11–20 of 105 posts
EDIT: not-so-happy sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9987351
Ether is law, but the example contract says nothing about websites, nor has any provisions to enforce the transfer of said site. I think it's more appropriate to say that ethereum is naive
What happens if you want to change the contract? How do you revoke the previous one? I suppose this would have to be done in a manner that involves both parties, some sort of two part signing process.
What if there's a bug in the contract? The contract then becomes ambiguous and you're left with the same problem.
> even if you "win", you have the problem of collecting.
Definitely interesting, but how does it help with this? > even if you "win", you have the problem of collecting.
The reason contracts are messy is because they're a system that has vulnerabilities. Lawyers are just hackers with different tools and training.
So moving to another system, equally complex or dynamic, will not solve anything in the long run.
A system that must support contracts between humans would be dynamic enough to allow for vulnerabilities that will eventually be discovered.
In fact I find it laughable that these guys are trying to replace a legal system with a computer system. When computer systems get hacked all the time.
Ether is law, but the example contract says nothing about websites, nor has any provisions to enforce the transfer of said site. I think it's more appropriate to say that ethereum is naive
The benefit of etherscript in theory at least is that the wording of the contract is unambiguous, with the caveat that there may still be some areas where ambiguity is unavoidable. Which means that in the case of a website a digital bailiff could enforce the transfer. This is a clear benefit in some sense at least. How many times have you read about a court case and been bewildered about how someone could possibly be arguing over something that should be clear cut.
For contracts like a website domain transfer this sounds at least initially doable. What etherscript will have trouble handling is establishing what actually happened. It will undoubtedly be very good at specifying what the outcome of a sequence of events should be but as soon as it hits the real world the problem of establishing what that sequence of events was will still require some form of investigation and enforcement mechanism composed of people and thus there will still be an unavoidable amount of ambiguity there.
A contract would only be interesting in the example if it was structured as an option: The buyer has promised to pay for the item by 1st April, and in return, you have promised that you won't sell the item to someone else before then.
How would this be handled? How would be example contract react if you set 'WEBSITE_ADMIN' to someone else prior to the purchase? Does the example contract mean that WEBSITE_ADMIN cannot be altered by anyone else? What are the access controls to this storage slot WEBSITE_ADMIN? Does the seller lose write-access to it after the deal completes? Does the buyer gain read access? If not, what's to stop anyone changing this value and breaking the deal?
"You might even imagine a nation defined not by geography but by the rules and benefits of citizenship. Imagine that people of the future could opt-in to the virtual nation that suits them best." . I wonder if we will ever get there . But its eye opening just to think about it.
"You might even imagine a nation defined not by geography but by the rules and benefits of citizenship. Imagine that people of the future could opt-in to the virtual nation that suits them best." . I wonder if we will ever get there . But its eye opening just to think about it.