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> smart contract sound like some magic sauce, but in fact aren't anything magical, they are short programs that can be executed on public data in the ledger, th

> smart contract sound like some magic sauce, but in fact aren't anything magical, they are short programs that can be executed on public data in the ledger, that's it. The only ways they can modify this ledger is publically and immutably defined at the creation of the smart contract. Sure they're not magic, but at any given time, you can query events published by that contract and query that contract's state. That's at least different than the traditional internet. It may feel like I'm moving the goal posts but I'm just trying to highlight the differences between the stuff that happens on the traditional internet vs web3.

littlestymaar 5y ago
I'm not trying to say smart contract are useless, just that they are only useful in the context of the ledger they are built-on. I was specifically responding to this sentence: > It's not just a decentralized ledger anymore, but a decentralized and public execution environment. “decentralized and public execution environment” really sounds like you could execute arbitrary programs in a distributed fashion (which would be really cool), which is absolutely not what smart contracts are.