Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The possibility of remaking the financial system with the blockchain

hbr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 77 posts

Re: The possibility of remaking the financial system with the blockchain

#11

Post by brilliantcode »

tylershuster wrote: post #7
vanattab wrote: post #4

yeah... just like the "sharing economy" was going to take over the world.

You mean like Uber, AirBnB &c? Give it a couple years. The internet is ~30 y/o. "The Sharing Economy" isn't even a decade old.

Uber is fucked and AirBNB is facing lot of resistance for making cities unaffordable by incentivizing landlords to rent to short term travellers vs people who are contributing to the local economy who aren't able to move closer to work due to lack of supply.

Not exactly what the internet ordered.

Re: The possibility of remaking the financial system with the blockchain

#12

Post by libertymcateer »

I do not buy this for a minute and to be fair the headline misrepresents the much more sober tone of the actual article, to the authors' credit.

I am not a fan of cryptocurrency in general (that is another argument for another day) so I am just going to focus on one claim regarding law firms: the rise of the smart contract. I do not believe it is a realistic expectation, and here is why:

The vast majority of contracts do not have syntactically testable conditions. They just don't. Whether the conditions in a contract have been met is very often a matter of huge debate - this is what "law suits" are about. Unless you can create a condition that is testable by code, you cannot have a contract that self-enforces with the block chain. The conditions set forth in contracts are extremely complex and reasonable people can differ. I cannot imagine how you would have a contract be triggered on the insolvency of a privately held corporation - good luck defining insolvency and good luck getting access to the underlying books. Copyright infringement is also a preposterous idea - the amount of semantic judgment that must be made to determine if a work is infringing is enormous. Only the very simplest of conditions - comparing numbers, checking the time, can be reliably automated, and if you are getting a lawyer to write your contracts, odds are there is substantially more complexity in the agreements than this, which is why you hired the lawyer in the first place. In addition, a fair portion of contracts that can actually be set up to work this already are - and the blockchain is not necessary. They are things like credit cards and they work pretty good without the blockchain.

This aside, are you going to trust your lawyers to write blockchain enforced smart-contracts? Every time I post my code to the world I get reamed and I spend a shitload of time writing code and learning about it, far, far in excess of [edit/deleted: any other lawyer] the vast majority of lawyers I know [edit/insertion: a handful of exceptions have come to mind, but I know literally hundreds of lawyers and practice in NYC] - among lawyers I am a giant and on HN I am beneath contempt. Why on earth would you trust lawyers to write code-based contracts? Nothing about that seems right.

Who knows, however. If 2016 taught me one thing it is that all bets are off and the points don't matter.

Re: The possibility of remaking the financial system with the blockchain

#13

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

InternetUser wrote: post #6
vanattab wrote: post #4

yeah... just like the "sharing economy" was going to take over the world.

You don't think that the peer-to-peer sharing of news and other online content has had a significant effect on politics, business, and society?

Can you elaborate on what you mean by peer-to-peer.

What protocols are people using on the internet that are peer-to-peer?

Re: The possibility of remaking the financial system with the blockchain

#14

Post by cholantesh »

InternetUser wrote: post #6
vanattab wrote: post #4

yeah... just like the "sharing economy" was going to take over the world.

You don't think that the peer-to-peer sharing of news and other online content has had a significant effect on politics, business, and society?

They're referring to apps like Lyft or Taskrabbit, which provided shared access to a resource.

Re: The possibility of remaking the financial system with the blockchain

#15

Post by FrankenPC »

libertymcateer wrote: post #12

I do not buy this for a minute and to be fair the headline misrepresents the much more sober tone of the actual article, to the authors' credit. I am not a fan of cryptocurrency in general (that is another argument for another day) so I am just going to focus on one claim regarding law firms: the rise of the smart contract. I do not believe it is a realistic expectation, and here is why: The vast majority of contract…

You haven't heard of Law 2.0. The slow rise to financial dominance is coming to an end for the big Amlaw firms. A disruption event is on the horizon where lawyers will need to be replaced with technology/law expert hybrids who will program the legal systems which will act autonomously with as little intervention as possible. Hands on law will eventually become a thing of the past. I've been working in legal for 25 years on the IT side. I've seen it go from ALL paper to 'paper on demand'. Nearly everything is digital with ETL warehousing acting as the data conductor. The clients are fed up with $1000 an hour corporate lawyers and want another cheaper and faster solution.

