On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 6:28 PM, Kerim Aydin<ke...@u.washington.edu> wrote: > I think this holds some water, perhaps more than my argument. And > it's much simpler. > > R1728 allows Contract-actions as long as: > the effects of that > action are restricted to altering entities and/or attributes > whose existence depends on that contract. > > How shall we determine what attributes/entites' existence "depends on" > a particular contract? I think it's a simple test, but not as simple > as the caller claims. > > 1. If something in a contract is not regulated by Agora (see Regulation > Regulations) then it meets the test of being contract-dependent. > > 2. If something, in general class, *is* regulated by Agora, then Agora > must explicitly delegate all reasonable aspects of governing an instance > of that class to the contract (e.g. a contract-defined asset).
It says "depends on", not "depends only on". If one or more factors is necessary to preserve the existence of an entity, and one of them is the contract, then its existence depends on the contract. If I Google "existence depends on", one of the first few results is an article titled "Our Existence Depends on Trees". It claims that people should stop cutting down trees in order to preserve life on Earth. Now, our existence depends on lots of things. If the planet Earth were to lose its atmosphere, for example, we would likely be destroyed, or the Sun to burn out, or nations to engage in global thermonuclear war. That is to say, it's common usage to say "X's existence depends on Y" when there are things other than Y that might destroy X-- which is the case for nearly all entities other than the imaginary ones we manipulate in this nomic. Accordingly, I find your test unreasonable. It makes sense for language such as "entities regulated by the contract" or "entities defined by the contract", but not for the language that R1728 actually uses. -- -c.
