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Yeah I agree, and that's why I'm generally skeptical of any smart contract ideas that have to interface with real life (supply chains, land registry, and so on)

Yeah I agree, and that's why I'm generally skeptical of any smart contract ideas that have to interface with real life (supply chains, land registry, and so on). I think they make more sense when they are concerned with things entirely contained within the blockchain, like swapping tokens or mapping names to addresses. Frustratingly enough, it's the former type ("let's put cows on the blockchain") that seem to get the most mainstream attention.

WorldMaker 5y ago
I've passed beyond skeptical of smart contracts that try to apply to real life to a concern that much more real contract law needs to apply to smart contracts. Ethereum is already full of fun stories where "smart" contracts did extremely dumb things because they took a programmer's word extremely literally rather than a programmer's intent. In a world where programmers are assumed to be ordinary, fallible humans that's a ton of pressure to put on a programmer to never make a single mistake. While there's a lot of active research into trying to bring technical solutions to that human problem such as strict "formal proofs" and such of the programs being made into smart contracts, I'm increasingly of the opinion that would benefit them the most would be political and sociological solutions such as classics like "courts of appeals", "trials by jury of peers" to determine intent over literal substance, and so forth. Those aren't "fun, technical" solutions, and would require placing trust again in institutions and people, so I absolutely have zero optimism that any smart contracts system would embrace them. I just think that they need such political structures to exist otherwise you left with merely a lowest common denominator tyranny of software bugs (no matter how formally the best contracts mathematically prove their claims/efforts).
- Graoik 5y ago
  Using a court of appeals assumes a shared widespread understanding of the topic of disagreement, often the only people with the expertise on the topic are going to be the parties involved and teaching a 3rd party can be impractical and prone to steering. I can see smart contracts working with very low volume specialized scenarios for this reason. Also traditional dispute resolution is expensive plenty of times where both parties would be willing to accept the risk of a bug over paying lawyer fees
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    The shape of trials in a court of law is built around discovering the topic of disagreement and sourcing enough expertise on the topic to get a judgement from a jury of "peers". Whether or not that is an expensive process is orthogonal to the question: if a "smart" contract makes a mistake, how do you fix it? Right now there is just zero recourse and everybody shrugs their shoulders at it, "oh well, that's just how software bugs work, sorry about your loss". That's an awfully hard pill to swallow for the average person. Real contracts built up a lot of mechanisms to keep contracts fair and equitable by making sure that when one goes wrong there are ways to deal with it. Right now with "smart" contracts it's a wild west of whether or not escrow accounts exist and you can maybe, optionally get people (or institutions) involved to fixed something about to go wrong or in the process of going wrong, and there's just about no way in most "smart" contracts to fix things after they've gone wrong. But critically it's a "right" in most contract law-based countries to challenge a contract in a court of law and get a human opinion from a jury of your peers, and I don't see how average citizens can trust a system where that "right" is not given as such and is an "optional" feature that they generally have no idea exists in a specific "smart" contract code (much less if that feature itself is buggy or not). I realize (per above) that this is often a "feature" and not a "bug" in "smart" contract design today. Most of the designers don't trust institutions (and maybe not even people) and like the "freedom" of "smart" contract platforms with few regulations, few "required features", and few places for instutional/personal intercession. I just don't think that's a good situation for most people to ever trust "smart" contracts in the real world.

WorldMaker 5y ago

I've passed beyond skeptical of smart contracts that try to apply to real life to a concern that much more real contract law needs to apply to smart contracts. Ethereum is already full of fun stories where "smart" contracts did extremely dumb things because they took a programmer's word extremely literally rather than a programmer's intent. In a world where programmers are assumed to be ordinary, fallible humans that's a ton of pressure to put on a programmer to never make a single mistake. While there's a lot of active research into trying to bring technical solutions to that human problem such as strict "formal proofs" and such of the programs being made into smart contracts, I'm increasingly of the opinion that would benefit them the most would be political and sociological solutions such as classics like "courts of appeals", "trials by jury of peers" to determine intent over literal substance, and so forth. Those aren't "fun, technical" solutions, and would require placing trust again in institutions and people, so I absolutely have zero optimism that any smart contracts system would embrace them. I just think that they need such political structures to exist otherwise you left with merely a lowest common denominator tyranny of software bugs (no matter how formally the best contracts mathematically prove their claims/efforts).

Graoik 5y ago
Using a court of appeals assumes a shared widespread understanding of the topic of disagreement, often the only people with the expertise on the topic are going to be the parties involved and teaching a 3rd party can be impractical and prone to steering. I can see smart contracts working with very low volume specialized scenarios for this reason. Also traditional dispute resolution is expensive plenty of times where both parties would be willing to accept the risk of a bug over paying lawyer fees
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  The shape of trials in a court of law is built around discovering the topic of disagreement and sourcing enough expertise on the topic to get a judgement from a jury of "peers". Whether or not that is an expensive process is orthogonal to the question: if a "smart" contract makes a mistake, how do you fix it? Right now there is just zero recourse and everybody shrugs their shoulders at it, "oh well, that's just how software bugs work, sorry about your loss". That's an awfully hard pill to swallow for the average person. Real contracts built up a lot of mechanisms to keep contracts fair and equitable by making sure that when one goes wrong there are ways to deal with it. Right now with "smart" contracts it's a wild west of whether or not escrow accounts exist and you can maybe, optionally get people (or institutions) involved to fixed something about to go wrong or in the process of going wrong, and there's just about no way in most "smart" contracts to fix things after they've gone wrong. But critically it's a "right" in most contract law-based countries to challenge a contract in a court of law and get a human opinion from a jury of your peers, and I don't see how average citizens can trust a system where that "right" is not given as such and is an "optional" feature that they generally have no idea exists in a specific "smart" contract code (much less if that feature itself is buggy or not). I realize (per above) that this is often a "feature" and not a "bug" in "smart" contract design today. Most of the designers don't trust institutions (and maybe not even people) and like the "freedom" of "smart" contract platforms with few regulations, few "required features", and few places for instutional/personal intercession. I just don't think that's a good situation for most people to ever trust "smart" contracts in the real world.