As someone who has been through this exact thing, it sucks, but it is possible in the current court systems. Courts have complicated "Discovery" processes explicitly for this reason: to find out not just the immediate problem (a bankrupt builder or a builder who would be bankrupt by the end of the court case), but the supply lines (what other warranties apply?) and the creditors (where is the bankrupt company's money going?).
A human run court is allowed to state "this bankruptcy looks fishy for this reason, and these people are owed damages, and some of the money that moved on already to these creditors is by rights should be paid for damages to these people". It's definitely not fun to be involved in such court proceedings, and it is and likely always be an inefficient human process, but it is a process as a society we've built to be mostly very trustworthy. A jury of peers to decide if damages are warranted in the first place; a human judge with reasoning to say "this shell company is bankrupt, but these other companies can and should pay, maybe with the money they took from this shell company" or "this shell company is bankrupt but some of this still applies to the warranty insurance product they purchased and the insurance provider needs to pay up even though their client is bankrupt".
It doesn't always work right/decide in your favor, and it is slow and expensive, but "smart contracts" offer no better and often a lot worse processes. A "smart contract" can't route around a shell company/wallet. A "smart contract" likely can't discover that other warranties may have applied or other insurance products existed (and if it can it's in a programming class all its own and likely a one off you can't expect to exist in general or to work if you need to actually rely on it).
There’s problems with that particular mechanism, but in general if contracts can automatically decrease someone’s money, reputation, access etc, they can do enforcement.
What happens next?
The article said the neighbours first vote that work is done. Most of the time that could work. But it also mentions the neighbours could collude to steal the collateral. In that case courts could get involved and force money be returned etc.
I’m very far from a legal expert, but smart contracts seem like a potentially useful tool, within the current system. Not as a complete replacement.
So, it's the government enforcing the contract.
EDIT: Just wanted to add that I actually completely agree with your last sentence!
This is part of the smart contract, which has to explicitly define the conditions on which the collateral is confiscated.
Getting real life data reliably into the blockchain is hard, but there are different approaches to solve this.
A more practical approach is to transfer the funds to Bob once he clicks on the checkbox and have some lock-up period, so that Alice has the opportunity to trigger a dispute if she needs to.
Then the dispute can be resolved by a private court (composed of humans) that both Alice and Bob agreed on beforehand. See: https://kleros.io
You don't have to trust the escrow holder, you don't have to worry about getting banned from Ebay.
The human judges/arbitrators aren’t, and they’re what’s critical. The contract cannot be sensibly completed without their input.
So you have an escrow system where human judges need to supply critical information. I’m left having to trust the human judges, unsurprisingly. Running this basic escrow code on the blockchain means that I no longer have to trust the kind of basic escrow code that’s used in centralised escrows. My question now is whether the escrow code of centralised providers (if condition then funds.release()) is really so unreliable that I’ll get get tonnes of benefit using blockchain escrows. Whenever there’s controversy over escrows, it comes down to the arbitration, which as you admitted would still be performed by humans.
Yes, it means that you will 100% know that the escrow website is not gambling your money away, that it won't out of the blue ask you to supply more documents when it finally comes the time for you to get paid, it means that the escrow won't get hacked and your PII won't be sold on darknet.
Smart contracts are just a simpler and more transparent way to deal with finance.
no, you won't
> Smart contracts are just a simpler and more transparent way to deal with finance.
no, they aren't
who's the one looking for miracles here?
the only thing you can be "100% sure" is that we're all going to die.
the second one is that cults will try to convince other people that they are the only true cult.
what's stopping him now?
> without having to deal with intermediaries and bureaucracy.
you mean laws?
edit: immagine this situation, Bob does the job, the other party never clicks on "done", Bob doesn't get the money, what Bob can do if there's no intermediary and/or bureaucracy protecting him?
> immagine this situation, Bob does the job, the other party never clicks on "done", Bob doesn't get the money, what Bob can do if there's no intermediary and/or bureaucracy protecting him?
