Cryptocontracts Will Turn Contract Law Into a Programming Language

"Amber scans the READ ME quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards -- a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari'a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn't easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law -- the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It's not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her -- that's what her grammar engine is for -- or even that they're full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP...."

Points off for capitalizing Lisp, but otherwise prescient.

Re: Cryptocontracts Will Turn Contract Law Into a Programming Language

#8

Post by ThomPete » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 8:05 PM UTC

http://virtual-notary.org/

http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/06/20/virtual-notary-intr...

Re: Cryptocontracts Will Turn Contract Law Into a Programming Language

#9

Post by moomin » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 8:06 PM UTC

patrickmay wrote: post #7

Charles Stross anticipated this in Accelerando: "Amber scans the READ ME quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards -- a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari'a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn't easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole librar…

I don't remember that ending well...

Re: Cryptocontracts Will Turn Contract Law Into a Programming Language

#10

Post by rayiner » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 8:10 PM UTC

> Essentially what we are talking about is a real democratization of contractual agreements. Whereas today contracts are restricted to deals with enough value to justify a lawyers time (mortgages, business deals, land transfer etc…), in the future there is no limit to what could be codified into simple contracts. You could imagine forming a self-enforcing contract around something as simple as sharing a lawnmower with your neighbor, hiring a babysitter, or forming a gourmet coffee club at work.

Contracts are already totally democratized. A simple verbal agreement pertaining to lawn tools is already an enforceable contract, as is a simple English statement of terms. I don't see how making it into a programming language doesn't make it less democratic. I don't know if you had noticed, but programmers are more expensive than lawyers now.

Of course simple contracts aren't "self enforcing" but I fail to see how crypto anything helps here. How does that make your neighbor return your lawnmower?