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hmm true. Maybe smart contracts also need a good old fashioned terms & conditions signed. At least that protects against unknown bugs and exploits?



In that case, they are no longer smart contracts. The entire appeal was that they would be knowable in their entirety, automatically executed, and irrevocable. The goal as I understood it was too have something that would enforce itself, not needing an external authority to interpret it.

Instead, as others have pointed out, the hard fork demonstrated that this was not at all the case. Ethereum contracts can be voided, and the entire premise is therefore flawed. Terms and conditions would just be another way that contracts could be voided, another flaw.


The term "smart contracts" is highly misleading. It is feeding the hype and deeply confusing people. "Smart contracts" are neither smart nor contracts. They are instead very limited scripts triggered by blockchain events.

All the use cases I've seen depend on external input to be even moderately useful. But once you depend on unverifiable and potentially fraudulent external input, the supposed unique value of these scripts is lost. The notion of "oracles" just moves the problem elsewhere so it can be dismissed.

When and if we see profitable uses of these block-chain scripts then I would be glad to revisit this assessment. Until then it looks to me like a classic case of a technology looking for a problem.




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