I'll make a prediction about where this is going longterm. Smart contracts will take off despite their rigidity but we will start writing them to include common law arbitration protocols. The arbiters will initially be 1 or more human but as the block chain begins to evolve it's own common law(s), fuzzy machine arbiters will emerge to fill the "incompleteness".
>>... to include common law arbitration protocols.
That's a great example of the sort of ambiguity that an arbitrator must deal with. Do you mean to refer to "the common law" as in the body of law descending from the brits, or do you mean the common law principals of precedent and authority? Or do you mean only the concept of precedent by which past decisions under similar fact patterns are used to inform decisions regarding new fact patterns. I have some assumptions based on your choice of language and my best guesses as to your cultural background, but good luck finding a machine capable of such understanding. If we crack that, then much of our culture is moot and the robots can be left to run things.
I mean a "concept of precedent by which past decisions under similar fact patterns are used to inform decisions regarding new fact patterns." Without the need for territorial jurisdiction there will be many competing (but still distinct) common law groups. Signatories would pick a lineage at signing (npm install JAMS).
We'll start with human only arbiters, (panel of three from JAMS for example) then moved to mixed panels, then totally mechanical arbiters will handle most disputes once they're good enough.
then totally mechanical arbiters will handle most disputes once they're good enough.
I'm not seeing it. Who's going to enforce the outcomes of machine dispute resolution? I mean, who's going to even want to sign up to the machine dispute resolution? Not me, no way, that's the freaky dystopian future we're supposed to be trying to avoid.
> I mean, who's going to even want to sign up to the machine dispute resolution? Not me, no way, that's the freaky dystopian future we're supposed to be trying to avoid.
Hell, that was a plot point in a 1987 episode of Max Headroom, "The Blanks", where a "blank" (someone who has erased themselves from all government databases, which is a crime in the world of Max Headroom) protests after she is tried by a computer that she has a right to be judged by a human but the prosecutor points out that as a "blank" she "has no rights" (implying that if she was not a "blank" she would have such a right).
Business wants a reliable and predictable legal system. They don't care that the judge has a pulse. If the machine looses it and starts making terrible decisions, people would just start using a different arbitration group. You could probably even update old (well written) contracts to accommodate that.
Reliability and predictability are extraordinarily easy. For example: he who pays the most to the judge wins. That's very reliable, very predictable. It can be automated. Decisions can be taken instantaneously with absolute and perfect certainty as to who should be the victor. But it isn't just or fair, nor is it friendly to business.
Business wants to maximize profit. It supports justice and fairness to the extent that they aid the production of profit and absolutely no further.
A just legal system may be imposed upon businesses, but the desire of each business is to transform that system into one where it receives maximum benefit for minimum expenditure.
Your example isn't desirable because it maximizes expenditure, not because it minimizes justice.
Your first, depends. The tiny businessman will claim he wants fair courts, but the big business love the predictable and reliable courts, because they save time and money when making decisions with legal repercussions, and are great for those with money.
Brazil economy tanked recently in part BECAUSE courts suddenly become actually fair, sending several corrupted companies, and their thousands of (mostly innocent) employees to their doom, and making rich people wary of investing, because now they are unsure about their own future, and the corrupt ones fear for their future.
I cannot wait until I can do UNIDROIT[0]-compatible contracts in Rust using Parity[1]. building an implementation of UNCITRAL Model Law[2] would be the biggest market disruption I could think of. Imagine being able to do ex aequo et bono (think Judge Judy/small claims rules) arbitration; even with human (flawed/biased) arbitral tribunals, this would be amazing.
ROSS is killing the need for lawyers, and this is the path to killing the need for judges. Software is eating the world, and i couldn't be happier.
>then totally mechanical arbiters will handle most disputes once they're good enough.
It seems to me that any such arbiter would need to have the practical ability to interpret the human intent behind imprecise/incorrect language and author/fix code. I think that would be a major advance in computer science and the most important application would be writing software.
Yes but that is a flesh-and-blood arbitrator. We are talking about coding the arbitration process into a machine. Being pedantic is exactly what happens when one tries to express cultural norms in the exact terms used by mechanisms.
If you could capture the entire logic in code, it wouldn't be arbitration, it'd just be a feature of the smart contract.
The way you'd encode an arbitration clause into a smart contract is making the arbitrator an oracle. That makes it a part of the smart contract, but it's still resolved by an external arbitrator.
""So I’ll start there, and imagine that there are semi-trusted ‘oracles’ that compete to be the most reliable and trustworthy verifiers of contracts. People involved in contracts choose N of them, and then require that contract conditions be validated by one or more of them before the contract pays out. Pick more than one so no single oracle can steal the contract’s funds, but less than N in case some of them go out of business or just aren’t around to validate contracts when it is time for the contract to pay out."
So you can "just" write contract in some language so that:
- it will cover most of cases without human intervention
- if there will be bug with code oracle will read (as human) content of terms to get idea about contract intent (basically dispute)
But it seems that good marketing and some really interesting technology can switch focus from asking basic question - "we are trying to solve existing business problem or just create cool tech?" And yet when i read blogposts about ethereum i see more and more complicated contraptions (ruby goldberg machines in fact) and reason why this whole thing is even build is not clear.
Right, the point is that the arbiter can evolve independently of the contract logic (via establishing new precedent). The contract would just specify a unique, unforgeable designator for the arbiter to use.
Am I correct in thinking that a smart contract has to be open source? Because there might be good reasons to keep the arbitration oracle's source code secret.
No, multiple parties could execute a smart contract between themselves, and keep the code private. Smart contract just means it's a contract that gets executed through code.
Even in the case of a public and decentralized platform like Ethereum, I don't think there's any requirement to make it open source. Further, I think with Ethereum, a smart contract is made up of compiled code and a Application Binary Interface (defines what functions can be called in your contract), so it could be possible to never even share the source publicly. I've never written an Ethereum smart contract so this is just my understanding, and I may be wrong.
>> in the vein of the living body of common law descending from the Brits.
Does the speaker recognize the various forks of that body of law? The US/Canada/Australia and others split many years ago and are now developing their own versions. I assume the OP is speaking of them collectively, but try asking an American whether Canadian cases should be relevant to US decisions.
It;s actually much more than the 50 states. There are the territories and the feds. Then there is the precedent used by various boards and committees such as the NLRB. Canada and the UK have similar splits (ie scotland) but the biggest and most relevant divide is that between nations.
either party to this contract submit a signed request for arbitration within the escrow period of this contacts then
1) a panel of 3 arbiters from the New Atlantis Common Law Arbitration Group will be selected at random.
2) 50-ETH will be set aside for court fees.
3) The panel can execute any 1 of 5 events by submitting 2 of 3 signed tokens. If the panel cannot arrive at a consensus, one token will execute at random.
Many competing standard arbitration packages will develop.
>> Contracts don't usually have a 'random outcome' clause, do they?
Like in a betting shop? When I lay my chip on "red" then I am entering into a contract with the casino. A random event can be a term in a contract, but you are correct in stating that in the case of a dispute we do not allow a coin flip on the "who is right" question.
Whether the random number is pulled before the hearing (picking just 1 judge instead of 3) or after (by picking one vote token at random) seems the same to me.
