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Comment by Fordec | Hacker News Reader

I've come to the acceptance that lawyers are to the legal system as software engineers are to technical systems. You pay people who specialize in knowing the ins and outs of a complex system so you can get on with your life as a citizen, founder, etc.

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.

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The trouble is that the systems are broken. The level of gatekeeping and lack of informed consent have made the legal system a mess. The lawyers are the ones writing the laws... for the benefit of the lawyers and the people with the highest bids.

In a fair system, sure, but the American financial legal system is bonkers. There's a reason people are looking for alternatives.

Stated like this it comes across like a software rewrite, with all its inherent fallacies: underestimating the effort, misjudging the complexity of the original system and comparing known to unknown outcomes.

That's not to say it's inherently a bad idea, rewrites are sometimes useful but you need to acknowledge those factors.

It also sounds a lot like lawyers arguing that cybersecurity is broken, so you should replace part of your dev team with a new type of contract and some lawyers to enforce it

(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...)

And the biggest one: anyone that undertakes it should be an expert in the existing system. Otherwise you're just the junior dev coming in and suggesting a rewrite in the language you know best.

People need to stop using software analogies for everything.

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.

I think your comment, and the one you responded to, are both correct. If our legal/governing system was able to adapt more quickly and keep up with the pace of modern technological advances, we would all be better off. The challenge is, how?

Lawyers do not write laws. Politician, or at least the writing staff do.

To stick to the analogy I guess:

Lawyers -> Engineers

Policy Writers -> Architects

Politicians -> Executives, Directors, Sales and Marketing

Judges -> QA

Well, lawyers are the plurality of Congresspeople (though their share of Congress has declined over time) https://thepractice.law.harvard.edu/article/declining-domina...

And most (competent) tech leadership were previously technical and are leveraging their expertise also.

The laws are mostly fine. The process of getting justice when someone has broken them is the bigger problem. Unfortunately solving the problem of access to cheap and efficient justice is just not that glamorous. There’s not enough money in it, so let’s start again from scratch right?

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.

The solution to a broken system is not to replace it with another equally broken system. It is to replace it with a better one. The argument from people who are skeptical of the entire premise of smart contracts is that it looks to them like a worse not better system.

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.

> There's a reason people are looking for alternatives

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.

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