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No, smarty pants. I'm telling you that "smart contract" is a bad term for those things because it is unclear and confusing. A contract is a legally binding sta
by jrm4 5y ago
No, smarty pants. I'm telling you that "smart contract" is a bad term for those things because it is unclear and confusing.
A contract is a legally binding statement describing a promise or promises among parties to execute one or more actions. But they are NOT the actions themselves, again, they are a document relating to the actions.
"Smart contracts" are THE ACTIONS THEMSELVES. They're deliverables, they're payments, they're executions of code, but they're NOT CONTRACTS, by any sense of how we've always traditionally used the word.
- foobarbecue 5y agoInteresting perspective, but it sounds like you're mixing up smart contacts with transactions. A smart contact defines what transactions might happen. Transactions are the actual actions. One contract can run for an indefinant amount of time and cause many transactions.
- jrm4 5y agoBy this definition, a vending machine is a contract. Which it isn't. You could put a sign on the machine, contact so-and-so if it steals your money, we will definitely repay you. That would be a contract.
- foobarbecue 5y agoYeah, the price list on a vending machine is an implied contract defining a monetary transaction for food. So if someone wants to call a vending machine a contract, I'm fine with that.
- jrm4 5y agoI'm a lawyer and you shouldn't be. That's my point. I've already seen people immediately make this mistake. "Oh, I don't need a lawyer now because the contract is now on the blockchain." Wrong wrong wrong. If you'd like to do a blockchain transaction thing with or without a lawyer, that's fine, the risk is on you. But, the thing called a smart contract does not fundamentally replace what the lawyer does.
- foobarbecue 5y agoWow, for real? People think a smart contract on the blockchain is a legal contract? I suppose I often underestimate how dumb people can be...
- foobarbecue 5y agoSpeaking of which, I'd like to apologize for mistyping "indefinite" earlier.
- jrm4 5y agoHahaha be nice, but yes. I think I pay a lot of attention to this as a lawyer because of the whole trope of "lawyers always muddy the waters," and the deeply silly but attractive-to-tech-people idea that you can replace lawyering with technology, like with more "precision" or something like that. Not gonna happen anytime soon; at the end of the day what lawyers do is work on "when humans being human disagree on things where the stakes are big," not "writing things clearly like a computer."