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I've done your example in the real world, without smart contracts. The 3rd party is a notary. If I understood you right the notary here is replaced by a notary
by bildung 6y ago
I've done your example in the real world, without smart contracts. The 3rd party is a notary. If I understood you right the notary here is replaced by a notary plus smart contracts.
A notary in my juristication (Germany) is a quasi-employee of the government, so has little risk to go broke etc. The particular bonds for these cases are usually non-transferrable.
OTOH smart contracts introduce new risks like bugs and costs like high gas prices - for what gain?
Edit: To clarify, the modes of failure are vastly worse for the smart contract scenario. If the notary goes broke, my money will not be part of the insolvency estate. If OTOH the smart contract has a bug, everone's money is gone.
- roenxi 6y ago> A notary in my juristication (Germany) is a quasi-employee of the government, In a sense; precisely. At the moment, to fill that function, you need a quasi-government employee to have a trustworthy bondholder. With a smart contract, literally I could be the notary and while that would be super weird, I can't actually do anything not specified in the contract. Something is possible that wasn't possible before. That is why people can get excited about the idea.
- fock 6y agoyet you can do something not matching the real world outcome. and there's no way to roll that back. and people still need real-world trust in you... seems not soo smart to me.
- koonsolo 6y agoI don't know about Germany, but in Belgium you pay a crazy amount of money for the notary service. So it only makes sense to hire them for when dealing with large amounts of money. So what do you do with small amounts of money? Plus, not only notaries but also escrow services might be replaced with smart contracts. Smart contracts might be way cheaper. It will be very interesting to see this play out. But I wouldn't just discard smart contracts because we have some ancient way of doing things right now. And let's be honest, every time I have to deal with a notary, the work looks like it comes from Medieval times.