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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

An important property of corporations is that they are always resolvable to a natural person. This is true even in jurisdictions like Nevada where the corporate laws allow arbitrary levels of blinding and indirection. The "autonomy" would be illusory.

Basically, you can't do much that is interesting unless a computer system ultimately resolves, or is imputed by law to resolve, to a specific natural person.

(EDIT: People are missing the point. What you call it is immaterial. All the handwaving aside, these "autonomous systems" including the ones described by the author are legally not autonomous. It is not possible under the law to construct such a thing. You may claim that it is "autonomous" but no government will recognize that claim as suggesting legal independence from a natural person. True AI would make this weird but we do not have AI today and the underlying fact still remains.)

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Actually, that's really really not true, outside of the USA.

It's trivially easy to set up a USA corporation that is: managed by a laywer, that is is owned by a trust in the Caymans, or a similar secrecy jurisdiction, where the beneficiaries of that trust, a.k.a. the owners, are unknown - protected by client-attorney privilege. For an added layer of security, this trust's beneficiaries could be another trust that is governed by bearer bonds. That is, whoever owns the bond, an actual piece of paper, is entitled to the benefits of that trust. They are only legal in some countries.

Make this harder to follow, and you have a series of shell companies in many countries, all with secrecy jurisdictions, and I've just described how organized crime can own lots of very legal and real looking USA companies, with almost 100% chance that you'll never find out who is controlling them. Ones that make large political donations to lobby groups and politicians - not bribes you understand.

EDIT: I think you're all missing the point that this can be done today with the right lawyers and enough USD, but bitcoin just makes it easier. Though the fact that bitcoins can be traced MUCH easier than the flow of USD, is somewhat of a downside.

Interesting read to me, I did not know this. Good to read from someone who knows much more about corporate structure than I do.

I want to add one important point. Bitcoin not only makes it much easier to setup this kind of autonomous corporation, it also makes it transparent and verifiable by outside. It does so through being open source. And since no one actually owns it, it is completely transparent.

I first learned of this world in popular non-fiction: Emergency by Neil Strauss. An excellent book if you want to know more about secrecy jurisdictions, state regulatory capture, the basics of transfer pricing, etc. is Treasure Islands by Nick Shaxson (http://treasureislands.org/).

Bitcoin makes it cheaper, too. You can't do what you wrote without quite a bit of money.

I think you missed the point of the article.

What you are saying is literal and descriptive. Currently corporations are always resolvable to a natural person. I think the author's point is that new technology (including bitcoin) can effectively cut out the middle-man.

Therefore, future legal (or quasi-legal) entities will be able to be structured in novel ways. Maybe it won't be a corporation by the standards we're used to. But bitcoin itself is an example of this structure - de-centralised and not "owned" or "managed" by any particular individuals.

Then I suppose we shouldn't call it a corporation. Does "Autonomous Economic Systems" sound better to you?

Yes. Corporations are legal fictions, and have their own set of legal rules. Besides being resolvable, they exist somewhere. They are registered/incorporated/created/etc. There is some jurisdiction. There is usually an agent.

There are all sorts of agency/etc laws that would have to be built to support such a system.

Corporation is literally the wrong word for what this describes.

Carriages are pulled by horses. So I suppose horseless carriage was the wrong word?

Language evolved, often creating interesting contradictory terms. "Autonomous corporation" is not the same word as "corporation."

A "horseless carriage" may be a bit of a contradiction, from a certain point of view, but we don't have a strict definition of what is and what isn't a carriage, so it's not particularly misleading. We have a very strict definition of a corporation, so "autonomous corporation" is misleading. True, language evolves, but the law hasn't yet.

> An important property of corporations is that they are always resolvable to a natural person.

Just like an important property of cars is that they are always driven by a natural person?

> The "autonomy" would be illusory.

Until we have strong AI, any autonomy will be illusory (i.e. humans will out compete agents at writing agents). I still find the word meaningful to distinguish such types of mostly autonomous corporations from traditional corporations.

You are probably right for now regarding how the legal system would currently handle such corporations.

> An important property of corporations is that they are always resolvable to a natural person

To play up the SF angle a bit, this might change when lobbyists start accepting Bitcoin.

There is a HUGE difference between resolvable to 'a natural person' v. 'a specific natural person.' This difference is basically the gist of the article.

Really? How many non-specific people are there in the country?

Non-citizen national here. I have a special passport, and am considered a non-specific, non-naturalized person. I have to create (foreign-owned) LLC's in order to work within the system/collect or pay taxes/earn a wage in Dollars. I've met at least a hundred people that have the same status as I do. I'm told there are thousands of us.

Yes, but practically, does it matter as long as the autonomous systems continue to provide sufficiently lucrative reasons for real people to sustain its operation, e.g. by continuing to mine or maintain the network under the governments' radar?

Could you give some examples please?

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Who exactly will have the ability to enforce laws against a swarm of decentralized systems? In all practical terms, it does not look like "laws" can take out crypto-currencies at all. Jim Bell shows that the opposite is not true. I think that BTC is the beginning of the end of politically-centralized "law" as we know it.

"In all practical terms, it does not look like "laws" can take out crypto-currencies at all"

Perhaps, but the law can certainly stunt the growth of such currencies, to the point of keeping them small, niche, and irrelevant for the majority of transactions. I suspect that this is already the case, without any modifications to the law.

Jim Bell's theorem clearly demonstrates that the politicians have lost the monopoly on the use of force. At the same time, the politicians have never had any real or valid claim to legitimacy. Libertarians reject government claims to legitimacy on grounds of Occam's razor. Religious people reject it because such claims amount to paganism and often also blasphemy. Therefore, politicians will have to contend with retaliatory measures, which may make any of their attempts at keeping BTC small, irrelevant.

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