On Thu, 2026-02-26 at 11:51 -0500, Gregory Hayes via agora-business wrote: > I call for judgment on the following statement: "Galle CAN transfer a > Contratoken to the Contradictory Contract." I submit the text of the > Contradictory Contract as evidence, and the following as arguments:
Hello! Gratuitous arguments: There have been quite a few paradox attempts like this in the past (some of which were successful), so there's quite a lot of case law about this sort of thing. Normally, when this sort of paradox doesn't work, the reason that it doesn't work is that something in the rules requires the action to be unambiguously possible, but the contradiction creates an ambiguity. For example, in https://agoranomic.org/cases/?3334 a Promise was given a self-contradictory author destruction condition. At the time, the rules didn't have any requirements on unambiguity, so an attempt to destroy it was straightforwardly paradoxical. Nowadays, the rule in question says "If a promise specifies expiration conditions then any player CAN by announcement destroy it while the expiration conditions are unambiguously met.", so the paradox attempt in CFJ 3334 no longer works: the contradiction creates an ambiguity that prevents the action working. This case is a little different from the others, though, because we have a default-CAN in rule 2577 that is restricted by the "An asset CANNOT be gained by or transferred to an entity unless its backing document specifies that entity can own it." in rule 2576 and the "subject to modification by its backing document" in rule 2577. So a player judging this CFJ will need to focus on whether the contradiction in the contract modifies transfer attempts into being a paradox, or whether the contradiction means that it simply fails to successfully specify that the transfer is possible or fails to correctly modify the rules for the transfer. The caller might want to analyse the text in rules 2576 and 2577 and present their own interpretations about what they mean in this situation. In particular, the word "specify" in rule 2576 looks relevant – if a contract contains two contradictory specifications, do they both succeed in specifying, or both fail to specify, or collectively cause the specification status to become paradoxical? It's also worth thinking about whether a Contratoken owned by the Contradictory Contract would be in abyeance or not (or whether that itself would be paradoxical). If it would be, then the transfer might not be possible because the recipient would automatically change (although even in that case, it might be possible to create a similar paradox about whether or not you could transfer to the Lost and Found Department). As a side note, the "unambiguously" in rule 478 doesn't matter here: that requires the action (and intent to perform the action) to be specified unambiguously, but doesn't require it to be unambiguous whether or not the action can be performed. (FWIW I think this is one of the better paradox attempts we've had in a while, and it's pretty close to some successful ones that we've had in the past, which means that this sort of paradox principle *could* work: it'll just come down to the extent to which the contradictorily specified contract is capable of affecting the possibility of the rules-defined actions.) -- ais523
