| > But contracts can never define the totality of the law that applies to a given situation, even if the parties swear up and down that that is their intent. I think this is true, and this is probably all you had to say. > Can code both embody and replace law for the exact function for which it is set up? Sure, yeah. 99.9999% of people in rich code-enforced transactional systems like EVE Online and the NASDAQ order book are content with how code has replaced and embodied the "law" (or more broadly, "how things work"), despite the fact that people win and lose at this video game and in the real stock market all the time. It's clearly not just about people being mad and losing a ton of their money, because that happens in the stock market all the time but losers rarely sue NASDAQ. It's just when people do sue NASDAQ, hilariously, it's when there's bugs in the order book / exchange code, or shutdowns of the market due to technical errors. Do you see how that is different? What matters isn't whether or not a "contract is a contract," but whether or not there are bugs. A bug is a concrete thing. It's not something you can abstract away into your bigger point about "human relations" and a "system of laws." You can write a test for nearly all kinds of bugs and show very confidently that whatever the issue was, it won't happen again. There's no such thing as unit tests for laws, unless you get so abstract as to lose everything essential about unit tests. You can reproduce bugs in code infinitely, but you don't get to re-adjudicate disagreements in contracts infinitely. There's so much that's different between disagreements over legal interpretations and a software bug that you're missing why people view the fork as relatively uncontroversial. There was a bug in the code which led to an exploit. It isn't a refutation of law being embodied in code. It's just a refutation that this particular exciting contract system wasn't treated like the multi-hundred-million dollar software product it turned out to be. The story is smaller than you make it to be. |