Specifically, in the DAO hack, the affected people had enough political influence to get the entire network to undo the ownership transfer that was the result of their own oversights:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereumfraud/comments/6bgvqv/faq_w...

If anything, Ethereum is worse because you have to get the entire network to fork (analogous to a revolution or constitutional convention) to fix a mistake, instead of just getting a judge to rule "okay, that's obviously not what anyone meant".

Furthermore, it's far more unequal, where mistakes only get fixed when they affect the most influential users. Seems like a step in the wrong direction.

For all its warts, a legal system backed by a jury of your peers is still the best way of sorting out the actual intent of a contract when the shit hits the fan.

It is fine if you don't like those features. But it turns out that a lot of people DO want them.

The people who want to court system can already use the court system. Now we just have more options and choices.

But if someone wants to, they can make it extremely for that to happen.

Good luck finding the anonymous contract creator that set up their contract by sending money through Monero.

Also, empirically, your claim that courts will get involved with ethereum smart contracts just isn't true.

It is not true, because gigantic scandals and contract theft have ALREADY happened on ethereum, and the courts haven't been able to do shit.

I did not assign any assertion or position to the OP, only followed up on his thread about the potential ramifications that ETH backers seriously advocate.

And many people do promote the "code is law, and nothing else" idea -- at least Ethereum Classic stuck to it!

A system of laws devoid of all ambiguity and emotion isn't even possible, let alone desirable, because at some point these contracts have to come into contact reality, and the humans in it. And these humans happen to be, well: human.

I guess there's an ideology at play that would love to change humans to fit within their neatly arranged algorithms. And if that means some grandmother loses her house because she signed the wrong smart contract when buying cat-food, there'd be a lot expressions of sympathy on Twitter, but she really needs to understand that it's just not possible to do anything about, because principles etc etc.

Here and there, some of these people may, very privately, consider it a feature of the system that others less intelligent than them sometimes happen to die on the streets because of that one Saturday morning where they didn't audit all 500k lines of brainfuck in that contract for chinese takeout.

With less snark: the idea of ambiguity or emotions as being something negative is a somewhat naive view of reality, somewhere on the spectrum between Star Trek's ideal of Spock and the social darwinism of Ayn Rand. It's most often seen in the currently popular misunderstanding of how judges should behave, and how journalism supposedly used to work.

For an example that maybe is a bit less inflammatory than anything about journalism, check any recent threat about the Google vs Uber lawsuit: the presiding judge is almost a legend for his diligence in learning the technology in the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit a few years back. Yet people criticise him for a lack of decorum whenever he uses language that doesn't pretend to be a robot following an algorithm: "This judge is clearly biased! The contract clearly only says $50,000, and there's no law that gives him the authority to say those are USD. When the defendant says it means Canadian Dollars, it's he-said-she-said and undecidable"

Ethereum, as well as things like IPFS that say "Your content is permanent and irrevocable, don't publish if you don't like that", are non-starters because they overlook this core desire to operate under forgiving systems.

Many unfair or distorted legal regimes exist (including, to some degree, the American one), but they all make overtures toward these principles in some form or another. Ethereum et al must correct this if they want widespread adoption.

Some people do.

Source: I am a person who wants this.

Anyone who wants to maintain power in virtually any setting (communal, corporate, governmental) must create an impression of fairness and equity, at least to the extent that a good portion of the people are not willing to risk their [reputations/jobs/lives] to throw off the "oppressors".

It's not an accident that virtually all powerful corporate bosses and politicians are so image-conscious and superficial; it's a matter of survival for powerful people.