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Comment by fiatjaf | Hacker News Reader

For people interested in common law and the problems of the State law system, I recommend the articles on the topic by John Hasnas:

THE MYTH OF THE RULE OF LAW: http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm HAYEK, THE COMMON LAW, AND FLUID DRIVE: http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/NYUFinal.pdf

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Hasnas is good. Also consider Benson's Customary Law with Private Means of Resolving Disputes and Dispensing Justice: A Description of a Modern System of Law and Order without State Coercion: http://mises.org/journals/jls/9_2/9_2_2.pdf

Do you ever think about building a framework for injecting an anarchistic customary law into our statist society using cryptography and the Internet? Something like the bitcoin of law? I'm talking about something that could be applied to the real world today, not to a group of crypto-anarchy enthusiasts. I'm also not talking about smart contracts, as these need a legal structure to work and cannot build it themselves.

I'm seeking people interested in this subject to exchange ideas.

Well, let's start with a reasonably understood system: HN karma. Behaviors that follow guidelines are upvoted; behaviors that violate them are downvoted. Guidelines are implicitly created (customary law) by edge-case upvotes and downvotes. What does it not address that your system would need to?

(This is not a rhetorical question; it would help me understand what you're trying to achieve.)

More could/should be added, because the real world is complex. For an ideal world we would probably need a framework that would support: support for courts/judges (human parties that could issue their verdict on cases and compete for cases), a system for proving real world identities (could be done by trusted human parties, maybe the same courts/judges, that could operate on the real world also, seeking the people outside the system), long written text descriptions of cases and testimonies, a search engine. I don't know. What do you think?

Another major problem is the State, that would probably try to make this system illegal if it becomes popular. This shouldn't be a problem for the system itself, because it could work on a peer-to-peer basis, but to the parties involved in the cases, if their names are made public.

You've got the point. I imagine that HN karma is a system very close to the ideal. At first, it would only one things: an interface to the real world. I mean, people breaching contracts and people fulfilling them in the real world should be thrown into this system, and the real world people (which should not need to make a special type of digital contract or something, because they already have their own contracts that should be valid) must be able to use this database of ratings to make decisions.

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