succinctly said. all these web3 / crypto folks forget complex laws exist to prevent and remedy situations that can't be simply solved by smart contracts. most of the laws are so complex, we've professionals who specialise in them.
And people who espouse that we don't need laws or lawyers to run our society are making about as coherent sense as saying we can ship a unicorn entirely on no-code and without engineers. It's in the realm of possibilities, maybe, but it will be a house of cards ready to implode unless this mantra is, at best, sheepishly abandoned half way through the endeavor.
In a fair system, sure, but the American financial legal system is bonkers. There's a reason people are looking for alternatives.
That's not to say it's inherently a bad idea, rewrites are sometimes useful but you need to acknowledge those factors.
(I'd say this does't actually happen because lawyers aren't that daft, but then I remember really long EULAs with really silly clauses...)
It does not work for something like laws. You can't just go and change something the following month because you realized there's an edge case you forgot. All that constant churn will just erode the public's faith in the system.
To stick to the analogy I guess:
Lawyers -> Engineers
Policy Writers -> Architects
Politicians -> Executives, Directors, Sales and Marketing
Judges -> QA
Not to mention techno-libertarian anarcho-capitalism is the ideological driving force behind many decentralisation efforts (hello Bitcoin), which is kinda at odds with improving justice. Many people in the space actively wish to be outside the law. Those are the people who started looking for alternatives, everyone else will parrot any old extreme ideology like “get rid of courts” for a sweet well-paying gig.
I am a software engineer. I know full well what it takes to design a well functioning software system. I also know that software tends to ossify processes. Anyone who has ever tried to work against the software of another business knows how straight jacketed that can get. Putting these together my only reasonable conclusion is that smart contracts look like a terrible idea and I would never in a million years trust one.
But is this true?
some people have always looked for alternatives throughout history, but very few of them have become popular, most of them were a failure and a bunch of them completely destroyed societies, sometimes for centuries.
I might be completely wrong, but in my eyes the crypto-optimism looks like reverse luddism.
So it seems like a good complement, not a replacement.
OTOH—without knowing many concrete details myself—seems like there would be plenty of room for reuse of contracts? Maybe even something like a storefront where you can grab one that matches your scenario
That hasn't happened in any other area of open source. Linux is supported by billion dollar companies with hundreds-of-millions in revenue. Container software is supported by tech giants. Browsers are the same. Web frameworks are either from corporations or they're built by people who are sponsored to build them. Most successful open source projects have revenue streams from outside the project paying people to work on them. I'd even suggest that might be a requirement for a successful project. As the project grows and gains popularity the costs of running it go up massively.
In the case of all of those projects the usefulness and utility of the projects also goes up, so people are able to make money with them that pays for the developers, and that could happen for web3 tech. I'm not suggesting web3 won't go the same way, just that economies of scale don't rrally work for software development. The more popular a software project gets the more it costs to run, forever.
You don't have to pull a Paul Graham and invent a the concept of a web application for the first time. You can piggyback on decades of development and open source software and frameworks and libraries. One developer and create and deploy an application in a weekend that would take a team of engineers months to build 2000.
Crypto is a nascent space that similarly enables people to bypass all the gatekeeping and institutional cruft in finance. It just turns out that a lot of the gatekeeping in finance is structurally important and intentional, so it may be a couple decades before any particular cryptocurrency is comparably robust and secure as well trusted fiat currencies like the usd or euro. A trustless and mature financial system that doesn't have the pitfalls of credit bureaus and arbitrary government policy chaos, that opens up microloans and honest banking for literally anyone, that gives opportunity to invest and trade and participate even at low levels of wealth - those are socially good things, in my view.
As with any complex rewrite I suspect we are doomed to rediscover the rationale for the original design. Hopefully it will end up meaningfully better, and not a Digg 3.0.
https://frostbrowntodd.com/wyoming-paves-way-for-dao-legal-c...