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Comment by nikhizzle | Hacker News Reader

So which one is it? Code is contract and he should get to keep the money. Or crypto is governed by laws outside of crypto and so he violated the “spirit” of the code and hence is a criminal?

It seems like right now the crypto industry makes the decision to their convenience on a daily basis.

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Purity goes out the window when there's real money involved. And means that in cryptocurrency, you only own what the government grants that you own.

It'll be interesting how this gets resolved by Canadian courts.

And this is rich: “A bad actor not brought to justice and held to account for one act of fraud will surely commit another”

> It'll be interesting how this gets resolved by Canadian courts.

He's being prosecuted by the US DOJ, EDNY. Not Canada.

Code is contract and disputes are handled by the courts. There's no such thing as a purely extrajudicial contract, is there?

I think the name smart contract is misleading because if you believe that the code is law then there is no actual contract in the smart contract. There is no meeting of the minds, no agreement on what the contract means or what is considered customary. Just a machine floating in the ETHer you can interact with. You owe the machine nothing and it owes you nothing.

There is a third way: Private adjudication. I see no reason why the crypto community couldn't run its own private court system, similar to what e.g. Randy Barnett describes in chapter 5 of Anarchy and the Law.

(Obligatory, I don't work in crypto or have any special connection to it, I just think people forget this third option even exists when it's really the most common way most private industries actually resolve disputes most of the time.)

It already does run its own private court system, it's the consensus process that is used to upgrade the protocol. If there was enough consensus there could be a fork that returned the funds, but that will never happen.

Sure, but suppose people decide that's not good enough.

what "people"?

simple, those who lose to the system they’ve supported until it bleed up in their face

Private court system? How does it work? Regular court system works because the government has the threat of violence, has the muscle and rights to hunt, capture and detain. if "private court" rules against me and I refuse to obey, how will they make me obey? There is no "or else" embedded in it so it will be useless.

its a cryptocurrency, the courts legitimacy would likely come from the community forking as necessary to resolve issues as identified by the court, in the same way the us judicial branch gets its legitimacy from the us executive branch employing force as necessary to resolve issues as identified by that court.

its a broader group to convince, sure, but there is a clear 'or else' from which the court can get that legitimacy. 'return the money or else we will return it for you' is a meaningful or else

There definitely some hypocrisy, but it might work differently in the law.

As devs, we might claim that 'code is the law' but my guess is that the law does not care. That is, one cannot overwrite property laws by a few lines of code.

Consider how disclaimers work--we are increasingly putting limitations on what rights you can contractually forfeit.

This will be interting to watch.

It seems absolutely bonkers to me that someone would write a smart contract that lets them bleed $50m without automatically stopping after they lose the first $1/10/100k.

That seems hard to implement. Presumably the move was all based on regular transactions. You can't just say, "If we're losing money, stop it", you have to concretely specify the conditions.

In the real world locks are meant to keep honest people honest and slow down the dishonest people until someone notices and stops them.

There’s a world where crypto could be sold the same way, but the sycophants drowned that out for long enough that we aren’t in the Trough Disillusionment now so much as the Trough of Open Mockery.

We have laws, yes.

Yes, we have laws. When should the law intrude on the private transaction of two parties? Typically, the law holds both parties to their contractual agreement. If those two parties have contracted to abide by the output of an algorithm, can the law distinguish good faith manipulation of algorithmic inputs to benefit oneself from bad faith manipulation of algorithmic inputs to benefit oneself? Given that the whole point of a smart contract is to encode the terms of the agreement as code, when is it appropriate to step in and alter that agreement?