, i.e. civil law cannot be fully ported to computer code.

Maybe I'm wrong and all civil law could be translated to computer code. Might that make for a better world? Even if possible, there's so much inertia in the system with lawyers and judges wanting to keep their job which is another human complexity that would have to be worked through.

Civil law can't be fully ported to computer code, but enough of it probably can. Most contractual issues don't get anywhere near a court. They're resolved via negotiation and alternative dispute resolution (and there's normally a contractual obligation to go this route before resorting to the courts). Dispute resolution is incredibly expensive, especially when you're dealing with multiple jurisdictions. Lawyers and judges haven't managed to stop parties using mediation and arbitration services offered by people who aren't legally trained, such as economists or people with extensive domain experience.

But smart contracts would change the way contracts are written, as they're often intentionally ambiguous for a variety of reasons. There's also the problem of "oracles", but we already have a profession for translating real-world events into legal ones (notaries).

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