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Any smart contract enforcement mechanism would necessarily rely upon some outside system Absolutely. This drastically limits the scope of smart contracts. You

Any smart contract enforcement mechanism would necessarily rely upon some outside system Absolutely. This drastically limits the scope of smart contracts. You can do all kinds of interesting stuff with the contracts and digital money, like ponzi schemes, simple gambling games, and so on, but you can't link them with the real world without relying on some third party trust. And once you require trust, then you might as well implement the whole thing in the real world. Incidentally, this is also the killer problem with Slock.it's (the DAO creators) other project, their 'digital locks', physical padlocks that would open or close based upon smart contracts. They were fundamentally flawed because it's impossible to prove that a physical lock is tied to the blockchain. There's no proof that it will honour a smart contract, so the whole system again relies on third party trust.

ethbro 10y ago
I don't see why this is a fundamental problem. At worst, a simple legal shim of the "third party law firm legally bound to do X if smart contract dictates so" would bridge pretty effectively. Smart hardware locks sounds interesting. I'll have to read up on what they tried -- it sounds like a technically interesting problem.
- notahacker 10y ago
  It's a pretty fundamental problem for a "trustless", "decentralised" system to require either a significant amount of trust, a third party to fix things or both in most conceivable practical use cases. If you're requiring a third party law firm to ensure offline parts of a smart contract are enforced and mediate disputes, you might as well write the contract in something the law firm actually recognises as a contract.
  - nemild 10y ago
    See my other comment, there are gradients of trust not simply trusted or trustless. A simple example why is that 10 MM parties across the world want to coordinate together for a custom contract - this might be challenging depending solely on the current system (coordination cost, different jurisdictions), but there may be benefits to having elements of both systems involved. Again, this is all speculation - and only time will tell, but I also think it's a debate to be had, rather than suggesting that such a system is worthless if it depends on any real world legal forms.

ethbro 10y ago

I don't see why this is a fundamental problem. At worst, a simple legal shim of the "third party law firm legally bound to do X if smart contract dictates so" would bridge pretty effectively. Smart hardware locks sounds interesting. I'll have to read up on what they tried -- it sounds like a technically interesting problem.

notahacker 10y ago
It's a pretty fundamental problem for a "trustless", "decentralised" system to require either a significant amount of trust, a third party to fix things or both in most conceivable practical use cases. If you're requiring a third party law firm to ensure offline parts of a smart contract are enforced and mediate disputes, you might as well write the contract in something the law firm actually recognises as a contract.
- nemild 10y ago
  See my other comment, there are gradients of trust not simply trusted or trustless. A simple example why is that 10 MM parties across the world want to coordinate together for a custom contract - this might be challenging depending solely on the current system (coordination cost, different jurisdictions), but there may be benefits to having elements of both systems involved. Again, this is all speculation - and only time will tell, but I also think it's a debate to be had, rather than suggesting that such a system is worthless if it depends on any real world legal forms.