Won't happen. People need to believe that the justice system will hear their pleas and consider factors on-balance, and then proceed in fairness. In real law, there are several potential overrides available to stop egregiously unfair outcomes that would otherwise be legally valid (estoppel, unconscionability, etc.). People will not accept a system that does not have the appearance of fairness (regardless of its actual fairness).
One of the things that cyberpunks fail to grasp is that people don't want a perfectly immutable, fixed system. They want to feel that their sense of justice and moral righteousness can be satisfied. Stuff that drops people off right at "sucks to be you" doesn't really work; there must be some type of recourse available even if it doesn't have a 100% success rate.
Agreed! It really won't happen, and isn't happening, even in Ethereum: when people find the result distasteful enough, they go via political means to rewrite the ownership so it feels right.
Specifically, in the DAO hack, the affected people had enough political influence to get the entire network to undo the ownership transfer that was the result of their own oversights:
If anything, Ethereum is worse because you have to get the entire network to fork (analogous to a revolution or constitutional convention) to fix a mistake, instead of just getting a judge to rule "okay, that's obviously not what anyone meant".
Furthermore, it's far more unequal, where mistakes only get fixed when they affect the most influential users. Seems like a step in the wrong direction.
Not sure why you're being downvoted because you're exactly right. The crypto-anarchists love to say "the code is the law", but the reality is that losing your retirement savings because somebody forgot to mark a method private is a pretty shitty outcome.
For all its warts, a legal system backed by a jury of your peers is still the best way of sorting out the actual intent of a contract when the shit hits the fan.
Ignoring the fact that he was responding to a post that was sarcasm, if we really stop to think about it, how many people are judged by their peers and how many are judged by people who are the furthest from it?
Sarcastic or not, "contract by code" and "lawyers are obsolete" are, in reality, major selling points used by Ethereum evangelists. The OP's post gives an opportunity to discuss this.
I did not assign any assertion or position to the OP, only followed up on his thread about the potential ramifications that ETH backers seriously advocate.
You're right on the facts, although I don't quite get why you ridicule this idea as a "sense of justice and moral righteousness" with only the "appearance of fairness".
A system of laws devoid of all ambiguity and emotion isn't even possible, let alone desirable, because at some point these contracts have to come into contact reality, and the humans in it. And these humans happen to be, well: human.
I guess there's an ideology at play that would love to change humans to fit within their neatly arranged algorithms. And if that means some grandmother loses her house because she signed the wrong smart contract when buying cat-food, there'd be a lot expressions of sympathy on Twitter, but she really needs to understand that it's just not possible to do anything about, because principles etc etc.
Here and there, some of these people may, very privately, consider it a feature of the system that others less intelligent than them sometimes happen to die on the streets because of that one Saturday morning where they didn't audit all 500k lines of brainfuck in that contract for chinese takeout.
With less snark: the idea of ambiguity or emotions as being something negative is a somewhat naive view of reality, somewhere on the spectrum between Star Trek's ideal of Spock and the social darwinism of Ayn Rand. It's most often seen in the currently popular misunderstanding of how judges should behave, and how journalism supposedly used to work.
For an example that maybe is a bit less inflammatory than anything about journalism, check any recent threat about the Google vs Uber lawsuit: the presiding judge is almost a legend for his diligence in learning the technology in the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit a few years back. Yet people criticise him for a lack of decorum whenever he uses language that doesn't pretend to be a robot following an algorithm: "This judge is clearly biased! The contract clearly only says $50,000, and there's no law that gives him the authority to say those are USD. When the defendant says it means Canadian Dollars, it's he-said-she-said and undecidable"
I don't ridicule the need to have senses of justice and moral righteousness fulfilled. I think they should be accommodated by legal systems. My point is that systems must at least pretend to do so if they want public credibility.
Ethereum, as well as things like IPFS that say "Your content is permanent and irrevocable, don't publish if you don't like that", are non-starters because they overlook this core desire to operate under forgiving systems.
Many unfair or distorted legal regimes exist (including, to some degree, the American one), but they all make overtures toward these principles in some form or another. Ethereum et al must correct this if they want widespread adoption.
And the inverse also applies. People (groups and individuals) want to be able to throw their power around and leave people they don't like at "sucks to be you". This behavior has been the status quo for millennia.
Eh, dictatorships and oppressive systems still work hard to appear fair and even-handed. That's why they have such elaborate propaganda machines.
Anyone who wants to maintain power in virtually any setting (communal, corporate, governmental) must create an impression of fairness and equity, at least to the extent that a good portion of the people are not willing to risk their [reputations/jobs/lives] to throw off the "oppressors".
It's not an accident that virtually all powerful corporate bosses and politicians are so image-conscious and superficial; it's a matter of survival for powerful people.
One of the things that cyberpunks fail to grasp is that people don't want a perfectly immutable, fixed system. They want to feel that their sense of justice and moral righteousness can be satisfied. Stuff that drops people off right at "sucks to be you" doesn't really work; there must be some type of recourse available even if it doesn't have a 100% success rate.