I hate this so much, and it happens so often with Tech stuff. Just because something is brand new, and does not have laws or regulations relating to it right now does not mean that people can simply do whatever they want.

Courts are still going to litigate this stuff, and people are definately going to sue if they start losing huge amounts of money, and it is just worse that the creators are basically not planning for these issues, but just going off the basis that it is all going to work out.

In the specific case of the project known as 'TheDAO', the terms of service does indeed waive all legal rights and says that whatever the computer program says supersedes all human-world stuff.

I may have missed it, but that is not at all what the link you posted says. It has a waiver of liability against 3rd parties (basically the DAO operation). It does not say that you cannot have liability between to parties subject to a contract, or even seem to mention anything about dispute resolution.

Also, I would like to point out that you CANNOT have a contract that requires an illegal act. For instance, you cannot create a contract that says "Person A waives all legal recourse against Person B if Person B murders them." The act of murder is still illegal even if both parties agree to it.

Finally, the TOS for DAO is not the contract, it is merely the TOS for using the service. So the individual contracts between two people are going to override that.

Right, except Is there a section in the code that says the parties agree to have no legal recourse? Because if not, I can still appeal to a judge. The simple fact is that in the legal eyes of the law, the code is not a contract, it is perhaps at best a vehicle to complete a contract. You cannot simply set up a new legal agreement and just say "And you don't have any legal recourse".

The law cannot compell you not to murder either, but does that mean you can go out an do it freely? No.

The law doesnt need to compell the computer code, it can force people to do things, it can force the code to be rewritten, it can shut down servers that run the code, it can confiscate the money used in the processes.

These are not some magical anonymous items that are above the law and inviolate. While it is true that they have not been litigated yet, that time is quickly coming, and they still rely on outside individuals to complete the contracts, and are still governed by all the same laws that everything else is.

But that isnt even true. If two people enter into a contract they are governed by law, regardless of whether it is a paper contract or computer code. I highly doubt there is any legal language in the computer code saying that the agreeing parties waive any US legal rights.

The code is not the contract, but rather a vehicle to effect the contract. You can have the exact same setup without the code.

On top of that, there is some legal questions as to what the DAO stuff actually is as a legal matter.

Did the Allies win WW I?

I think it is pretty obvious that by most measures that the central powers did not win the war, but did that victory create a lasting peace?

It obviously didn't. The way the "victory" in WW I was handled pretty much set the stage for WW II.

It is the same way in the middle east, you can have a "victory" or "win" but that does not mean long lasting peace.

So I will comment on the one example that I can speak somewhat fluently on, which is Thought experiment #2.

In the modern economy, hedges are publicly traded as well as the stocks. It is impossible for one to rise in value without the other falling, simply because information is public. If the executive begins to buy huge hedges against his corporations stock, the value of the hedge will rise.

Even if no one knows who exactly is buying these hedges, the price is going up, and so people will either begin to buy hedges as well, thus reducing the gain on them, or they will sell the stock, lowering its price and reducing the gain on the hedge.

Also, buying hedges based on private information would also be insider trading....at least in the US.

naively assuming linear returns to medical research funding

Likely the returns in medical research would be not even close to linear. The Law of diminishing returns will hit you hard. Spending 10x more on research will likely net you far less than a 10x increase, you would likely be lucky if you got half or a quarter of that. Science comes in steps and part of the process that reduces so much waste is peer reviewing and replication of results. Some processes simply cannot be sped up, regardless of funding. Even with infinite funding, I would be impressed to see a 10x growth.

My main question to you is: Why is it better to have a million robots that are all able to do "X" and build themselves instead of one factory that builds robots and a million robots that do "X"?

Obviously replication in certain circumstances is very useful (mars/space exploration for example where "shipping costs" are not only astronomically expensive but nearly impossible on large scale). In the same way 3D printers are useful not because they can replicate themselves (the cant), but because they can create custom things in short amounts of time wherever and whenever they are needed. It is because the jobs they are doing is small scale that they are efficient. You can ship one thing and have it create 100s of other things.

I think the end goal is to stop him from down-voting as well as commenting as mentioned in the last sentence of the post.

I guess the question is whether someone who took action by themselves to mass down vote for the express purpose of removing other users from the site would stop simply because his primary method was removed.

If I were doing the down-voting, and was then de-karmified, it would be the next logical step to find another way around the system such that I could continue my actions without the use of karma.