RE: Why Asimov's Laws of Robotics are not good enough and why smart contracts will require human intervention
We've already had lengthy discussions on this subject in other threads but I can see that you over and over again make the same intellectual abuse - in your argumentation you do not clearly distinguish between these two very different cases:
- The necessity to amend the rules written in code.
- The necessity to retroactively change the outcome of those rules.
This is very unfortunate, as it obscures the picture. While I fully agree with you on (1), I have the opposite view regarding (2). To be clear, the blockchain immutability issue refers only to situation (2). So please do not use arguments supporting situation (1) to support your case regarding situation (2).
Regarding situation (2), I think this is the dilemma we actually have:
If we make immutability an axiom and do not allow to retroactively change the outcome of smart contracts, we run the risk of having clearly undesired situations similar to the DAO incident:
(a) People are unhappy because the smart contract executed in an unintended way and a significant part of their funds was lost as a result.
(b) One could argue that this option encourages hackers to constantly look for loopholes in smart contracts and make a morally questionable business out of it.If we remove the axiom of immutability and allow to retroactively change the existing outcome, we remove the problem of unhappy users - a smart contract execution is undone and funds are returned to their original owners. But this comes at a big cost - we create two additional problems which you failed to mention:
(a) As it is practically impossible to salvage all smart contracts, we create a too-big-to-fail situation, which implies we establish some sort of financial elite which gets a special treatment.
(b) We encourage a business model based on irresponsibility ("we take a risk, if the outcome is good only we collect the profit and if the outcome is bad we get bailed out"), which in my view is a fundamental flaw of the current corporate culture.
Thus each approach has its upsides and downsides. For me the downsides of the first option (i.e. no immutability axiom) are significantly bigger than downsides of the second option (i.e. keep the immutability axiom), and that's why I support the latter.