"Socially desirable" is the right way to think about it. Law has always been "mob rule", with competitive courts competing to define what this entails.
"Legal" just means the government agrees with it. The state claimed a monopoly on "law" along the way.
The tension we see today is that the "legal" does not represent the "socially desirable" / "law" anymore.
Granted, a binary offline/online result using DDOS attacks is a very rude reputation system, but the reputation feedback processes can be improved upon by competition (semantic web startups anyone?).
Law has always been "mob rule", with competitive courts competing to define what this entails.
Exactly. In the US we have a system of checks in balances to pit competing mobs against each other in a way such that it is sufficiently difficult for a mob to rule over a large population. But if the mob gets sufficiently large, they can rule. And likewise, for small geographic regions we often do have mob rule.
"Legal" just means the government agrees with it. The state claimed a monopoly on "law" along the way.
The tension we see today is that the "legal" does not represent the "socially desirable" / "law" anymore.
Granted, a binary offline/online result using DDOS attacks is a very rude reputation system, but the reputation feedback processes can be improved upon by competition (semantic web startups anyone?).