Code is not law

This past Sunday I gave a new presentation at the Palo Alto Ethereum meetup — it was largely based on my previous two blog posts.

Note: all of the references and citations can be found within the notes section of the slides.  Also, I first used the term “anarchic chain” back in April 2015 based on a series of conversations with Robert Sams.  See p. 27.

Special thanks to Ian Grigg for his constructive feedback.

Slides:

Video:

3 thoughts on “Code is not law

  1. Interesting, however it should be pointed out that Bitcoin is designed to be ” electronic cash” or electronic money, if you will. Money is supposed to be fungible – meaning that is has limited liability once transacted. If some government (or rather a judge in a government court) decided that Bitcoin is not money and therefor is not fungible (no more money business license requirements?), the Bitcoin dev’s and miners would do well to implement zero cash in the bitcoin protocol in order to make it so that one could not identify from whose money bags those bitcoins were coming from.

    • There’s a natural tension between those who wish to secure the chain in all its elegant beauty, and those who wish to secure their own value from thieves, corruption, bugs and hard forks. If there are enough of the former and not many of the latter, then it’s fine to secure the chain.

      OTOH, if your market ambitions include the mass market, you’re going to need to switch attention to what the users want. And they don’t give two hoots for theories of fungibility if they’ve been robbed.

  2. Pingback: Smart Contracts and the Role of Lawyers (Part 2) – About “Code is Law” – Biglaw KM

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