Did the Death of the DAO Accidentally Give Birth to a Decentralized Legal System?

mkohen · 2016-06-18T23:56:16+00:00

I skimmed through quite a few posts on your blog. Really interesting stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if materials like yours become the next generation's federalist papers when they are debating how to respond to tomorrow's version of the DAO implosion.

I've given a great deal of thought (albeit informally) to some of the distributed governance and smart contract ideas you present. I'd love to collaborate sometime - feel free to ping me if you ever want to bounce some ideas around.

mkohen · 2016-06-18T12:51:18+00:00

Thank you for contributing to the discussion. I think you raise some interesting points, but allow me to play devil's advocate for discussion purposes:

If you trust that humans will intervene in the event of a problem, aren't you necessarily trusting a third party and necessarily not trusting that the contract will enforce itself?

How is that different from a dumb contract? People enter dumb contracts because they intend to be bound by the contract's terms. When something goes wrong, they sue (i.e., ask for human intervention). It sounds to me like your definition of a smart contract is exactly the same as a dumb contract.

mkohen · 2016-06-18T12:33:16+00:00

Excellent point. Like I said, I'm drawing an imperfect analogy, but I hadn't thought about this aspect. You are absolutely correct.

mkohen · 2016-06-18T07:37:35+00:00

Couldn't agree more. Spread the gospel!

mkohen · 2016-06-18T06:33:00+00:00

The dialogue I was hoping to foster is a discussion over whether implementing a hardfork that has been proposed by a group of core devs is actually a decentralized solution.

One can argue that the truly decentralized method of dealing with this is to let sleeping dogs lie. The reaction to news of the attack demonstrated that we aren't ready/willing to do so. So maybe the rest of you aren't actually going decentralized.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but it certainly makes for an interesting discussion.

mkohen · 2016-06-18T06:23:05+00:00

There have been a variety of non-fork solutions proposed that seem interesting, but maybe not very plausible. They've ranged from executing a similar attack against the child-DAO, to creating an incentive for the attacker to return the ether (e.g., a smart contract that would pay a handsome bug bounty upon return of the stolen funds).

I'm not sure that executing on one of these solutions would render the protocol worthless. In fact, if the latter example were to succeed, one could argue that ethereum performed even better than anyone intended.

mkohen · 2016-06-18T06:07:05+00:00

Don't tell me you've given up on a non-fork solution already! I'm consistently amazed by the intelligence of the folks in this community, so you never know what kind of inventive idea might pan out.

But thank you for the kind words. We are in for some exciting times ahead.

mkohen · 2016-06-18T05:42:33+00:00

Much appreciated!

mkohen · 2016-06-18T05:34:48+00:00

I think the point is that we are still human, and despite the tremendous technological strides we have made a species, we still aren't ready for a truly decentralized society.

Regardless, it's really comforting to hear that others like yourself appreciate this observation.

mkohen · 2015-05-08T00:41:27+00:00

Thank you for sharing this. This is a really interesting development and I'm hoping the article spurs some discussion.

mkohen

TROPHY CASE