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A comment on There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology (2019). Parent comment

Re:There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology (2019) by 627467 on Sunday August 16, 2020 @10:09PM (#24183189)
While I agree with Bruce assessment that a lot of Blockchain evangelists push the whole "decentralized trust" or "trustless" or "in code we trust" ideas, I actually think you don't need to buy these ideas to see some hope in how things may work "better" if the promises of Blockchain materialize:

I agree entirely that we would need still be trusting humans even with Blockchain (shifting trust around). But I do see us gaining something with Blockchain: standardization. Rather than having multi-national and multi-lingual team of lawyers and diplomats to establish contracts and rules and how to interpret it and enforce them we can (try to) standardize all in code.

We would all still need to trust our lawyer/engineers, but now they don't need to trust some intermediary, translator/etc to get things done.

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Re:There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology (2019) by bawolff on Sunday August 16, 2020 @11:18PM (#24183534)
People think lawyers are just about making sure there are no loop holes, but its really not that. Lots of it is about making sure that two parties really agree on something including in the fine details.

Blockchain isn't going to magically solve the problem of having to figure out what the two sides actually want.

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Re:There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology (2019) by 627467 on Sunday August 16, 2020 @11:24PM (#24183565)
It won't, I agree. but won't it help auditing compliance and enforcement after agreement has reached?
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Re:There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology (2019) by bawolff on Sunday August 16, 2020 @11:38PM (#24183656)
Maybe if everything the agreement is about is on the blockchain.

However i cant think of a non-contrived example where that is true. Real agreements involve real things in the real world, outside of the reach of automated compliance checking, and you're back at square one.

Perhaps you could say that the formalized computer language helps disagreements, but lawyers already have formalized language for this, and i suspect legaleze is better for making human-agreements than some turing complete language ever would be.

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