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by HappyFunGuy 3629 days ago
It's a good thing that smart contracts have allowed us freedom from human error and bias.... I guess we can just call them "contracts." now.
3 comments

Intersting idea. Perhaps we should have a system of governance of the "contracts" whereby we elect "representatives" who appoint "judges".
Dude, we could even name it something cute, like when you're trying to get a girl to marry you... Courting, yes, we could call it a Court!
I think that's kinda where http://urbit.org/ is going with its constitution.
Poe's law in full effect.

If you're serious: Why not make use of existing infrastructure (current courts, laws, etc) rather than reimplementing all that again on top of ethereum? Also, what prevents this new layer from becoming as corrupt and bureaucratic as the one we currently have in place?

I was being facetious :)
Without irony, it would be awesome to have a court system on the internet.
Human error and bias are pretty much impossible to eliminate in any system that involves humans making choices.
smart "contracts" = essentially a severless service running on a decentralized platform

smart "contracts" != legal contracts

How decentralized is a platform that hardforks via human intervention? What happens when the 51% choose to take the money of the 49%? If your blockchain changes the rules, because someone followed the rules of the code, but following those rules led to the "wrong" people losing money. Then your blockchain is more harmful than useful.
> What happens when the 51% choose to take the money of the 49%?

What happens when the 51% desires to violate the rights of the 49% in general? (Or, more commonly in the real world, 10% desires to violate the rights of 0.5% and 85% don't care.) Direct democracy refuses to solve that issue in any way other than assuming that the minority will be successful at returning violence against the majority, or that everyone will just get along.

In practice, though, nobody's actually stealing your money here... you can still use the old chain if you want, it'll just be devalued to the point of uselessness.

"your blockchain"?.. This is not a football team or a clan, there is no "my"/"your"...

Decentralized systems work by consensus and by choice, for the DAO the consensus of the community is to stop the theft. Some might disagree and move to their own fork.

In the scenario of the "51%" you described, the "49%" would simply move to their own forked chain if they so choose.