As I said, there is a period of funds lock-up. In the worst case, Bob has to wait some time until the smart contract sends him his payment.
and your virtual ideology is better, how?
since nobody can enforce anything.
> As I said, there is a period of funds lock-up. In the worst case, Bob has to wait some time until the smart contract sends him his payment.
What if they payment is never sent and "some time" is forever?
You need laws after all (AKA a solution outside of the chain, or a deus ex machina if you want)
If I was Bob I would not see this thing you're talking about like a great advancement and would continue doing my job like I do it now.
I mean, I get you watched a lot of fiction and wanna feel like living as an outlaw, but even outlaws have laws and follow some of them.
You are trading mid to low trust in your local community for zero trust to some entity you'll never know, who'll never know you, couldn't care less about you and respecting the terms of some virtual contract and pretend we all should do the same.
Do you understand that this is the exact definition of "out of touch"?
a door with no lock it's perrmissionless
how does this solve the issue of authoritarian governments?
> You have no idea how smart contracts work, do you?
I was writing smart contracts in solidity in 2015
at least it was something new back then...
but back on topic, what if they payment is never sent and "some time" is forever?
can you tell me what tools can the poor Bob use to claim what is legitimately his in your perrmissionless world?
how would you encode the "work completed" in a smart contract?
should nodes run by people in the Philipines vote on Bob's work, when Bob lives in Yowa and only wanted to be paid for keeping the gardens in his neighborhood clean (as per job description)?
who decides?
and how?
and what are the consequences for Bob and Alice?
and what happens if Alice or Bob are not happy with the verdict?
> Alice is not available for some reason and just disappears, Bob will still get his paycheck
it's fun you don't see any problem and think of this as an acceptable solution, even if it fails in its most basic form.
You can only hire someone for a job if you have the money.
In reality many people hire someone for a job and thanks to their help they'll have the money to repay them in the future.
Money that at the beginning they do not possess.
Basically credit does not exist in your world, but you still think that it's better for the poor folks.
But what if Alice disappeared because she's dead, and Bob id the one who killed her?
do you ever stop to think about real life?
genuinely curious.
(not to sound harsh, but you just reinvented escrow accounts, in a more complex way...)
I was talking about Kleros at the beginning of the discussion, but it's just one possible option.
>You can only hire someone for a job if you have the money.
No, you can only hire someone for a job using this specific method if you have the money beforehand. This means that Bob can be 100% sure that his employer is capable of paying him.
>In reality many people hire someone for a job and thanks to their help they'll have the money to repay them in the future.
There can be other smart contracts which allow this. The cool thing about them is that Bob is always fully aware whether his employer has the funds to pay him or it's just an IOU.
>But what if Alice disappeared because she's dead, and Bob id the one who killed her?
This is outside of our threat model. We're designing a smart contract for employing a freelancer, not high value SC where murder would be economically viable. If Bob murders Alice this is handled the same way as any other murder.
so a private service that need people to invest money in ether to participate...
Is this your idea of justice?
Some faceless arbiter, subject to nobody?
Why I am not surprised that your ideas closely match how authoritarian system (and dystopian cyber punk worlds) work?
> This means that Bob can be 100% sure that his employer is capable of paying him.
But he's not sure he's going to actually pay and he's not even sure who the employer is.
> If Bob murders Alice this is handled the same way as any other murder.
You're avoiding the answer, and I understand you, it's hard to come with an answer when your design have bugs.
But smart contracts are immutable pieces of code that act on their own.
If Alice dies Bob get his money.
There no way to stop it from happening.
the chain is a useless tinsel in this example of yours, it makes things more complex and guarantees no one.
The law already encodes tons of conditions that a smart contract could never comply with.
What if Bob is a minor or the employer is a minor?
That would make the contract void in real life.
Should people publish their personal info on the public blockchain so that the smart contract can exclude them from proposing or accepting a job?
And how do you check that the informations are correct?
What if Bob is an immigrant running from a regime and has no way to prove who he is, but needs the job to survive?
etc etc
you'd need to basically recreate what government do today, without the enforcement of the law capability.
who would trust a system like that, except outlaws and scammers?
