Dr Craig S Wright, Philosophy of Law Part 1. The whole hour…
Dr Craig S Wright, Philosophy of Law Part 1. The whole hour, broken down.
The big idea: a real legal system runs on two layers, and neither works without the other.
Layer one, natural law. The moral foundation. Going back to Aristotle and Aquinas, the idea is that objective moral principles are built into human nature and you find them through reason. An unjust law can still be enforced, but it lacks real authority. This is where modern human rights actually come from.
Layer two, common law. The machinery. It runs on precedent, and traditionally a jury decides the facts while the judge only applies the law. That split is the safeguard. When a judge decides both the facts and the law, or creates law instead of interpreting it, that is judicial activism, and it hands huge power to a small group of unelected people you cannot vote out. Craig's core warning: lawyers interpret law, they do not write it. Writing it is the legislature's job, and mixing those up breaks the division of powers.
Quick tour of the rest. He runs the history: pre-Norman England, the Norman conquest of 1066, Henry II's traveling judges, Magna Carta in 1215 giving us fair trial and habeas corpus. He contrasts the schools: legal positivism (a law is whatever its source says, morality aside) against natural law (an unjust law is not a true law, which is what justifies civil disobedience like Gandhi and MLK, but always with consequences). He leans on Locke (life, liberty, property, limited government, the backbone of the US founding) and Hayek, and rejects Rawls. He notes eudaimonia is not "happiness," it is flourishing, the striving to be excellent. And he says judges should read law by plain meaning and by purpose, never by importing today's values, which is just activism with extra steps.
Now the part that hits our conversation. Craig maps all of it straight onto Bitcoin.
The protocol is the natural law of Bitcoin. The manmade laws, theft, fraud, recovery, sit on top. You apply both.
"There is no law of Bitcoin" is false. Theft and fraud have centuries of precedent. Refusing to apply them is laziness or activism.
Asked point blank whether NAR and DAR are a layer of common law for Bitcoin, he says yes, that is exactly what they should be, and that Bitcoin has always been recoverable.
The postal rule comes up by name. He uses Lord Denning's telex case as the model of a judge correctly stretching an old principle to new technology.
Recovery is asymmetric. It bites at the macro level, large theft, cartels, sanctioned banks, corrupt officials, not at the level of an average person's small balances. It protects the common man and does not enable mass confiscation.
The trap is "code is law." The disasters come from people who ignore the protocol layer, or invent their own manmade law because the code allowed it.
On AI, briefly: he holds that today's AI is statistics, not reasoning, with no personhood or rights, and the same legal first principles will apply to it as to anything new.
Bottom line: the protocol is the natural law, the manmade law sits on top, NAR and DAR are the common law layer, and the postal rule was the tell that we were reading the same map he teaches from.
Replies
The Byzantine generals problem, the Justinian deception.
Byzantines generals daughter.
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Two lips, trust 😏 👄