Quote from: Zangelbert Bingledack on July 09, 2015, 10:27:17 PM

Branching into law, here's a quote from John Hasnas, the Hayekian legal professor (emphasis mine):

How profoundly naïve and myopic point of view! How exceptionally Anglocentric to the point of parochialism! What a beautiful example of "Here be dragons" from somebody who is considered "learned" amongst the Anglophiles.

Here are my standard two links I send to the lawyers who attempt to do common law reasoning to the rest of the world and the rest of the history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisitorial_system

I'm going to preserve the whole quote for my future reference. This type of reasoning typically comes from various "diploma mill (or step above)" graduates and political apparatchiks, but this one is actually very well written.

Quote from: Zangelbert Bingledack on July 09, 2015, 10:27:17 PM

Branching into law, here's a quote from John Hasnas, the Hayekian legal professor (emphasis mine):

Quote

I have been arguing that the law is inherently indeterminate, and further, that this may not be such a bad thing. I realize, however, that you may still not be convinced. Even if you are now willing to admit that the law is somewhat indeterminate, you probably believe that I have vastly exaggerated the degree to which this is true. After all, it is obvious that the law cannot be radically indeterminate. If this were the case, the law would be completely unpredictable. Judges hearing similar cases would render wildly divergent decisions. There would be no stability or uniformity in the law. But, as imperfect as the current legal system may be, this is clearly not the case.

The observation that the legal system is highly stable is, of course, correct, but it is a mistake to believe that this is because the law is determinate. The stability of the law derives not from any feature of the law itself, but from the overwhelming uniformity of ideological background among those empowered to make legal decisions. Consider who the judges are in this country. Typically, they are people from a solid middle- to upper-class background who performed well at an appropriately prestigious undergraduate institution; demonstrated the ability to engage in the type of analytical reasoning that is measured by the standardized Law School Admissions Test; passed through the crucible of law school, complete with its methodological and political indoctrination; and went on to high-profile careers as attorneys, probably with a prestigious Wall Street-style law firm. To have been appointed to the bench, it is virtually certain that they were both politically moderate and well-connected, and, until recently, white males of the correct ethnic and religious pedigree. It should be clear that, culturally speaking, such a group will tend to be quite homogeneous, sharing a great many moral, spiritual, and political beliefs and values. Given this, it can hardly be surprising that there will be a high degree of agreement among judges as to how cases ought to be decided. But this agreement is due to the common set of normative presuppositions the judges share, not some immanent, objective meaning that exists within the rules of law.

In fact, however, the law is not truly stable, since it is continually, if slowly, evolving in response to changing social mores and conditions. This evolution occurs because each new generation of judges brings with it its own set of "progressive" normative assumptions. As the older generation passes from the scene, these assumptions come to be shared by an ever-increasing percentage of the judiciary. Eventually, they become the consensus of opinion among judicial decisionmakers, and the law changes to reflect them. Thus, a generation of judges that regarded "separate but equal" as a perfectly legitimate interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment gave way to one which interpreted that clause as prohibiting virtually all governmental actions that classify individuals by race, which, in turn, gave way to one which interpreted the same language to permit "benign" racial classifications designed to advance the social status of minority groups. In this way, as the moral and political values conventionally accepted by society change over time, so too do those embedded in the law.

The law appears to be stable because of the slowness with which it evolves. But the slow pace of legal development is not due to any inherent characteristic of the law itself. Logically speaking, any conclusion, however radical, is derivable from the rules of law. It is simply that, even between generations, the range of ideological opinion represented on the bench is so narrow that anything more than incremental departures from conventional wisdom and morality will not be respected within the profession. Such decisions are virtually certain to be overturned on appeal, and thus, are rarely even rendered in the first instance.

Confirming evidence for this thesis can be found in our contemporary judicial history. Over the past quarter-century, the "diversity" movement has produced a bar, and concomitantly a bench, somewhat more open to people of different racial, sexual, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds. To some extent, this movement has produced a judiciary that represents a broader range of ideological viewpoints than has been the case in the past. Over the same time period, we have seen an accelerated rate of legal change. Today, long-standing precedents are more freely overruled, novel theories of liability are more frequently accepted by the courts, and different courts hand down different, and seemingly irreconcilable, decisions more often. In addition, it is worth noting that recently, the chief complaint about the legal system seems to concern the degree to which it has become "politicized." This suggests that as the ideological solidarity of the judiciary breaks down, so too does the predictability of legal decisionmaking, and hence, the stability of the law. Regardless of this trend, I hope it is now apparent that to assume that the law is stable because it is determinate is to reverse cause and effect. Rather, it is because the law is basically stable that it appears to be determinate. It is not rule of law that gives us a stable legal system; it is the stability of the culturally shared values of the judiciary that gives rise to and supports the myth of the rule of law.

We could rewrite the bold text to make a fundamental point about Bitcoin forks and open source in general:

"The observation that Bitcoin is highly stable is, of course, correct, but it is a mistake to believe that this is because it is "governed by impartial math" or code. The stability of Bitcoin derives not from any feature of the code itself, but from the overwhelming uniformity of ideological background and interests among its investors and other stakeholders."

The correct way to think about it is that Bitcoin is constantly forking, just usually to the same thing, because the stakeholders by default desire constancy. But by the same token, whenever Bitcoin needs to change to better serve what its investors/stakeholders deem to be its purpose, that continual forking - like someone just repeatedly pushing a button marked "STATUS QUO" - will shift easily to the necessary change. Of course this will essentially never involve changing the monetary parameters, because - again - that would be the "third rail" for investors and other stakeholders. They will ONLY support changes that add value.

It is not, like the code-focused devs imagine, a matter of stakeholders desiring that "the code" remain constant, but a matter of them desiring that "the code + the environment it interacts with = the resulting effective functionality of Bitcoin in the world" remain constant. If and when that environment changes, the code must also change: in this case, when there is greater adoption and higher technology available, especially with altcoins nipping at Bitcoin's heels, the code must change just to keep the final result (the effective functionality of Bitcoin in the world) constant.