[e-cvs] cvs commit: e/doc/talks/pisa/paper index.html

[markm@eros.cs.jhu.edu]

markm       01/12/27 10:45:31

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         to someone else. The contract host would then revoke Alice's access to 
         the chair, and issue fresh access to the new player, much as the $-Issuer 
         does with Alice's money.</p>
-      <p>With this last step, it seems we have the ability to express the full 
-        range of contract layering used in modern finance. Not that modern finance 
-        is directly relevant to the needs of the poor, but it is a good test of 
-        the generality of our framework. </p>
+      <p>With this ability to compose networks of games, it seems we have the 
+        ability to express the full range of contract layering used in modern 
+        finance. Not that modern finance is directly relevant to the needs of 
+        the poor, but it is a good test of the generality of our framework.</p>
       <p>But wait. This structure decouples knowledge in a way quite different 
         than anything in the financial world. We have the contract host issuing 
         rights it does not understand, since these rights are produced by games 
@@ -712,14 +712,38 @@
         to local knowledge shared by Alice and Bob, knowledge to which Fred has 
         no access, he may not find the derived rights comprehensible at reasonable 
         cost and move on. More commonly, if the contract is understandable to 
-        some number of others, including some Fred trusts, Fred to turn to them 
-        for advice on the contracts meaning. (Unfortunately, it seems this new 
-        medium will bring about a new form of lawyer, but so it goes.) </p>
-      <p>If this tale seems implausibly complex, please keep in mind that each 
+        some number of others, including some Fred trusts, Fred may turn to them 
+        for advice on the contract's meaning -- the computational analog of legal 
+        advice.</p>
+      <p>This provides for a much more complete resolution of the tension between 
+        local knowledge and widespread trust. Previous attempts to title the assets 
+        of the informals failed because of the illusion that these assets were 
+        merely literal simple property -- physical objects or plots of land. De 
+        Soto found instead that these assets were already enmeshed in complex 
+        negotiated systems of rights, rules, and obligations that needed to be 
+        accomodated, in order for a title listing to be considered meaningful. 
+        They are more like our option -- a right produced by a negotiated contractual 
+        arrangement -- then they are like the underlying physical objects one 
+        would point at. Smart contract can capture some sense of these negotiated 
+        arrangements. They will still form a procrustean bed of a sort, because 
+        not all terms will be expressible to this new language. But homogenization 
+        is not needed -- vast variation is expressible within this language, and 
+        we may hope that leaves room enough to capture much of the local knowledge 
+        and arrangements that would otherwise have been lost.</p>
+      <p>For whatever aspect of these arrangements does get captured in these 
+        smart contracts, by uploading these contracts into widely trusted contract 
+        hosts, we achieve credibility of title transfer at a distance. These will 
+        create their own pressures for homogenization: Alice did not lose the 
+        sale to Fred from lack of trust -- under the stated assumptions, our architecture 
+        took care of that. Rather, she may have lost him through her inability 
+        to explain what she was selling. But these pressures for homogenization 
+        can exerpt their influence, or not, after the basic transition is made. 
+      </p>
+      <p>(If this tale seems implausibly complex, please keep in mind that each 
         of the player is presumed to be participating through a software system 
-        well engineered to hide complexity where it can, and make the issues intuitive 
+        well engineered to hide complexity when it can, and make the issues intuitive 
         when it can't. Vastly more complex internal architectures have been made 
-        to seem simple to use.</p>
+        to seem simple and come to be widely used.)</p>
       <p>&nbsp;</p>
       <p>&nbsp;</p>
       <h3><a name="blockbuster"></a>Smart Contracting for the First World</h3>