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Cool - glad you brought up the smart lock example. How does that work without trusting (presumably off-chain) software/firmware to honor the change as to who sh

Cool - glad you brought up the smart lock example. How does that work without trusting (presumably off-chain) software/firmware to honor the change as to who should be able to open the lock? The smart contract might be iron-clad in showing who should have access, but at some point, that has to be interpreted and executed by a real-world entity, human or machine. In other words, standard contracts work just fine (without any lawyers involved) when everything goes to plan. It's the failure cases that matter, and it's not hard to imagine a compromised lock (or an entire company's locks if they're connected to the internet for access to the blockchain) that no longer respect the smart contract. So you're back to calling your lawyer to help sort out the mess.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Your assessment is accurate. Crypto proponents paper over this, but don’t have an answer. The part they say quietly is that the ledger supersedes the law and legal framework, and that’s clearly not how governments and their legal frameworks work.
noman-land 6y ago
That's definitely a good example of where things get tricky, but smart contracts are not a dispute resolution mechanism, they're part of a shared infrastructure. If you use a smart contract you don't need to maintain any sort of backend at all. Your infrastructure costs are basically zero because they're baked into the cost of using the contract, which is paid on every transaction. You also get interoperability for free without having to build out any sort of API layer. Smart contracts are not the solution to all problems but I think they have some really interesting use cases.