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I love watching the HN comment hivemind speedrun the history of blockchain innovation every time this comes up. You just reinvented smart contracts on Ethereum,

I love watching the HN comment hivemind speedrun the history of blockchain innovation every time this comes up. You just reinvented smart contracts on Ethereum, keep going :-)

gavinsyancey 10mo ago
No amount of smart contracts can solve the situation where one party says "I shipped you the widgets you ordered; pay me" and the other says "I received a box with a brick in it" -- you need some trusted third party to decide based on reasonable heuristics who is trying to commit fraud, based on e.g. is this the first or the tenth time this has happened.
- pyrolistical 10mo ago
  That’s just a bad contract. Now consider one that mints you an NFT
  - bhickey 10mo ago
    I can't actually tell if you're touting monkey jpegs or making a really funny joke.
    - forgotpwd16 10mo ago
      They agree with your statement in another reply under this submission. So a joke on crypto hype culture, where you either put aside problems and move to next craze or next craze is shoved to everything.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 10mo ago
  That's exactly the point of smart contracts. The contract can hold the money in escrow such that it can only be sent either to the seller or returned to buyer. The seller and buyer can then both walk the contract through a state machine on agreement (i.e. confirm shipping, confirm delivery, potentially also confirmation for a return process) and when the buyer and seller come to a disagreement (ex: seller attests they've shipped the product and it should be delivered but the buyer asserts they havent/the tracking on shipping is invalid) or one of the participants is non-responsive for a certain amount of time then the contract moves into arbitration. In arbitration one or more third parties then step in to serve as arbiters/oracles that decide in the favor of one party or the other and commit those decisions to the contract and the contract then derives consensus from those decisions and proceeds to the corresponding state/action of the contract (i.e. refund vs close). Now your arbiters/oracles/third parties have reputations and you can reason about how trustworthy they are before you enter into the contract. This means all parties can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels before entering the contract/on agreement. ------- TLDR: Trust is inherent to any system reliant on the physical world. The point of smart contracts, etc is to formally encode those trust assumptions and the procedures of the contract in as trustless of a way as possible and to allow distribution of that trust across parties with most of the coordination overhead being automated/abstracted away. And importantly smart contracts provide an extremely low friction happy path. In the happy path where all parties are satisfied, it's extremely efficient and responsive. But in every other path, the conflicts, incentives, and resolution procedures are clearly defined for all parties involved.
  - FabHK 10mo ago
    Read Irrationality, Extortion, or Trusted Third-parties: Why it is Impossible to Buy and Sell Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain. Or just read the title, it has the main point. http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09857 http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09857
    - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 10mo ago
      Did you read the paper? The paper is arguing the exact same point I was arguing. To quote the paper: > Finally, assuming that the parties are rational agents and the smart contract language is Turing complete, we argue that it is impossible to implement the basic sales escrow as a smart contract without trusted third-parties or vulnerability to extortion. In other words, any escrow smart contract has one of the following three demerits: > – Assuming irrational agents who are willing to punish the other side, even if it is not in their own interest; or > – Relying on a third-party; or > – Enabling at least one of the two parties to extort the other. > In summary, we illustrate that the smart contract and Dapp community is wrong in assuming that the current implementations of two-party escrows have a well-designed