【Author】
Rodrigues, Usha R.
【Abstract】All contracts are necessarily incomplete. The inefficiencies of bargaining over every contingency, coupled with humans' innate bounded rationality, mean that contracts cannot anticipate and address every potential eventuality. One role of law is to fill gaps in incomplete contracts with default rules. Emerging technologies have created new, yet equally incomplete, types of contracts that exist outside of this traditional gap-filling legal role. The blockchain is a distributed ledger that allows the cryptographic recording of transactions and permits smart contracts that self-execute automatically if their conditions are met. Because humans code the contracts of the blockchain, gaps in these contracts will arise. Yet in the world of smart contracting on the blockchain, there is no place for the law to step in to supply default rules-no legal intervention point. The lack of a legal intervention point means that law on the blockchain works in a fundamentally different way from law in the corporeal world. Business organizational law provides a prime example of how the law uses default rules to fill gaps in an incomplete contract and how the law works differently in the blockchain context.
【摘要】所有的合同都必然是不完整的。对每一个意外事件讨价还价的低效率，加上人类与生俱来的有限理性，意味着合同无法预测和解决每一个潜在的可能性。法律的作用之一是用默认规则填补不完整合同中的空白。新兴技术创造了新的但同样不完整的合同类型，这些合同类型存在于这种传统的填补空白的法律角色之外。区块链是一种分布式账本，允许对交易进行加密记录，并允许智能合约在满足条件时自动执行。因为人类对区块链的合约进行编码，这些合约中的漏洞就会出现。然而，在区块链智能合约的世界中，法律没有介入提供默认规则的地方——没有法律干预点。缺乏法律干预点意味着区块链上的法律与物质世界的法律有着根本不同的运作方式。商业组织法提供了一个很好的例子，说明法律如何使用默认规则来填补不完整合同中的空白，以及该法律在区块链环境中的运作方式有何不同。
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