From what I gather its a contract that is so spesific there isn’t any room for interpretation.
Normal contracts refer more strongly to a “reasonable human being fluent in the language its written in”. This leaves some of the basic concepts somewhat open and some fitting is needed to make spesific sense for the circumstances. For example we can refer to “chairs” without there being any rigourous definition of such. But a smart contract can define rigourously complex hypotheticals on what migth happen in a way that doesn’t leave any ambigity.
I guess the theory of it could be way more sound if humans were capable of logical omniscience. But given a piece of code you probably only understand its main modes of function. If you brough up some weird edgecase on how the spesification binds you and ask “did you really will this?” a typical human can’t answer yes to all such questions. Its like committing to following the bible and then afterwards finding out it involves stoning people (and then not being so willing after learning this fact). Someone who doesn’t know that marriage influences inheritance etc is not capable of agreeing to a marriage, even if he says yes during some ritual. But marriage is simple enough that it can be externally verified when a person does understand it or atleast ought to.
In a way we do somethign similar when we include terms of service that are boring enough and skippable enough that lots of people do not read them. But here the whole text is readable. It is just so dense in mathematical/technical coding that reading it in a comphehensive way would take significant effort which is not usually done. Its like saying “here read this schrödinger equation. Congratulations now you understand quantum mechanics completely”. But the comprehensiveness can be executed and the ability to prescan it for known tricks/bugs makes it not automatically socially useless. But if the code ends up later to have a property that neither of the parties were aware off and could not be expected to come aware off upon prescanning the code are they legally stuck on following it? You either have to acknowledge that the parties have incomplete information on the functioning of the code or you have bindings that nobody knew about or intended. Which is pretty bad for informed consent.
From what I gather its a contract that is so spesific there isn’t any room for interpretation.
Normal contracts refer more strongly to a “reasonable human being fluent in the language its written in”. This leaves some of the basic concepts somewhat open and some fitting is needed to make spesific sense for the circumstances. For example we can refer to “chairs” without there being any rigourous definition of such. But a smart contract can define rigourously complex hypotheticals on what migth happen in a way that doesn’t leave any ambigity.
I guess the theory of it could be way more sound if humans were capable of logical omniscience. But given a piece of code you probably only understand its main modes of function. If you brough up some weird edgecase on how the spesification binds you and ask “did you really will this?” a typical human can’t answer yes to all such questions. Its like committing to following the bible and then afterwards finding out it involves stoning people (and then not being so willing after learning this fact). Someone who doesn’t know that marriage influences inheritance etc is not capable of agreeing to a marriage, even if he says yes during some ritual. But marriage is simple enough that it can be externally verified when a person does understand it or atleast ought to.
In a way we do somethign similar when we include terms of service that are boring enough and skippable enough that lots of people do not read them. But here the whole text is readable. It is just so dense in mathematical/technical coding that reading it in a comphehensive way would take significant effort which is not usually done. Its like saying “here read this schrödinger equation. Congratulations now you understand quantum mechanics completely”. But the comprehensiveness can be executed and the ability to prescan it for known tricks/bugs makes it not automatically socially useless. But if the code ends up later to have a property that neither of the parties were aware off and could not be expected to come aware off upon prescanning the code are they legally stuck on following it? You either have to acknowledge that the parties have incomplete information on the functioning of the code or you have bindings that nobody knew about or intended. Which is pretty bad for informed consent.