Re:Smart contracts on Bitcoin
by noman-land on Thursday January 14, 2021 @07:25PM
(#25785180)
That's definitely a good example of where things get tricky, but smart contracts are not a dispute resolution mechanism, they're part of a shared infrastructure.
If you use a smart contract you don't need to maintain any sort of backend at all. Your infrastructure costs are basically zero because they're baked into the cost of using the contract, which is paid on every transaction. You also get interoperability for free without having to build out any sort of API layer.
Smart contracts are not the solution to all problems but I think they have some really interesting use cases.
Re:Smart contracts on Bitcoin
by toomuchtodo on Thursday January 14, 2021 @07:04PM
(#25784956)
Your assessment is accurate. Crypto proponents paper over this, but don’t have an answer.
The part they say quietly is that the ledger supersedes the law and legal framework, and that’s clearly not how governments and their legal frameworks work.
In other words, standard contracts work just fine (without any lawyers involved) when everything goes to plan. It's the failure cases that matter, and it's not hard to imagine a compromised lock (or an entire company's locks if they're connected to the internet for access to the blockchain) that no longer respect the smart contract. So you're back to calling your lawyer to help sort out the mess.