The possibility of remaking the financial system with the blockchain
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&#x27; credit.<p>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:<p>The vast majority of contracts do <i>not</i> have syntactically testable conditions. They just don&#x27;t. Whether the conditions in a contract have been met is very often a matter of huge debate - this is what &quot;law suits&quot; 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.<p>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 <i>shitload</i> of time writing code and learning about it, far, far in excess of [edit&#x2F;deleted: any other lawyer] the vast majority of lawyers I know [edit&#x2F;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.<p>Who knows, however. If 2016 taught me one thing it is that all bets are off and the points don&#x27;t matter.