The Point Of Code-Is-Law Is That It Enables New Types Of Legal Systems, That Would Not Be Possible Otherwise

I have been very inspired both by the work of Dr. Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum who also wrote the formal specifications in the yellowpaper, and by the work of Johann Gevers, co-founder of Monero. These two researchers are developing narratives that converge around Gavin Wood's idea of crypto-law.

Johann Gevers takes a long-view approach while Gavin Wood is looking at the concept from the perspective of someone who is developing the first iteration of a technology that could support crypto-law.

In his research, Johann Gevers describes how human-based trust systems, such as the legal system of the nation-states, are limited by the memory limit of the human brain, dunbar's number. Because of this limit, human trust systems are unable to scale in a decentralized way. This is the reason why we have used highly centralized legal systems.

Johann Gevers goes on to describe that "Where human-based trust-systems do not scale, technology-based systems scale virtually without limit, beyond dunbar's number. " This echoes the ideas put out 30 years ago by information security researcher Nick Szabo in his concept for Automata as Authority. The idea is that math-based trust systems can scale in ways that human-based trust systems never could.

It is only within a system where, as Nick Szabo conceptualized it, Automata is Authority, where Code is Law, that a decentralized legal system would be able to emerge. As Johann Gevers describes it, the memory limit of the human brain means that non-math systems could never scale in a decentralized way.

It is only on top of a system where code-is-law that a decentralized society could emerge.