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I suppose the hope is that eventually somebody will come up with a smart contract that: a) Does something useful... b) ...in a way that's somehow significantl
by Joeboy 9y ago
I suppose the hope is that eventually somebody will come up with a smart contract that:
a) Does something useful...
b) ...in a way that's somehow significantly preferable to "dumb" alternatives;
c) gets adequately battle-tested in the real world;
d) can be reused ad infinitum, maybe with trivial variations
It seems to me that it's not out of the question that that will happen, but it's also by no means certain. It seems to me that once you get far beyond simple remittances it becomes extremely difficult to reliably codify intent.
- grey-area 9y agoI think it'd be far more useful to work on tools for reliably codifying agreement and intent, in order to make it easier to generate and parse contracts agreed by humans. The aim should be to restrict what it is possible to say in a contract, not expand the space to infinite possibilities as a Turing complete language does. I'm not convinced powerful languages will ever be suitable for this - the language used for contracts should be less flexible and powerful than human languages, not more - we attempt this with legalese and conventions associated with contracts already (they don't really use english say but a limited subset of it), why not take it a step further and define specific and incredibly limited axioms which can be connected to form immutable contracts with limited ambiguity and no room for error. Smart contracts assume that incredibly difficult problem is already solved and then start attaching money directly to the contract (why!), that in my view is far too optimistic about the state of software and the capability of humans to manage it.
- js4 9y agoERC20 Tokens (the ICO market) fit this description. Though they are basically just creating new currencies.