"For them, a world where the 'market' operates freely and the 'evil' of government is defeated is the perfect world of freedom." — Lawrence Lessig, Code: Version 2.0

Recently, I had the opportunity to preview James Craig's upcoming documentary Code Is Law. The film will premiere on October 21 on Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, and YouTube Movies, telling the stories of two independent yet related crypto hackers: the involved parties and the mindset of the perpetrators.

The film takes a clear stance, but this issue deserves deeper exploration. If code is not law, should it become law?

The 2014 Mt. Gox hacking incident is the first hacking case discussed in Code Is Law, while the DAO hack may be the most famous in crypto history. The DAO was the first Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) and thus became synonymous with the field. In 2016, when Ethereum was still in its early stages, it was one of the first decentralized applications to gain attention.

The story unfolds from the perspective of founder Griff Green, describing how the initial practice of decentralized governance rose, raising $160 million, only to be met with a devastating hack shortly thereafter.

The film approaches the issue from a human perspective, presenting the prevailing debates at the time. When attackers exploit the internal logic of smart contracts to extract tokens beyond the creators' intentions, is this behavior wrong? Should attackers be condemned by law or otherwise, or is this merely fair competition?

This cycle replayed itself in the early 2020s, and the film also analyzes a lesser-known hacking incident involving Indexed Finance. It is said that the vulnerability was exploited by attackers named Umbril Upsilon and Zeta Zeros, ultimately confirmed to be the teenager Andean Medjedovic.

The film portrays Medjedovic as a representative of the "code is law" philosophy. His worldview is depicted as naive, anarchistic, and ruthless. "As long as I can take it, it's my right."

In the film, this viewpoint is supported only by moral intuition, lacking a principled foundation, defended merely through tautology. No advocate provides normative reasons for why code should become law, but there must be an instrumental basis behind this philosophy that transcends moralism.

The phrase "code is law" is often attributed to scholar Lawrence Lessig. The first chapter of his 1999 book Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace is titled "Code Is Law," drawing a parallel between the power vacuum in Eastern Europe at the time and the internet (someone should pay attention to the situation there).

People always seek freedom on the frontier. This is because society is essentially a structure organized to curb individual desires and serve the priorities of those in power. Typically, this has at least some prosocial attributes: police, as monopolizers of violence, allow us to buy deodorant at Walgreens without ringing a bell for the clerk. But this does not change its essence.

In these frontiers where social structures have yet to be established, the strong can maximize their power to dominate others. For those who wish to live this way or hold heretical views and want to distance themselves from traditional moral oversight, this is freedom.

The moral roots of freedom thus emerge. Freedom is not a positive trait that can be obtained out of thin air, but rather the absence of negative factors. As various constraints are lifted, freedom increases. Therefore, for nonconformists and antisocial individuals, the state of complete lack of government authority in 1999 cyberspace or 2016 decentralized finance may be ideal.

They have now become advocates of the "code is law" philosophy, believing that reducing restrictions can provide them with unequal advantages. Since they tend to engage in activities condemned by society, the weakening of social conscience is more beneficial to them.

But Lessig's view is precisely the opposite:

In this framework, code does not necessarily mean the removal of negative constraints, but rather another form of regulation. It embodies limitations in different ways and faces the same issues as any other form of constraint.

However, two core issues, even under Lessig's broad definition, hinder code from becoming effective law.

First, as Craig's film emphasizes, it is extremely difficult to construct code robust enough to regulate human behavior in various contexts. The problem lies in the contradiction between the rigidity of code's logic and the fluidity of human behavior.

If developers deploy immutable contracts, once a vulnerability is discovered, participants will be unable to continue using the entire system due to the lack of legal framework support. It is unrealistic to expect developers to write perfect code. Human beings (i.e., through law) executing flexible rules is often easier and more efficient than developers anticipating all potential risks and preventing them with code.

This flexible authority makes libertarians uncomfortable, as discretion is essentially a form of power.

If one has ever experienced unjust law enforcement, one can understand how this power may be abused. But the reality is that no rigid system can operate as efficiently as a flexible one. Perhaps in the future, computers through large language models or other artificial intelligence could achieve equally effective discretion, but for now, the effect of code as law remains unsatisfactory.

However, the second problem with the "code is law" concept is even more fatal. While the regulatory model described here is a "reactive" system born out of the need for authority, some political scientists—realists—hold the opposite view.

Authority is a product of the differences in violence between individuals and groups. This difference in violence gives rise to the strong imposing rules on the weak. While code can set rules within its own logic, it cannot achieve a monopoly on violence in the real world.

Whether acknowledged or not, software is deployed by developers, and communities use it for specific purposes. When hackers exploit software for contrary purposes to steal community assets, some victims seek help from the government. Sometimes, the government sends armed personnel to stop the hackers and imprison them.

Although we often overlook this aspect in discussions, ultimately, violence is the fundamental basis of all regulation. As long as the government has an army and developers and hackers do not, those who believe in "code is law" cannot impose their philosophy on the masses.

At least for now, this is a good thing.

Related: 88% of cryptocurrency airdrops perform poorly; how to break this curse?

Original: “Reportedly, the new film Code Is Law explores the moral dilemmas behind crypto hackers”

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。