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>So I think you’re one step away from the epiphany, if you can resist doubling down on this statement I will double and triple down on it. I've been following

>So I think you’re one step away from the epiphany, if you can resist doubling down on this statement I will double and triple down on it. I've been following this for at least a decade now. Smart contracts are completely useless and they need to go. The "epiphany" here is that it was obvious since The DAO transaction was reverted that there is nothing actually immutable about blockchains or smart contracts. If enough whales are threatened by some activity then they'll hard fork, because the miners/stakers all depend on the activity of the whales to realize their profits. The network doesn't exist without them, and it's not actually hard for them to collude. This is another reason why it's futile for you to expect anything out of blockchains; they're not actually run by volunteers, by design they're run by the greediest possible participants who are supposed to do whatever they possibly can to maximize their profit from mining, because if they don't do this then the network collapses. This is entirely how the system is designed to work. You're not actually "trusting the code", you're trusting that a hardfork won't be successful for entirely non-technical reasons, i.e. that they would lose money. People who run ordinary databases also don't mess with the database for the same reason. Blockchains don't add anything new to this, they're not a good or even interesting invention. >Bitcoin was forked multiple times, but even a sensible hardfork change like increasing the block size proved too hard to do This is ahistorical, it wasn't hard to increase the block size, it was just undesired by the majority of the miners. BCH happened because some miners were upset about SegWit, a change that did actually succeed. >The ultimate in this is Provable Correctness, and there are now tools to actually prove a smart contract or a program is correct. These tools do not solve the problem, because "correct" is entirely subjective. With those, you can prove that the program doesn't violate its own invariants or contain certain logic errors, but you can't validate that the output for the human is correct. No amount of fuzzing can solve this.

EGreg 4y ago
I mean, I could say that you sound like the old fogies in each generation like Steve Ballmer who famously yelled "search is not a business!" People just don't get how the next generation of users could POSSIBLY find something useful, which they don't see useful. It's like people drew the future with flying cars, when in reality the innovation was in something else. In a regular database, I can't have an election because someone can go in there and change all the votes or stored procedures. I can't trust the code. I can't trust the database. One person with one key can change everything. You know what's better than that? People being able to only act as themselves, and the rules being enforced by multiple machines. As I said, it doesn't have be "a blockchain", but what I described is the defining features of "smart contracts". It's simply more resilient than any middleman, and it makes it much, much harder to corrupt the system to extract rents. The system ends up being neutral, and all the "profits" are either taken out of circulation or accrue to the participants. There is no parasitic investor class in the end. People sell the tokens once and then they circulate among network participants. There are multiple gateways to get or cash out of the token instead of one (like cashing in/out of PayPal using PayPal Inc only). It's very hard to shut the system down or exclude certain groups from it. In all these ways (except the last one perhaps, depending on who you ask), it's strictly BETTER than centralized, closed, privately-owned systems. Why do Web2 maxis hate all these improvements?

EGreg 4y ago

I mean, I could say that you sound like the old fogies in each generation like Steve Ballmer who famously yelled "search is not a business!" People just don't get how the next generation of users could POSSIBLY find something useful, which they don't see useful. It's like people drew the future with flying cars, when in reality the innovation was in something else. In a regular database, I can't have an election because someone can go in there and change all the votes or stored procedures. I can't trust the code. I can't trust the database. One person with one key can change everything. You know what's better than that? People being able to only act as themselves, and the rules being enforced by multiple machines. As I said, it doesn't have be "a blockchain", but what I described is the defining features of "smart contracts". It's simply more resilient than any middleman, and it makes it much, much harder to corrupt the system to extract rents. The system ends up being neutral, and all the "profits" are either taken out of circulation or accrue to the participants. There is no parasitic investor class in the end. People sell the tokens once and then they circulate among network participants. There are multiple gateways to get or cash out of the token instead of one (like cashing in/out of PayPal using PayPal Inc only). It's very hard to shut the system down or exclude certain groups from it. In all these ways (except the last one perhaps, depending on who you ask), it's strictly BETTER than centralized, closed, privately-owned systems. Why do Web2 maxis hate all these improvements?