4 ms·

Isn’t the blockchain part of smart contracts just pointless bloat for most applications? My contract with my power company is pretty smart in that they have an

Isn’t the blockchain part of smart contracts just pointless bloat for most applications? My contract with my power company is pretty smart in that they have an API with the current rate that lets certain devices switch themselves on and off. Same with cloud provider with APIs to programmatically add and remove resources. This thing with oracles doesn’t sound all that different from going to the courts or to arbitration.

rstuart4133 5y ago
> Isn’t the blockchain part of smart contracts just pointless bloat for most applications? On the contrary, the "blockchain part" is the bit that prevents the contract from being modified after the fact. It's an essential property of any contract, and immutability is core feature provided by a blockchain. In fact their very term blockchain arises from the need to provide that immutability. A blockchain is a series of statements, each relying on the ones before it. That means if you want to modify history you must also modify all the statements that came after and since a lot of other unrelated transactions depend on those statements, you would attract a lot of flak if you attempted it. It's true we've been providing that immutability in other ways for literally millennia. However, none of those are as difficult to change as something bitcoin puts in it's blockchain, and it provides that service for a fairly small mining fee.
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
  > On the contrary, the "blockchain part" is the bit that prevents the contract from being modified after the fact. It's an essential property of any contract, and immutability is core feature provided by a blockchain. I get that, but I fail to see the relevance in practice. If someone wants to go and commit fraud they can just do it, ignoring what it says in the immutable contract just as they ignore what it says in the law against fraud.

rstuart4133 5y ago

> Isn’t the blockchain part of smart contracts just pointless bloat for most applications? On the contrary, the "blockchain part" is the bit that prevents the contract from being modified after the fact. It's an essential property of any contract, and immutability is core feature provided by a blockchain. In fact their very term blockchain arises from the need to provide that immutability. A blockchain is a series of statements, each relying on the ones before it. That means if you want to modify history you must also modify all the statements that came after and since a lot of other unrelated transactions depend on those statements, you would attract a lot of flak if you attempted it. It's true we've been providing that immutability in other ways for literally millennia. However, none of those are as difficult to change as something bitcoin puts in it's blockchain, and it provides that service for a fairly small mining fee.

Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
> On the contrary, the "blockchain part" is the bit that prevents the contract from being modified after the fact. It's an essential property of any contract, and immutability is core feature provided by a blockchain. I get that, but I fail to see the relevance in practice. If someone wants to go and commit fraud they can just do it, ignoring what it says in the immutable contract just as they ignore what it says in the law against fraud.