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> Smart contracts are enforced programmatically, that's kind of the point. That is a tautological statement. Smart contracts are not "enforced" programmaticall

> Smart contracts are enforced programmatically, that's kind of the point. That is a tautological statement. Smart contracts are not "enforced" programmatically in any sense of the word that is distinct from all other pieces of software since the rules of all programs are "enforced programmatically" by definition. "These contracts are enforced by math" is a meaningless platitude. > But please don't call me a gullible idiot and then try to dress it up in fancy vocabulary I didn't call or imply that you're a gullible idiot. I chose my words for their specific meaning, not for the sake of "fancy vocabulary". I might be mistaken but I think you're misinterpreting the meaning of the phrase "strains credulity", I'm not calling you gullible, I'm saying that your statement invokes feelings of skepticism because it's grandiose, wildly speculative, and generally unsubstantiated. > The future is always hard to believe until it's here. Not really. The future is pretty believable most of the time, it's relatively rare to face a paradigm shift that alters our expectations of the future in a fundamental way; most of the time, things move along more or less as expected from an arbitrary point in time (of course, the farther you go in time from a given point, the more unexpected things may become, but they are also exponentially more difficult to predict with any expectations of certitude). > This kind of reply seems common in your comment history, like you're just generally angry around blockchain threads for some reason. I won't comment on your assumptions about my emotional state, but I'll say that I think blockchains are a very cool technology (including bitcoin), but I find the excessively bombastic claims about how these technologies are going to alter the course of human history to be absurd and worthy of rebuffing.

lazaroclapp 10y ago
> "These contracts are enforced by math" is a meaningless platitude. Not quite. For example, assuming you accept cryptocurrencies have an actual monetary value, now I can pay any amount of money I want to a "smart contract" that will then proceed to pay that money to whomever solves a mathematical problem of interest to me (for example, I could give it to someone who gives me the cheapest route to visit 50 cities of my choosing, given the point to point cost). Once the contract is defined and created, the following is true: a) I no longer can choose not to pay, even if I change my mind, b) Only someone who solves the problem I posed will be able to claim that payment, and c) They will be able to cash in the prize without ever needing to reveal their identity to me. Now there is two potential problems with this. First, it might very well be that the kind of "contracts" we care about for running organizations are beyond what can be expressed and enforced by smart-contracts (specially "enforced" in the sense of the example above, versus simply "reported"). Second, the above guarantees hold only as long as the underlying network holds, and that is a social system in the final degree, made of people who can as a whole destroy or subvert it. However, regarding the not-turtles-all-the-way-down argument about the cryptocurrency networks being social systems in the end, well... so is the Internet, the international trade system, the national governments, etc. Smart-contracts are not magic, but they are a different way of organizing resources and bootstrapping trust between parties. Will they eliminate the need for governments and traditional corporations? Probably not. Some people said that about the internet too, and they were, in the short to medium term at least, wrong. But if it has even 1% of the impact in the world the Internet had, well...

lazaroclapp 10y ago

> "These contracts are enforced by math" is a meaningless platitude. Not quite. For example, assuming you accept cryptocurrencies have an actual monetary value, now I can pay any amount of money I want to a "smart contract" that will then proceed to pay that money to whomever solves a mathematical problem of interest to me (for example, I could give it to someone who gives me the cheapest route to visit 50 cities of my choosing, given the point to point cost). Once the contract is defined and created, the following is true: a) I no longer can choose not to pay, even if I change my mind, b) Only someone who solves the problem I posed will be able to claim that payment, and c) They will be able to cash in the prize without ever needing to reveal their identity to me. Now there is two potential problems with this. First, it might very well be that the kind of "contracts" we care about for running organizations are beyond what can be expressed and enforced by smart-contracts (specially "enforced" in the sense of the example above, versus simply "reported"). Second, the above guarantees hold only as long as the underlying network holds, and that is a social system in the final degree, made of people who can as a whole destroy or subvert it. However, regarding the not-turtles-all-the-way-down argument about the cryptocurrency networks being social systems in the end, well... so is the Internet, the international trade system, the national governments, etc. Smart-contracts are not magic, but they are a different way of organizing resources and bootstrapping trust between parties. Will they eliminate the need for governments and traditional corporations? Probably not. Some people said that about the internet too, and they were, in the short to medium term at least, wrong. But if it has even 1% of the impact in the world the Internet had, well...