Re: The possibility of remaking the financial system with the blockchain

#17

Post by LeanderK »

libertymcateer wrote: post #12

I do not buy this for a minute and to be fair the headline misrepresents the much more sober tone of the actual article, to the authors' credit. I am not a fan of cryptocurrency in general (that is another argument for another day) so I am just going to focus on one claim regarding law firms: the rise of the smart contract. I do not believe it is a realistic expectation, and here is why: The vast majority of contract…

i think the questions are:

- whether a significant share has testable conditions

- whether eventual regulatory burdens can get diminished

- whether the benefits for a use-case make it possible to introduce testable conditions (like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13807297, or i was recently on a hackathon organised by a power provider who fears a blockchain-based marketplace will put him out of business. I was surprised how realistic they fear was. Maybe not today but alle the necessary steps are getting worked out right now)

Also to answer your concern: I think if there is a significant demand, supply will appear. Bootcamps etc are a step. But first we need a better Programming-Language. Ethereums Javascript-like Language is awful and really not useful for contracts. It's hard to impossible to automatically verify behaviour. I think it's possible to build a practical Language that's easy to prove correct.

Re: The possibility of remaking the financial system with the blockchain

#18

Post by valarauca1 »

Blockchains cannot understand intent like a human courts can.

The idea that intent is an important part of determining the punishment/morals of the crime came out of the French Enlightenment. I'd really rather not roll back this. The difference between an accident, manslaughter, and first degree murder are non-trivial and VERY IMPORTANT.

Also fuck you if you want to train an ML bot to that job. You clear don't get it.

Re: The possibility of remaking the financial system with the blockchain

#19

Post by sjtgraham »

FrankenPC wrote: post #15
libertymcateer wrote: post #12

I do not buy this for a minute and to be fair the headline misrepresents the much more sober tone of the actual article, to the authors' credit. I am not a fan of cryptocurrency in general (that is another argument for another day) so I am just going to focus on one claim regarding law firms: the rise of the smart contract. I do not believe it is a realistic expectation, and here is why: The vast majority of contract…

You haven't heard of Law 2.0. The slow rise to financial dominance is coming to an end for the big Amlaw firms. A disruption event is on the horizon where lawyers will need to be replaced with technology/law expert hybrids who will program the legal systems which will act autonomously with as little intervention as possible. Hands on law will eventually become a thing of the past. I've been working in legal for 25 ye…

It's easy to want something you can't have and wanting it a lot doesn't make it any more likely to become reality.

Re: The possibility of remaking the financial system with the blockchain

#20

Post by elastic_church »

FrankenPC wrote: post #15
libertymcateer wrote: post #12

I do not buy this for a minute and to be fair the headline misrepresents the much more sober tone of the actual article, to the authors' credit. I am not a fan of cryptocurrency in general (that is another argument for another day) so I am just going to focus on one claim regarding law firms: the rise of the smart contract. I do not believe it is a realistic expectation, and here is why: The vast majority of contract…

You haven't heard of Law 2.0. The slow rise to financial dominance is coming to an end for the big Amlaw firms. A disruption event is on the horizon where lawyers will need to be replaced with technology/law expert hybrids who will program the legal systems which will act autonomously with as little intervention as possible. Hands on law will eventually become a thing of the past. I've been working in legal for 25 ye…

Where is this happening

As an individual if I want a lawyer for anything right now, I am most likely going to wind up with a complete technophobe who is barely computer literate enough to copy and paste the boilerplate legal document they make for me.

Post reply on HN