I have just read an article of Daniel Larimer ‘The “Intent of Code” is Law’ about EOS new constitution and what really hit me was the opinion on the users that fell prey to the scam site. Even though the current decision was to block the hacker account the solution proposed by our EOS guru is “a charitable donation” to the users from the community.

Begging for money or for justice?

I wonder how many of you crypto geeks fell victim to scam or robbery in real life. Maybe you lost your wallet in public transport, or your home was robbed when you were on holiday. And I wonder also what you did afterwards.

How many of you would just accept the fact that your home was not protected enough, or it was your fault not to keep an eye on your wallet?

How many of you would call the police asking to catch a thief?

And finally, how many of you would not call the police, or the police would not come and instead proposed a charitable donation among your friends to cover your loss?

Hard way going mainstream

How many of you know prosperous dApps being used by average users? When I got an idea on what project I would like to develop, I soon realized blockchain is a perfect match. However, almost as fast I realized all the existing solutions do not offer scalability and performance needed for any kind of real-world application. When Daniel and his team announced the idea to create EOS, I discovered also my dreams can become a reality. I started to follow the project very closely, also immersing in a world of crypto-community.

Now with release of EOS mainnet I think scalability and performance will not be an issue anymore, but there is something way much important that slows down the mass adoption.

Can a dApp make a deal with Coca-Cola or Pepsi?

Let’s admit it — even if you are not fond of big corporate companies, they exist, they have huge money, huge income and for many of the start-ups making a deal with only one corporate client means the chance to grow instead of being crushed by market competition. Not all the dApps will be serving only private individuals. Many of them have a product that will be used by corporate clients or will be used to make a link between corporate clients and ordinary people. In our case we are tokenizing polls and surveys industry. In short people get paid when they participate in a poll or fill in a survey, so they are incentivized to do so and later if someone else pays for accessing the created data, part of the money goes to the hands of the participants. In this market normally survey organizers are corporate companies or market research institutions, and on the other side there are regular people. Still decentralized application must meet the requirements of both sides and two of the most important things here are first: to comply with the respective legislation and second: limit all the risk factors related to the cooperation between corporate company and a dApp.

So can big enterprise participate in the system, where if its private key is compromised, it loses all the money and there is no way to get it back?

To hack or not to steal?

While for many the decision to be honest and not to steal comes from their sense of morality and their principles, some may perceive it as a game with the probability of being caught, the chance for a profit and the change for a penalty being the main parameters.

In second case it is a matter of calculating the expected value. If you can steal $1 USD and have a chance of 50% to be successful, and 50% to go in jail for a year and let’s say you value your freedom for $10,000 USD you will not risk, as the expected value is negative. However, if you have a chance to steal millions with some probability of being successful but you do not face any risk of a loss then your expected value is positive and you may try to steal.

The second situation is really what is going on in crypt world. There are so many scams because hackers are never punished and with the inflow of unexperienced users they have a motivation to scam people.

An option to freeze accounts

Even though finding all the scams and freezing all the scam accounts is impossible, I believe we should not deprive the community of the right to act in situations of an obvious scam.

Everyone remembers the DAO, but maybe less remember CoinDash last year, when the hacker stole over $7m USD by changing the ICO contract address.

By keeping the option to freeze accounts we can successfully lower the expected value of a scam, and implement it in case of situations like mentioned above.

What really attracts hackers is a chance of big win, and if they have an additional risk of being blocked after the scam they may decide simply not to try, as the expected value will be much lower.

The “Intent of Geeks” is Law

While I respect Daniel and his mostly brilliant ideas, I see that the community discussion regarding the constitution really needs professionals in the area, and I know many of you will not like what I will write here: we need lawyers.

Daniel and most of the parties discussing the constitution are IT geniuses, but being a genius in one area does not mean you know everything.

In modern countries a discussion about creating or changing the constitution is a matter of the years and is done by specialists.

Our company in order to run an ICO has to comply all the rules of Poland and European Union. Same with block.one — just check a 15 pages EOS token purchase agreement for ICO of EOS. Was it written by Daniel or the professionals?

So as much as I like the discussions we have now about the laws of the network, they should be longer and include specialists from more fields and not only IT specialists.

Summary

I believe that in situations of obvious scams the community should have an option to act and bring justice to the users. How to do that is an open question but we should not afraid of the discussions. They are of much value and I am sure after the years many of us will be proud to take part in them. However, we should invite more people to take part in creating the rules, as writing the law is as time consuming as writing the code.