mechanism that incentivizes rational actors to be truthful. More shockingly, we show that the smart contracts on programmable blockchains have inherent limitations that make it impossible to implement such a contract. In a sense, this can be considered the first incontractability result on programmable blockchains. ---------- This is exactly what I was arguing. I never claimed that two party escrow is ideal. I was explicitly saying that two party escrow is an intractable problem and that you must formalise your trust assumptions instead and either accept some level of trusted third parties OR without third parties accept some level of risk of exploitation by one party or the other. Even with third parties there is still risk for exploitation but depending how it is implemented that risk is lesser. Again this is a matter of formalising trust assumptions and explicitly outlining who you are trusting, what you are trusting them to do, and how much you trust them to do it. And in doing so up front both parties can evaluate their risk tolerance based on the agreed upon contract before progressing.
XorNot 10mo ago
Smart contracts can only enforce things which happen on the chain. No smart contract can prove you were not actually delivered your goods without trusting someone else.
- gobip 10mo ago
  Yes, it's called an oracle on the blockchain.
  - Kbelicius 10mo ago
    So blockchain requires trust in third parties. What is the point of it then?
    - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 10mo ago
      I outlined it over in another comment[1] so I'm not gonna copy it all over but the point isn't to eliminate all trust. The point of trustless architectures (of which blockchain and smart contracts are one) is that you are eliminating implicit trust. You are taking all the implicit trust, lowering it into explicit trust assumptions, and formalising who is allowed to make what decisions when, what happens when they do, and how the other parties are permitted to respond. You are moving all of those implicit assumptions about how a contract, interaction, or relationship work and formalising them into something explicit and upfront so that all participants can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels prior to agreeing to a given contract or interaction. And of course you are also sprinkling in a heavy dose of automation to smooth out the complexities of these explicit, mechanised contracts such that the happy paths are buttery smooth and the unhappy paths are at the least bearable and correspond to the contract you signed on to at the beginning of your interaction. TLDR: It's low trust automation + formalising implicit assumptions into explicit ones. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46181371#46192445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46181371#46192445
      - Kbelicius 10mo ago
        Clicked the link but ctrl+f doesn't find any posts by you. > The point of trustless architectures (of which blockchain and smart contracts are one) is that you are eliminating implicit trust. That is also the point of laws and contracts as we have them today. How does, explicitly, blockchain improve on that? > You are moving all of those implicit assumptions about how a contract, interaction, or relationship work and formalising them into something explicit and upfront so that all participants can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels prior to agreeing to a given contract or interaction. What implicit assumptions aren't removed by laws and contracts as we have them today that are removed by blockchain and smart contracts? > And of course you are also sprinkling in a heavy dose of automation to smooth out the complexities of these explicit, mechanised contracts such that the happy paths are buttery smooth and the unhappy paths are at the least bearable and correspond to the contract you signed on to at the beginning of your interaction. Without any examples of what is being automated, how and what it is that is made buttery smooth... you really aren't saying anything here. Can you expound on any of those claims? TLDR: By what you said the only thing that blockchains and smart contracts bring is a new medium to write contracts on.
UltraSane 10mo ago
smart contracts need some link to reality that has to be.... trusted.
baq 10mo ago
I love watching cryptobros speedrun the history of finance :-)

