
The possibility of remaking the financial system with the blockchain - walterbell
https://hbr.org/2017/03/the-blockchain-will-do-to-banks-and-law-firms-what-the-internet-did-to-media
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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.

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FrankenPC
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.

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elastic_church
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.

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Consultant32452
For 99% of the things I want a lawyer to do right now I'll fill out a form on
LegalZoom and never see a human. Someone wrote a chatbot that helps people in
NYC walk through the process of fighting their traffic citations. Automation
is coming for sure.

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sanswork
Unless something goes wrong then you'll probably regret your canned contract
for not dealing with the specifics of your needs.

Canned contracts are great and a wonderful money saver until they are needed.
It's just lucky that most contracts individuals are involved in are never
needed.

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sanswork
Every time I see someone claiming that no one thought the internet would
succeed by pointing out that newsweek article I wonder if they are even old
enough to remember the mid 90s. I get that it would be regional but in the
Toronto area in the mid-90s everyone I knew wanted to try the web and email it
was often just expensive or a pain in the ass to do so.

Having scanned through the article they basically point out why their premise
is wrong. "lawyers argue that regulation through code alone is inflexible and
doesn’t permit any role for useful discretion".

>In the case of cryptocurrencies, we’re seeing far more aggressive investments
of venture capital than we did for the internet during similar early stages of
development.

Also this is provably wrong. Blockchain VC sits at around 2b over the course
of 8 years and it has basically all but dried up. Internet companies had
passed that by 96 after 2 years. 8 years after the start of the commercial
internet was 2002.

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asciimo
I agree that there are plenty of differences between the technologies. But the
investment comparison in the article seems accurate; a public Internet can be
traced back before the 80s, and "early development" to the 60s. A public
blockchain opened in 2009. Wasn't VC investment in the former comparatively
late?

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sanswork
There were BBSs earlier and if you were lucky you worked for a company or
university with access but commercial internet access and usage was restricted
before the early 90s. So comparing VC to before that point isn't accurate it
also doesn't take into account how the internet itself has accelerated the
distribution of ideas and tech dramatically.

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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_.

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jbpetersen
Alternately, you could start up a prediction market on how likely the accused
is to commit crimes in the future based on potential sentences, sell shares of
their future income in order to incentivize proper rehabilitation, weigh the
various registered values of voters to determine how much money and time
should be sacrificed for the sake of seeing the guilty punished, get the case
analyzed by various remote contractors who have proven records on predicting
verdicts, and various other ambiguously utopian/dystopian "improvements" to
the legal system of today.

And how long until you can train the ML bot to do better than a randomly
selected jury at predicting what a larger jury would make of a case?

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rc_bhg
Maybe. If so, only on a much smaller scale. A lot of the automation in
Blockchain tech might actually help the banks and law firms make even more
money by having to employ fewer people.

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rdslw
I wouldn't say 'Law Firms' \- however I would say notary public may be
severely affected.

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BuuQu9hu
First we need to figure out smart contracts and educate folks on how
capability security works.

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graphememes
What portions of Smart Contracts is there left to figure out?

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libertymcateer
Literally all of the important stuff.

In a recent contract I worked on the definition of "material adverse effect"
took up a page of single spaced 12 point times new roman text and had about
two dozen other definitions involved. Each one of those terms, at its root,
comes down to a judgment call that is subject to disagreement among reasonable
people. This is why we have trials.

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

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tylershuster
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.

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brilliantcode
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.

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elastic_church
and it is going to take a long time for the legislative bodies to catch up to
modern realities.

thank the internet.

~~~
aburan28
What makes you think that legislative bodies are capable of catching up?

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brilliantcode
said the blockchain expert.

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yarrel
Allow new monopolies to emerge?

