heckerhut

You mean a bearsheet?

Great comment. Thanks.

Yes, spot on. HN mostly hates crypto but for all the wrong reasons. I learned a lot about the community here when I first realized that.

Wow, this guy has a war fetish. Makes the ideas and intent behind OR and its subsequent sale to FB all the more questionable. Sick, sick world.

In Europe, private companies can sue based on anti competitive behavior. It’s not limited to government agencies. Makes sense if you think about it. I’d assume it’s similar in the states.

Yes, completely. Running on a t-mobile world flat. None of the people I talk to has any clue where I am. I tend to not show video.

I bought a boat and made the driving license right when the lockdown started in March. Put solar panels up, big batteries and a 4G hotspot. Been living on the boat ever since. Best decision ever.

Wow, rarely seen such good writing on this topic. Encouraging to see that these ideas are well and alive and kept available until the impossible suddenly becomes possible.

Every single example you give either falls under contractor or employee. Simply because you don‘t know legal language, doesn‘t mean lawyers don’t have simple, binary ways to deal with this that fully captures all of your examples. Law is not at all wishy washy in this case. If both employees and contractors are captured, then you‘re literally covered.

What I do agree with, is that any careful corporate lawyer would have a good look at this license and check whether there are any courts that have ever looked at this license to see how battle tested it is. Speaking as a lawyer, what I would see as an edge case that might be problematic is if a competitor of Outline that uses its completely self-built tech stack to provide a competing service as outlined in that clause would use Outline internally as a knowledge base. But I mean that‘d be absurd.

// addendum Personally, I think it would be cool if Outline at some point removed that clause, once it has built sufficient moat around its commodity services.

Assuming that money is what they’re after. Are you reading Durov’s channel on Telegram? Also, having invented the Russian Facebook and forcefully selling it to the Kreml - I don’t think he needs any more money. He’s playing a totally different game. I don’t know which one though.

hehe. I’m from there too.

well said.

Lessig: https://youtu.be/pcYJTIbhYF0

China is actually quite environment savvy. They understand that environmentally friendly tech is an economic growth machine. The US less so. I do t worry about China as much as I worry about US.

It’s based on a quorum of white-listed accounts that are allowed to sign blocks.

That’s social welfare. We already have that in most civilized places. It’s a punishment for failing to have a job whilest keeping you barely alive.

Yes. Evolution is actually its own evidence. Biological evolution evolved out of necessity. Without constantly changing evolutionary pressures exerted by an organism's external environment there would be no need for evolution and it therefore wouldn't have evolved.

nope, it's ICOs

The author falls into many traps of the law vs code debate. There is a big difference between wet and dry code, as Nick Szabo, the original inventor of 'smart contracts' put it.

Admittedly, it is very stimulating to entertain thoughts in the direction the author takes his description. But in the end it is not a fruitful approach to understand ethereum and other smart contract systems.

Law has an open texture. It is deliberately broad and ambiguous to allow specific real life events to be subsumed under the conditions of a given regulation. Legal provisions do not have to be formulated in a natural language. They can be expressed in pictures or even in (pseudo) programming code. What is important is who (or what) parses and interprets the code. Wet code, i.e. legal provisions, are interpreted by humans. Nothing else can (currently) understand the "actual meaning" of a legal provision. Dry code is the opposite in that it is not interpreted by humans but by machines. Smart contracts - the official (but historically inaccurate) name of those programms that are hosted and executed on the ethereum distributed virtual machine - are written in dry code.

Ethereum is a 'rich and trusted' execution environment for software. 'Rich' because the ethereum virtual machine has access to a whole bunch of data that carries deep meaning to specific individuals and human society in general (or rather might some day). Trusted because the code execution is performed in a way that is extremely reliable. Whatever the competing interests behind the outcome of a specific computation may be, influence over the network may only be gained through computational resources (and at a later point probably stake/ether) which - in the real world - means economic resources. The achilles heel of a network such as ethereum (and bitcoin) is that "the crypto-economy" needs to stay causally disconnected from the other economy, that uses blockchains as a tool to run trusted fiduciary code (currency, insurance, identity, reputation).

"Law vs Code" is a very interesting talk to be had but there is no room for a "doomsday argument". Both are separate but intertwined domains. A fruitful approach to understanding the relationship between code and law may be Luhmann's system theory.

[further reading] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann https://medium.com/@heckerhut/smart-contracts-platforms-and-...