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Comment by sparkie | Hacker News Reader

"paper" here could be used loosely to refer to traditional contracts enforced by the state, in any form. They can still be electronic, but the databases will obviously be administered by the state, rather than being immutable on a blockchain. They'll be more efficient, but given the historical record of government database systems, less secure.

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I'd be fine with this for regulatory compliance.

But one nice thing about contracts (the objects of civil law) is that the state doesn't actually get involved in them except in the breach. You can create as many contracts as you like, as often as you like, with whomever you like, without any sort of filing cost or delay, and they will require no resources to maintain until someone on one side or the other thinks the contract has been violated.

I can't imagine the same being true if all contracts essentially worked like deeds, having to be notarized and filed at a government office (even if electronically) to have force, and needing to pay upkeep fees to keep them filed there lest their force lapse.

Also: a blockchain is nice because it allows people in different sovereign jurisdictions to create a contract. There's no legal contract I can make, as a US citizen, with e.g. a Cuban or Iranian citizen. But I can transact with them through a smart contract.

Smart contract do not override existing law os if there's sanctions for say selling PS3s to Iranians, even if smart contract could let you do that, it wouldn't be legal. In any case the existing case law in the US and UK already has it that a contract does not have to written down to exist so if you're pretty sure things are going to go well - say mowing the lawn, you can go ahead and just enter the contract with nothing written down (an no need for smart contract either)

I'm not really talking about overriding sanctions; just an absence of trade/treaty relations between two countries. You can't have an iterated prisoner's dilemma on an international level without an extradition treaty. (Well, you can, using the sort of arbitrary state-to-state gifts that international diplomatic incidents are resolved by, but that doesn't scale.)

> already has it that a contract does not have to written down to exist so if you're pretty sure things are going to go well - say mowing the lawn, you can go ahead and just enter the contract with nothing written down

Yeah, but there's a reason people do write contracts down rather than... not doing that, when they want to actually have them be enforced in the breach.

Personally, I don't even really want smart contracts to "do" anything on their own; all they would need to be useful is to be predicates—executable code running on a distributed computer that automatically detects a breach of contract, so that legal measures can be taken. That, by itself, is much more useful than a regular two-party written contract that devolves into "burn down their office to get out of the contract", or the regular three-party (you, them, a lawyer) written contract that costs $500/hr to facilitate.

Actually, smart contract DOES override existing law - if the subject of the contract is fully on-chain. In that case you can engage all the courts and police in the state, still, they won't be able to undo your transaction. Obviously, this does not apply to the example with PS3.

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