Live data from Hacker News

What is Ethereum?

etherscripter.com

61–70 of 105 posts

Re: What is Ethereum?

#61

Isn't fuzziness a feature of most legal codes? Treating the law like an absolute immutable contract sounds anathema to a healthy judicial system. I'm not sure why some technologists have such a fascination with legalism. I'm not against the idea of digital government and having laws be distributed under a free documentation license with the ability for citizens to discuss and amend laws. A standard version control an…

No, it's a defect. It's probably futile attempting to write "perfect" law, and probably for the best that jurists look to the law's intent rather than always trying to apply the law literally. But how can it be a good thing if people honestly do not and cannot know what is and is not legal?

Re: What is Ethereum?

#62

Such a system needs integration with subjective variable sources. For example let's say the website also needs to meet some basic code quality level. They could agree to give a third party exclusive access to set some "quality check" variable. If that's implemented it can be a great way to codify all sorts of legal docs and laws since a lot of legal stuff requires human interpretation at the time of execution.

The event calculus could be used to specify the behavior of the agents instantiated by ethereum smart contracts. This formalized description of the smart contract (e.g. a legal system) could then be used to verify its actual behavior in the wild.

Re: What is Ethereum?

#64

Isn't fuzziness a feature of most legal codes? Treating the law like an absolute immutable contract sounds anathema to a healthy judicial system. I'm not sure why some technologists have such a fascination with legalism. I'm not against the idea of digital government and having laws be distributed under a free documentation license with the ability for citizens to discuss and amend laws. A standard version control an…

Ethereum is a currency and enforcement system built for computers. Initially, ambiguity isn't a feature because it's meant for contracts and things which are meant to be precise. Room for ambiguity in ethereum can be added later, once computers are intelligent enough to negotiate ambiguity.

The main feature of this system is removing the need for enforcement. Think about how much goes into maintaining police, bounty hunters, debt collection services, reposession services, prisons. In many people's opinions, if enforcing a contract is possible through software rather than physical force, software is always preferable. It brings its own issues of course and isn't instantly perfect, but the possibility of a world with much less need for violence to enforce the law is worth pursuing.

The biggest advantage of this is that it can be completely automated. Corporations can be programmed to run themselves and negotiate enforcable contracts with each other without any human intervention. You could have a personal digital assistant which interacts with other digital assistants to manage your finances and investments, and everything can be enforced by software. As long as enough people are running free software, everyone can share mutually beneficial enhancements to the algorithms which govern their behavior.

You might not want this kind of thing today instead of a trained financial advisor, but 30 years from now, it's likely that software will be better able to make financial decisions than any unaugmented human. Even more important would be movement of commodities around the world between people who need them. Instead of relying on profit-motivated markets to distribute goods, we could have optimal algorithms for moving resources where they're most needed, and enforcement of these agreements will not depend on the strength of a nation's military or economic power but rather smart contracts which are perfectly enforcable whether they belong to a first or third-world nation.

None of this comes free, and there are real challenges to overcome. People will try to exploit them for personal profit. Software will have bugs and make bad decisions. Those are some of the growing pains we'll need to work through to get to a more fair, less violent world.

Re: What is Ethereum?

#65
post #23

It will be hard enough to get widespread social adoption of either blockchain currency or contracts written in programming languages without making them tied to each other. A better choice for an initial compile target for EtherScript would simply be English.

English is ridiculously colonized by obfuscators already. Think about the Clinton I debates on what the meaning of 'is' is.

I think those same obfuscators will be happy to emigrate to any new linguistic country in which their skills can be put to use, but I think the Etherium folks are fantasizing that they can make contracts non-ambiguous. Good luck trying.

I think the problem comes in that the contracts must eventually have impact in human minds. However you slice it, there's still an interpretation step. Efforts to make those interpretations unambiguous will be opposed.

Re: What is Ethereum?

#66

This will never be unbreakable because no complex system is unbreakable. 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…

Skilled programmers will be hired to write these contracts in a complex and verbose way such that the other party is unable to understand it and may not be able to afford to hire programmers to analyze it. They will then be taken advantage of. So pretty much the same as the current legal and financial system.

Maybe. Nobody is going to sign a contract he can't understand if he get the same goods and services from somebody else with a contract he can understand.

Re: What is Ethereum?

#67

The example contract is very vague and seemingly pointless. The stated problem is 'if the buyer pays before 1st April, then they own the website'. Fair enough, but usually you'd just deal with this without any kind of contract in place. We don't need contracts for simple cases of 'buyer pays money, gets purchase.' A contract would only be interesting in the example if it was structured as an option: The buyer has pro…

The example is pseudo-code and assumes a future with smart-property domain registrars. A better example might have been a smart contract trust which is 100% doable today.

There are other examples under the Samples menu at etherscripter.com. Also see ethereum.org.

Re: What is Ethereum?

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data for WEBSITE_ADMIN is set inside the Ethereum network . I think the term 'website' is tripping people up here. It's actually better defined as 'site with data' which can be accessed via the Ethereum APIs. If you are interested in playing around with the API calls, there is a Docker image for it. I put together a hosted version of this as well, so you don't have install anything to play with it: https://github…

Are you saying that Ethereum is a web hosting platform?

I think Ethereum is trying to replace the web (though it may [or may not; not sure] still run HTML/CSS/JS on top).

Re: What is Ethereum?

#69
post #64

Isn't fuzziness a feature of most legal codes? Treating the law like an absolute immutable contract sounds anathema to a healthy judicial system. I'm not sure why some technologists have such a fascination with legalism. I'm not against the idea of digital government and having laws be distributed under a free documentation license with the ability for citizens to discuss and amend laws. A standard version control an…

Ethereum is a currency and enforcement system built for computers. Initially, ambiguity isn't a feature because it's meant for contracts and things which are meant to be precise. Room for ambiguity in ethereum can be added later, once computers are intelligent enough to negotiate ambiguity. The main feature of this system is removing the need for enforcement. Think about how much goes into maintaining police, bounty…

You misunderstand why contract enforcement leads to violence. In the real world, contracts among equals are always fungable and rarely enforced with violence. It is different when the contracts are between powerful and the not so powerful. Violence propagates down.

Ethereum, by automating contract enforcement is going to end up being a tool for the powerful against the weak. A tool which brings the cost of lowering contract enforcement will lead to powerful organizations using Contracts more often against the weak.

Re: What is Ethereum?

#70

Isn't fuzziness a feature of most legal codes? Treating the law like an absolute immutable contract sounds anathema to a healthy judicial system. I'm not sure why some technologists have such a fascination with legalism. I'm not against the idea of digital government and having laws be distributed under a free documentation license with the ability for citizens to discuss and amend laws. A standard version control an…

No, it's a defect. It's probably futile attempting to write "perfect" law, and probably for the best that jurists look to the law's intent rather than always trying to apply the law literally. But how can it be a good thing if people honestly do not and cannot know what is and is not legal?

Ambiguity of legal language doesn't mean you cannot figure out if a certain phenomenon is legal or not.

For example, how would one write insurance contracts? Is it possible to write out every single eventuality? No, so the solution is generic language.

There are of course badly worded laws, but it does not mean that everything has to be concretely written out.

Post reply on HN