Imagine calling P2P voluntary interactions authoritarian...
>You're avoiding the answer, and I understand you, it's hard to come with an answer when your design have bugs.
I'm not avoiding an answer, I gave you it clear and straight.
>If Alice dies Bob get his money.
Correct.
>There no way to stop it from happening.
>What if Bob is a minor or the employer is a minor? >That would make the contract void in real life.
Depends on jurisdiction.
>Should people publish their personal info on the public blockchain so that the smart contract can exclude them from proposing or accepting a job?
They can do whatever they want.
>And how do you check that the informations are correct?
Idk. I wasn't proposing putting public info on the blockchain, it's your problem.
>What if Bob is an immigrant running from a regime and has no way to prove who he is, but needs the job to survive?
Bob would be delighted to know that he can interact with a permissionless network that does not require an ID and get paid for his work without revealing his identity.
>you'd need to basically recreate what government do today, without the enforcement of the law capability.
Nope.
>who would trust a system like that, except outlaws and scammers?
People who like efficiency and don't like intermediaries.
many nazis volunteered.
it's funny that people like you, who don't have a clue about what they're talking about, think they are so edgy that have something to teach to the humanity as a whole.
> Bob would be delighted to know that he can interact with a permissionless network that does not require an ID and get paid for his work without revealing his identity.
so basically Bob the pedophile could work with kids and nobody would ever know, until it's too late.
Or Bob the racist could employ black kids from developing country and everyone would be OK with that.
Bit most of all nobody could stop Bob, because nobody knows who he is!
That's a great advancement for society!
Of course bad people of the World would be delighted, I bet they would!
I'm starting to think you're one of them.
> People who like efficiency and don't like intermediaries.
exactly: mobsters, criminals, scammers, etc etc
there is nothing to gain for the common people. they can only lose the few protections they have left.
You've proven multiple times that you have no idea what you're talking about.
CVD. cargo cult.
how is crypto stopping Nazis?
and who cares if it's true or not, I was merely addressing your reasoning: volunteering and well behaving are orthogonal.
People can both volunteer and do bad.
> It empowers the individual and makes them less vulnerable to state violenc
it also makes them alone and vulnerable to any other kind of violence, and put them outside of the protection of the state and/or the community.
in your example people have to both pay for the justice system through taxes and for a private jury system handled by who knows who, using expensive crypto currency, when they already have a justice system they pay for.
> like getting their wealth confiscated because of their ethnicity
how exactly?
can you show Me an example where this actually happened, outside of your idealistic virtual universe?
like if nobody has ever been scammed in the crypto space.
> You've proven multiple times that you have no idea what you're talking about.
see?
that's what I am talking about: you confuse what you blindly believe with reality.
The world, unfortunately for you, is not what you imagine it to be though...
No, they cannot. They can reduce these values, but that by itself doesn't enforce anything in the real world. If the entitiy doesn't care about these values (for example because it was a fake account/identity/whatever) then the only enforcement can come from outside.
That's why the word "force" is in "enforcement". States work because, among other things, they ultimately have a monopoly on the application of force.
They don't use PoW or PoS. Instead they run on centralized servers like traditional databases. Only, they run on 10 or 20 or 50 centralized servers run by different people and processing the same input and cross-checking each other. Anybody who has money on the chain can stake it to vote for one of the servers (so I guess it is PoS really). Although anyone can connect to the chain and process input, the N servers with the highest stake-votes are the ones that actually count. Also the server owner has to put up some crazy collateral (currently in the realm of $500,000 I think, this is determined by market mechanisms, it used to be lower) and if they are caught cheating they lose it, a process called "slashing". Even having your server go down can cause you to lose some collateral. Conversely you earn collateral while it is up (like in PoS).
So it's really a lot like a traditional database cluster with an enforcement mechanism, and that enforcement mechanism makes all the difference unless your attacker has millions of dollars to waste.
So only the people with money can participate?
I mean, having a deed of owning some property on the blockchain is all cool and dandy. Provided that the polity where the property is located recognizes this. Otherwise you're still trespassing.