> in most cases, an unhappy judge would be issuing orders compelling behaviors from specific people

I'm presuming here that the unhappy judge is on the other end, is the thing. There's no judge local to the person “in the wrong” who actually has cause to go after them. Only the judge in the other country does.

If I'm in Iraq and you're in Brazil, and I rip you off, and you have no idea who I am because I'm just some pseudonym on a darknet market, then sure, a Brazilian judge can write an order for "me" to pay the money back... but how are they ever going to enforce that? They don't even know who "I" am.

Let's say they at least know where I am (Iraq.) In a compatible-legal-frameworks situation, your judge could get an arrest warrant out, and nudge my country's police to try to do some ISP PRISM-ing to figure out who I am. Then your judge could try to get me extradited to Brazil to be tried.

But if Iraq and Brazil aren't on "good buddies who treat one-another's warrants in good faith" terms... then what's your judge going to do?

(To put this another way: if Edward Snowden ripped a bunch of private US citizens off before heading to Russia/Switzerland/wherever, would he have been any more likely to have been extradited sooner?)

> if you're in Iraq and I'm in Brazil and we enter into a contract (as would be legally understood in either or both countries), we are now in a contract under the jurisdictions of both countries.

In the case of actual offshore casinos, if you lose money to another person, you don't owe them money, because you never interacted with them directly. You played a game together; but while doing so, what was technically, legally happening was that you were interacting with the casino, and they were interacting with the casino. So, if anyone owes anyone money, then it's the casino that you owe money; and, separately, it's the casino that owes them money. (This is a large part of why casinos get you to trade your cash in for tokens, and then play games using the tokens. Everything that happens with the tokens, is "you interacting with the casino.")

You see this dynamic domestically in the form of e.g. car insurance. If you rear-end someone, you don't owe that person money. You owe your insurance provider money; your insurance provider owes their insurance provider money; and their insurance provider owes them money. Usually all different amounts! Because those are three different contractual agreements, being settled separately.

While it’s not necessarily the case that this is the body of case-law that would pertain if you send Dogecoin to someone in another country through your mutual memberships in some DEx, it’s not not necessarily the case, either.

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I think we’re getting off-track here, though. My original point wasn’t that a judge would be replaced by a network-consensus abstract machine. It’s that a network-consensus abstract machine is a valid replacement good for a judge, when you don’t have any compatible legal framework through which to access a judge. This is the good people are paying for when they pay crypto transaction fees: this fake robot judge, that—while worse than a real judge in almost all respects—is at least better than the nothing (i.e. the “send Western Union and pray your counterparty isn’t a Nigerian prince”) you get by default in international civil/contract-law dispute scenarios.