The issues you're raising are important, but I don't think that you can simply say that "all the different arguments about the technological merits of one solution vs another can just sit by the wayside until these larger issues are worked out and understood." Those larger issues have to influence the technical solutions, and vice versa. For example, there are several protocols available for performing contract signing online. It's an old problem (well, older than I am). I don't think any of them explicitly address the issue you raise -- what if one or both parties lose the contract afterwards? How do you archive the contract (and do you want to) ? So that's a case where your "larger issues" need to direct technical research. At the same time, you can't just plug in one of these contract signing protocols and then expect it to work just like your usual notion of signing a contract. They require things like trusted third parties, or random beacons, or that you be willing to tolerate a probability of error here and there. If you don't watch it, you can be burned...for example, if Alice and Bob are negotiating a contract, should Bob be able to show the progress of that negotiation to Carol? What if Bob is negotiating for a new job with Alice and Carol? Whose interests does it serve if Bob can do that? if he can't? A recent protocol by Markus Jakobsson aims to prevent this(see it at http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/markus/); other protocols don't. Which you use depends on what you want. and though I hate to say it, sometimes what you want has to deal with what's possible.
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The issues you're raising are important, but I don't think that you can simply say that "all the different arguments about the technological merits of one solution vs another can just sit by the wayside until these larger issues are worked out and understood." Those larger issues have to influence the technical solutions, and vice versa. For example, there are several protocols available for performing contract signing online. It's an old problem (well, older than I am). I don't think any of them explicitly address the issue you raise -- what if one or both parties lose the contract afterwards? How do you archive the contract (and do you want to) ? So that's a case where your "larger issues" need to direct technical research. At the same time, you can't just plug in one of these contract signing protocols and then expect it to work just like your usual notion of signing a contract. They require things like trusted third parties, or random beacons, or that you be willing to tolerate a probability of error here and there. If you don't watch it, you can be burned...for example, if Alice and Bob are negotiating a contract, should Bob be able to show the progress of that negotiation to Carol? What if Bob is negotiating for a new job with Alice and Carol? Whose interests does it serve if Bob can do that? if he can't? A recent protocol by Markus Jakobsson aims to prevent this(see it at http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/markus/); other protocols don't. Which you use depends on what you want. and though I hate to say it, sometimes what you want has to deal with what's possible.