I love watching the HN comment hivemind speedrun the history of blockchain innovation every time this comes up. You just reinvented smart contracts on Ethereum, keep going :-)

gavinsyancey 10mo ago

No amount of smart contracts can solve the situation where one party says "I shipped you the widgets you ordered; pay me" and the other says "I received a box with a brick in it" -- you need some trusted third party to decide based on reasonable heuristics who is trying to commit fraud, based on e.g. is this the first or the tenth time this has happened.

pyrolistical 10mo ago
That’s just a bad contract. Now consider one that mints you an NFT
- bhickey 10mo ago
  I can't actually tell if you're touting monkey jpegs or making a really funny joke.
  - forgotpwd16 10mo ago
    They agree with your statement in another reply under this submission. So a joke on crypto hype culture, where you either put aside problems and move to next craze or next craze is shoved to everything.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 10mo ago
That's exactly the point of smart contracts. The contract can hold the money in escrow such that it can only be sent either to the seller or returned to buyer. The seller and buyer can then both walk the contract through a state machine on agreement (i.e. confirm shipping, confirm delivery, potentially also confirmation for a return process) and when the buyer and seller come to a disagreement (ex: seller attests they've shipped the product and it should be delivered but the buyer asserts they havent/the tracking on shipping is invalid) or one of the participants is non-responsive for a certain amount of time then the contract moves into arbitration. In arbitration one or more third parties then step in to serve as arbiters/oracles that decide in the favor of one party or the other and commit those decisions to the contract and the contract then derives consensus from those decisions and proceeds to the corresponding state/action of the contract (i.e. refund vs close). Now your arbiters/oracles/third parties have reputations and you can reason about how trustworthy they are before you enter into the contract. This means all parties can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels before entering the contract/on agreement. ------- TLDR: Trust is inherent to any system reliant on the physical world. The point of smart contracts, etc is to formally encode those trust assumptions and the procedures of the contract in as trustless of a way as possible and to allow distribution of that trust across parties with most of the coordination overhead being automated/abstracted away. And importantly smart contracts provide an extremely low friction happy path. In the happy path where all parties are satisfied, it's extremely efficient and responsive. But in every other path, the conflicts, incentives, and resolution procedures are clearly defined for all parties involved.
- FabHK 10mo ago
  Read Irrationality, Extortion, or Trusted Third-parties: Why it is Impossible to Buy and Sell Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain. Or just read the title, it has the main point. http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09857 http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09857
  - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 10mo ago
    Did you read the paper? The paper is arguing the exact same point I was arguing. To quote the paper: > Finally, assuming that the parties are rational agents and the smart contract language is Turing complete, we argue that it is impossible to implement the basic sales escrow as a smart contract without trusted third-parties or vulnerability to extortion. In other words, any escrow smart contract has one of the following three demerits: > – Assuming irrational agents who are willing to punish the other side, even if it is not in their own interest; or > – Relying on a third-party; or > – Enabling at least one of the two parties to extort the other. > In summary, we illustrate that the smart contract and Dapp community is wrong in assuming that the current implementations of two-party escrows have a well-designed mechanism that incentivizes rational actors to be truthful. More shockingly, we show that the smart contracts on programmable blockchains have inherent limitations that make it impossible to implement such a contract. In a sense, this can be considered the first incontractability result on programmable blockchains. ---------- This is exactly what I was arguing. I never claimed that two party escrow is ideal. I was explicitly saying that two party escrow is an intractable problem and that you must formalise your trust assumptions instead and either accept some level of trusted third parties OR without third parties accept some level of risk of exploitation by one party or the other. Even with third parties there is still risk for exploitation but depending how it is implemented that risk is lesser. Again this is a matter of formalising trust assumptions and explicitly outlining who you are trusting, what you are trusting them to do, and how much you trust them to do it. And in doing so up front both parties can evaluate their risk tolerance based on the agreed upon contract before progressing.

XorNot 10mo ago

Smart contracts can only enforce things which happen on the chain. No smart contract can prove you were not actually delivered your goods without trusting someone else.

gobip 10mo ago
Yes, it's called an oracle on the blockchain.
- Kbelicius 10mo ago
  So blockchain requires trust in third parties. What is the point of it then?
  - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 10mo ago
    I outlined it over in another comment[1] so I'm not gonna copy it all over but the point isn't to eliminate all trust. The point of trustless architectures (of which blockchain and smart contracts are one) is that you are eliminating implicit trust. You are taking all the implicit trust, lowering it into explicit trust assumptions, and formalising who is allowed to make what decisions when, what happens when they do, and how the other parties are permitted to respond. You are moving all of those implicit assumptions about how a contract, interaction, or relationship work and formalising them into something explicit and upfront so that all participants can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels prior to agreeing to a given contract or interaction. And of course you are also sprinkling in a heavy dose of automation to smooth out the complexities of these explicit, mechanised contracts such that the happy paths are buttery smooth and the unhappy paths are at the least bearable and correspond to the contract you signed on to at the beginning of your interaction. TLDR: It's low trust automation + formalising implicit assumptions into explicit ones. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46181371#46192445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46181371#46192445
    - Kbelicius 10mo ago
      Clicked the link but ctrl+f doesn't find any posts by you. > The point of trustless architectures (of which blockchain and smart contracts are one) is that you are eliminating implicit trust. That is also the point of laws and contracts as we have them today. How does, explicitly, blockchain improve on that? > You are moving all of those implicit assumptions about how a contract, interaction, or relationship work and formalising them into something explicit and upfront so that all participants can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels prior to agreeing to a given contract or interaction. What implicit assumptions aren't removed by laws and contracts as we have them today that are removed by blockchain and smart contracts? > And of course you are also sprinkling in a heavy dose of automation to smooth out the complexities of these explicit, mechanised contracts such that the happy paths are buttery smooth and the unhappy paths are at the least bearable and correspond to the contract you signed on to at the beginning of your interaction. Without any examples of what is being automated, how and what it is that is made buttery smooth... you really aren't saying anything here. Can you expound on any of those claims? TLDR: By what you said the only thing that blockchains and smart contracts bring is a new medium to write contracts on.

UltraSane 10mo ago

smart contracts need some link to reality that has to be.... trusted.

baq 10mo ago

I love watching cryptobros speedrun the history of finance :-)