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So this is like the "Software Lawyer" argument I stated above. If I hire a lawyer to review a contract in finance, I expect him to put his greed aside while he's working for me. This is well regulated, and while isn't perfect, keeps most lawyers honest.

With software there is no regulation. What happens when the software expert finds a bug in a smart contract? Is it illegal to sell the exploit? Can he exploit it for his own good? The smart contract is the contract after all.

Who defines what "conflict of interest" means? The software guy who wrote the smart contract or is it in the smart contract itself? How would I know if there's a backdoor in the smart contract if greed is the primary motivation for a software engineer, and every other software engineer I hire to look at that contract?




Yes, those are problems. Just like the existing textual contract system has problems, so does this new system. The new system is, obviously, much newer. The practices around the modern textual legal system have grown up over hundreds and thousands of years of refining practice. The fact that the crypto ecosystem is not yet as developed in terms of questions like that is unsurprising.

What is true is that crypto enables a new mechanism for doing something vaguely analogous to parts of the existing legal system. This new mechanism has disadvantages to be sure, but it also has advantages (for instance, it is border and jurisdiction neutral, the code runs the same everywhere, no matter what). I am certainly not arguing that crypto is strictly better than the existing legal system. It's not. It is just an alternative that is useful in some situations, and worse in others.

Over time, I think the domains in which it is useful are likely to expand. They are unlikely to replace the entirety of the existing legal system, of course. But I think the existence of a border neutral code layer for asset transfer and custody is a useful thing for certain applications.




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