[dusted]

I've thought a lot about law-as-code, but my conclusion is always that bad actors will be given an advantage by being able to brute-force the code until they find a way to get away with whatever obviously-immoral-harmful stuff they want (imagine giga-corps spending a few millions on hardware to brute-force tax law - ROI probably even better than tunneling through mountains to grab stonks first..).

In the end it reminds me of a quote by Edmund Burke: "Bad men obey the law only out of fear of punishment; good men obey it out of conscience - and thus good men are often restrained by it, while bad men find ways around it."

[TomasBM]

Right, but if laws were developed in regulatory sandboxes, you'd also have the opportunity to red-team them.

Might be a design idea for future lawmakers.

[dusted]

I'm wondering if it might be impossible to write a law that both prevents the sprit of what we want it to prevent, while also not preventing the spirit of what we don't want to prevent. :)

[TomasBM]

It probably is impossible, but you could cover a lot of cases with more deliberate design. For the rest, you can leave it up to the judges to decide.

Then again, that might be exactly how (some) lawmakers think, but I'm not aware of it.