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Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of the appeal of crypto/smart contracts is that they are final with little to no recourse, humans can't intervene and exploit failure modes which individuals using the so-called contracts can't defend against.

Corporations and wealthy individuals with influence in the writing of this legal system, with massive amounts of financial resources, with negligible moral agency, and with limited criminal liability find very different utility in the ability to use the legal system to roll back contracts, to enforce them, or to ignore them.

Those who find themselves on the other side of this power disparity would often prefer to risk a potentially buggy but inviolate contract than one which they expect to be abused against them.

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> Those who find themselves on the other side of this power disparity would often prefer to risk a potentially buggy but inviolate contract than one which they expect to be abused against them.

There is no way that AT&T, Comcast or Bank of America will ever agree to a smart contract written by an ordinary customer. As always, the companies will write their own contracts, and customers will either accept them, or leave. And if the company has monopoly power, tough luck.

so what happens if the company's smart contract has a bug in it, and the customer takes advantage of it?

In an analogous situation, if a shop mis-labels the price of an item (let's say, they forgot a zero or two for a $1000 item), the customer theoretically has the legal basis to purchase it at the labeled price. How is this scenario any different to a block chain contract with a bug?

If a site has prices stored on the frontend and a user edits the price to make it lower, do you think the user has a legal basis to receive the item at their new specified price? I don't think many jurisdictions would say they do.

Further, in many places your example itself falls apart.

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/company-advertising-price-wr... https://www.findlaw.com/smallbusiness/business-contracts-for...

> If a site has prices stored on the frontend and a user edits the price to make it lower, do you think the user has a legal basis to receive the item at their new specified price?

There was a case like that in the early days of online shopping, which was actually decided in favor of the customer. The prices of items in the shopping cart were stored in form fields, and the customer edited them before placing the order. The court considered that a counter-offer which was accepted by the store. (It probably wouldn't go that way today; for one thing online stores have gotten smarter about trusting data from the client.)

That's a bit different from simply editing the client-side view and never informing the merchant about the change, of course.

i would imagine that directly editing the price on the label is over the line, and the analogy breaks down when compared to smart contracts with bugs.

I want to know what kind of contracts people entered into before this where they thought they were being abused by a big corporation?

This seems like a noble endeavor, but not an entirely practical one. Both sides of a transaction have to agree to these smart contracts, so where is this an advantage (outside of internal crypto trading)?

A bunch of those many-to-one individual:corporation contracts (like phone service) are in such imbalanced markets that you'd have to overcome the power balance problem in order to get the other party to adopt the "smart" contract.

But if you can overcome the power balance problem, you can just fix the contracts directly anyway without them being smart?

I don't know what jurisprudence you live under, but under English common law (also America, Canada, etc) - which, I must say, I also always denounce and rarely defend - inequitable negotiating power between parties to a contract is considered by courts when adjudicating whether parties have broken it or can be awarded damages. We don't have a system where big powerful organizations can just dictate contracts to powerless individuals and then later enforce them.

Unfortunately US courts have taken a very dim view towards adjusting balance of power.

For example, I don't think there's anywhere else where the mere act of purchasing a product or service can result in you giving up the right to sue the company in court and be forced to enter arbitration with an arbiter of the company's choice.

That's ridiculous. If we're talking power disparities and differences in resources, corporations could just code up standard smart contracts with loopholes in them that allows the corporations to steal from their customers. It's not like customers have the resources to carefully audit the smart contract and make sure there aren't any backdoors that the corporation has written in to exploit.

This is a significantly more ridiculous premise than the one you're calling ridiculous.

During the financial crisis Goldmans traded against the trades of their customers, who were making trades Goldmans had recommended they make. They made a few hundred million on it. Goldmans that is, not their customers.

That's like saying corporations can release complex open source code with backdoors in it and the userbase won't notice. Are there any big instances of this happening?

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