Ethereum Q&A: Impact of Smart Contracts on Law and Accounting

Reading and writing the word of the law, but judging according to the spirit of the law - how does this apply to code for legal frameworks? We already have plenty of institutions that allow you flexibility to have your problem adjudicated in front of an impartial judge or a jury of your peers. Law students will leave believing in the spirit of the law and be gradually ground down in the system of prosecution and courts until eventually they don't believe in anything other than winning the case. We are now looking at building systems where the outcome is known based on the formula of a neutral contract. It will not always work, sometimes it will backfire badly and we will have another DAO-saster. How can law create a safety net? The worst case is that a smart contract fails and then parties in the contract geo-locate each other to sue them in whatever court they choose at the time. New York Convention on Arbitration, an international treaty that allows you to claim independent legal arbitration within a private system of law in 156 countries. Distinguishing between use and abuse of the system with normative judgement. In a system that has no spirit of law, only rule, there is no distinction between use and abuse; if the consensus algorithm allowed it, it is not abuse. The lesson of TheDAO wasn't "do we fork or not fork?", it was that you don't put $150 million in an untested contract, you idiots! That is a lesson that is self-correcting because people got hurt. The caveat of these new systems is that they are free-market, collaborative, voluntary participation: caveat emptor - "buyer beware."