I am announcing the formation of the
Digital Common Law Institute.
Welcome to Common Law 2.0Our primary purpose is to provide a forum for hackers and lawyers to meet and discuss what sort of attributes we need in digital common law.
What is Digital Common Law?Digital common law is something that doesn’t yet exist. It is an entirely new concept born from the revolution in cryptological currencies. Bitcoin and especially Ethereum provide us with an opportunity to formally digitize contractual agreements. As these contracts grow in complexity and methods of arbitrage emerge, we foresee the emergence of what we call Common Law 2.0.
We see many similarities between today and the beginning of the Renaissance. That period of time marked the end of the Dark Ages and was the birth place of our current corpus of common law. We call this Common Law 1.0. Our purpose here is to build upon this rich body of common law and bring it into the modern peer-to-peer context. Our hope is that hackers and lawyers will find this site (institute) a constructive forum to work through the complexities.
Why have an Institute?Because hackers and lawyers don’t typically meet, our intention at the institute is to facilitate these conversations and provide a discussion forum.
Comments
This. How do pseudononymous bots/persons who value their privacy choose a pseudononymous bot/person mediator? Game theory suggests that some mediators are playing the short-con, others the long-con, and all of them have equal ability to poison the reputation well. The promise of a digital common law may well be in the elimination of judges. Because transactions are anonymous and irrevocable, the "Law" is the smart contract. "Mediation" is simply the extension of the smart contract to handle edge cases. E.g., "if x,y, and z then compute payment based on efficient breach algorithm, else...". In the Digital Common Law there may be no disputes, for the parties are merely secret keys executing a protocol over the interwebs. The protocol terminates and that is what passes for Justice.
Apologies--I tend to think big.
" a replacement for law itself "
In my opinion law as we know it will not exist, in this great new world of DACs/ or what ever they become known as.
DACs Will only define there own laws when they exist? Its like the internet in the beginning, did we have any laws then? No we didn't, how long was it for Cyberlaw to become law of the internet.
A long time after, so as i have said law only defines itself after the fact.
What you have to think about in are brave new DAC world, is the use of words to tell and explain to people what a DAC is.
I remember reading on the Invitus website, someone said be careful on your choice of words in developing DACs.
Explanation, when you use the word contract or contracts, on there own they are just words, when you apply meaning, as a contract or contracts in a business environment, example business services, you then have business contract or contracts law.
The same applies to Decentralized Autonomous Corporation, the first 2 words are words, but when you add Corporation that word has laws attached to it, Corporation law, and so on.
Its these small things that we have to define to make this work, its the small things that make innovation what it is.
We need to find new words for , Corporation, contract/contracts, shares, shareholders, there are more words like this in the old world before DACs, like i have said before these words and other words have laws attached to them and we need to find new ones.
Regards
Gary
What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense."
A libertarian law knows no territorial land borders. Every individual is a sovereign autonomous entity collaborating with other sovereign entities in exchanging private, communal property derived social economic benefits under voluntary terms. Every sovereign individual contributes towards the collective organization of defensive law. This will be interesting to watch this development.