It seems like we are moving in this direction, with things like Etherium that enable smart contracts.
Does anyone have proof that Etherium is secure? There’s also the issue of giving whomever runs Etherium complete authority over those ‘smart contracts’, and that could easily turn into ‘pay me to make the contract even smarter’.
Technology should enable us to enforce more real-world precommitments, since we’ll be able to more easily monitor and make public our private data.
People are going to adapt. And I see no reason why would anybody share particularly private stuff with everyone.
And then there’s the part where things look so awesome they can easily become bad: I can imagine someone being blackmailed into one of those contracts. And plenty of other, ‘welcome to the void’ kind of stuff.* Where’s Voldie when you need him?
People will be incentivized to share private things if robust public precommitments become available, because we all stand to benefit from more information. Because of human nature, we might settle on some agreement where some information is private, or differentially private, and/or where private information is only accessed via secure computation to determine things relevant to the public interest.
We have precommitments already. It’s just that every time someone follows through on one, people at LW are eager to jump on them for being irrational because they obviously made the choice that produces less of what they want than some alternative choice. But emotional reactions that predictably lead to “irrational” behavior are forms of precommitment.
Of course this doesn’t lead to arbitrary precommitments.
Define “secure”. And, naturally, Etherium contracts live on the blockchain, so there is no one who “runs” Etherium in the same sense that there is no one who runs Bitcoin. But, of course, persuade a sufficiently large part of the community and you can have anything you want—see the DAO mess and the consequent hard fork.
I believe the GNU GPL was made to address this.
Does anyone have proof that Etherium is secure? There’s also the issue of giving whomever runs Etherium complete authority over those ‘smart contracts’, and that could easily turn into ‘pay me to make the contract even smarter’.
People are going to adapt. And I see no reason why would anybody share particularly private stuff with everyone.
And then there’s the part where things look so awesome they can easily become bad: I can imagine someone being blackmailed into one of those contracts. And plenty of other, ‘welcome to the void’ kind of stuff.* Where’s Voldie when you need him?
People will be incentivized to share private things if robust public precommitments become available, because we all stand to benefit from more information. Because of human nature, we might settle on some agreement where some information is private, or differentially private, and/or where private information is only accessed via secure computation to determine things relevant to the public interest.
We have precommitments already. It’s just that every time someone follows through on one, people at LW are eager to jump on them for being irrational because they obviously made the choice that produces less of what they want than some alternative choice. But emotional reactions that predictably lead to “irrational” behavior are forms of precommitment.
Of course this doesn’t lead to arbitrary precommitments.
Define “secure”. And, naturally, Etherium contracts live on the blockchain, so there is no one who “runs” Etherium in the same sense that there is no one who runs Bitcoin. But, of course, persuade a sufficiently large part of the community and you can have anything you want—see the DAO mess and the consequent hard fork.