Smart Contracts: Are We Getting Rid of Lawyers?

[Anonymous No.7952563]

this is sergey's topic at the upcoming SXSW conference. i was thinking of a use case for a smart contract with chainlink as the intermediary instead of lawyers:

i have a smart contract will written so that when i die, my house goes into the ownership of my two kids. my cash gets divided between them.

the smart contract waits for inbound data fed through the chainlink oracle for my death certificate to appear in a public government database.

this triggers the smart contract to send outbound data through the chainlink oracle to legal AND financial sectors updating their databases so that my property & bank account are now legally owned by my kids.

and this is all automatically executed as soon as i am confirmed dead.

no bereft family members having to take death certificates to lawyers and banks. fuck you lawyers!

[Anonymous No.7952607]

Whats stopping laywers to go against this. You dont mess with laywers. Bad move

[Anonymous No.7952639]

>>7952607
>Whats stopping laywers to go against this.
Huge corporations that don't want to pay lawyers.

This will be a battle of titans.

[Anonymous No.7952642]

>>7952607
What are they going to do about it? Start a fucking picket line? The entire point of these decentralized new systems is they can't be meddled with or fucked with by the old guard who'd prefer to see them crash and burn.

[Anonymous No.7952645]

>>7952563
>What we wish it would happen
>We will get rid of the lawyers!
>What will really happen
>Lawyer work will get automated
>Law firms will just become reputation houses where few fucks will jerk each other off and sell "cryptochain" services to clueless normies when they do jack shit at all

[Anonymous No.7952710]

>>7952645
kek sounds like the real thing that will happen, people is stupid and we havent hit bottom yet, the stupidity of humanity is limitless

[Anonymous No.7952748]

>>7952639
Nah. I think highly skilled lawyers will be in great demand because a lot of the law is debateable and requires certain assumptions or arguments to be presented.

These are things that can’t be replicated with smart contracts.

Low-skill, low IQ lawyers are basically fucked. Smart contracts will encroach in mid-tier lawyers.

Low skill lawyers? The internet has made it much easier to perform simple tasks like registering an LLC and things like legalzoom make things easier.

Mid tier like dealing with structures settlements and executing wills is going to become much easier. Debating wether Samsung infringed on a patent will require real people.

[Anonymous No.7952807]

>>7952563
What if there is a bug in the the goverment database and your death is broadcasted to the blockchain even if you are still alive?

[Anonymous No.7952965]

>>7952807
well a death certificate has to be signed off by medical practitioner certifying my death & the cause. so my record wouldn't even exist in the death register until my death was confirmed.

[Anonymous No.7953090]

>>7952748
This.

Law is about interpretation and argument.

Although smart contracts may reduce smaller cases I agree

[Anonymous No.7953146]

When someone unironically has a good idea about using stinky link

[Anonymous No.7953180]

>are we getting rid of lawyers

This is retarded as fuck. There's like hundreds of thousands of laws and you can't contain them all within a "smart contract". Lawyers exist because of the absurdly high amount of laws that exist. Hence, they have to go to school for 3-4 years just to learn about like fucking 10% of these hundreds of thousands of laws.

[Anonymous No.7953271]

>>7953180
there are lawyers who specialize in something called, "contract law". i think that might be related somehow to this smart contract thing, i'm not a doctor though.

[Anonymous No.7953451]

>>7953271
Contract law is 1% of the law field

[Anonymous No.7953481]

>>7952710
>people is stupid

[Anonymous No.7953546]

>>7952563
I think lawyers are not replaced.
BUT smart contracts make it possible to prevent small shit tier cases that no lawyer could be bothered with at the moment.
For example if you're a sub contractor then you can use a smart contract to make the payment when conditions have been met.

[Anonymous No.7953678]

>>7952563
Sounds great. This is one of the few actually useful applications for smart contracts. But still, these cases where money needs to be tied to contracts seem to be rather rare. The niches are definitely there, but smart contracts aren't gonna become as widespread as some people think.

[Anonymous No.7953844]

Companies have all sorts of contracts for all sorts of things (obviously) but the legal system never works like it's supposed to. Let’s say you agree a contract to sell a table, say, for $20 next week. You give the guy the table but next week he doesn’t pay. Are you really going to take the buyer to court even though he legally owes you the money?

This kind of thing happens on a huge scale between companies. If they do decide to go to court it's expensive and wastes time. Usually, the side who’s owed money settles out of court for much less than they’re owed.

This is where smart contracts come in. Smart contracts are basically code that executes a contract when conditions are met. An example might be “I'll buy $100 of bonds if the base interest rate hits 1%”.

Once agreed, a smart contract will execute as written, no matter what. No one can fuck each other over once the contract is agreed (unless they BOTH agree).

What’s more, the contract is stored on a blockchain and so can’t be interfered with without hacking 51% of the nodes (this is practically impossible).

But there is another attack vector for smart contracts. Returning to the $100 for bonds example above, I could hack the input to the contract to (falsely) tell the contract that the interest rate is now 1%. The smart contract sees this and executes when it's not supposed to. The security of the contract is only as strong as the weakest link, which in this case is the external data input (also called an oracle).

Chainlink (LINK) solves this problem by decentralizing the oracle – i.e. the information that goes into the contract. It means smart contracts can't be triggered by false inputs (i.e. the attack vector I described above) without hacking 51% of the nodes (again, impossible).

And the bond example is just one of millions of use cases.

[Anonymous No.7953960]

>>7953844
Well said!

[Anonymous No.7954286]

When real estate is stored on a blockchain the transfer of title should be suer easy through a smart contract. Conveyancing is the bread and butter of many firms, as far as I'm concerned this will be the biggest threat to legal practice's bottom line.