Ray Kurzweil, a famous inventor, thinker and futurist, whose projections on technological development and social changes are highly appreciated by global business community and political elite, believes that the era of national boundaries, as we know them, is coming to its end due to the growth of advanced technologies, which blur state borders and lead to a continuous transformation of traditional national states. Kurzweil claims, that we are moving towards a unified global community:
“We are building a global culture, a global legal system. Nations are still powerful, but I think they will continue to lose influence.”
According to a last year research by Globalscan consulting, the number of people considering themselves cosmopolites, rather than citizens of their nations, reached 49% of total 20,823 people across 21 countries, and this is the highest figure for the last 15 years.
Virtual environment has already seen some examples of associations which are not fitting into the governmental system, such as open digital unions, decentralized societies, virtual cities and nations. These are the first efforts to affirm brand-new law paradigms and form a unified digital jurisdiction.
At the same time, in this «globalisation-digitization» era, corporate environment has some specific requirements, which include, first of all, clear legal foundations for its presence in a digital world. However, a decentralized ecosystem does not imply any central regulatory body, like government, so, the credibility of the system should be automated, and the conditions of interactions and their consequences should be spelled out at the code level.
Where do the smart contracts step in?
The nature of smart contracts, as well as the benefits of their implementationare now commonly known. The advantages brought by smart contracts to companies are numerous: transactions immutability, complete trust between parties to an agreement, automatisation of many business activities, full transparency (and privacy, as well), exclusion of intermediaries … This list could be much longer. More on this you can read in our previous articles:
So, if they are so handy, what stops the companies from prompt implementation of smart contracts? There could be several reasons, such as:
1) Doubts about the reliability of the code (many examples of recent hacks)
2) conservatism, traditionalism, narrow-mindedness
3) Lack of coherence with existing legislation
The last obstacle is the biggest problem of all mentioned above: code could be improved and the narrow-mindedness could be rightly treated. Although, there is no point to expect that all national governments will ever come to universal understanding of smart-contracts and blockchain technology.