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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

This is terrible obviously, but if code is law and someone writes bad code and exploits that is it “illegal”?

The entire basis of even having judges, courts, etc is an acknowledgment that the “code” is imperfect and certain circumstances require human intervention.

Going without that is, well… YMMV.

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I honestly wondered the same thing during the VW emissions scandal.

The requirement was that diesel emissions were at a certain level under those exact conditions... And they were OK under those exact exact conditions.

(Anyway it turned out there was a specific carve out for cheater devices and they did get in trouble)

Do people go to jail for writing bad laws?

Code is law is just a meme

Isn't it a consequence? If the entire foundation of your system is irreversibility and finality, then doesn't it effective becomes true? (unless you are big enough to force a network-wide rollback...).

If you ignore the fact that the actual law might have something to say about this, then sure.

But that's exactly what the decentralized crowd is arguing. You encode transactions and no centralized authority (e.g. a country's judicial system backed by people with guns) can override it. A natural consequence is that no one can override a mistake either.

Legal contracts in the physical world can be poorly drafted as well. But courts don't usually allow ludicrous results arising from honest mistakes.

The law doesn't care if I argue it doesn't apply to me.

Code is law only if you are an NPC. If you are a normal user, code is just rules that are potentially breakable

If regular law is the ultimate arbiter of the correct location of funds in this system, then we don't need this complex network of energy-hungry computers constantly double-checking each others' work to make a financial system. We can just use regular computers, like before.

We don't need the web because we can go back to BBSs

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