Nick Szabo  🔑

Nick, what would have been the best practical solution to the recent EIP issue?

Community norms should forbid expanding the scope of software upgrades to include making particular legal and accounting decisions to modify balances. It's an abuse of the software upgrade process, an invitation for lawyers to take over, and destructive of social scalability.

What's different about creating new software with legal/accounting policies contained within them in the first place (like issuance schedules, etc) vs making changes?

Political analogies in this field seriously suck, but one comes to mind anyway: the difference between special legislation (fixing a particular case which should properly dealt with by courts) vs. general legislation.

ERP is an amateur court that lacks the most basic procedural protections one learns in the first year of law school: notice to affected parties, criteria for quality of evidence, etc.

ERP has no reliable or secure way to verify the supposedly required "real" names, nor to map them to social media nyms, nor to securely map these to the impacted Ethereum addresses. For this and many other reasons it would be a ripe target for fraudulent claims.

These are good points. I hope we strive to build worthy self-governance, learning from courts. To summarize, a) stick to general policies rather than specific meddling, b) "status quo" is a prudent default, c) beyond that requires better process?