Re:Smart contracts on Bitcoin
by stocknoob on Thursday January 14, 2021 @07:35PM
(#25785276)
I'm sure creating the first spreadsheet application was more expensive than hiring an accountant. But not doing it 1 million times. Someone will make "contracts as a service" and competition will drive down the cost, until it's nearly free (as spreadsheets are today).
[ Parent
| on HN ]
I think there may be a difference. Accountants are humans that are trying to be computers.
Smart-contracts are computers trying to be human. Most contracts are flawed and only really matter when things go wrong. I'd rather that a human be there when things go wrong to understand the human intent behind the contract than have a computer which does not know the human intent, but is able to enforce the (likely flawed) computational representation of that intent.
That's a tradeoff left to the contractual parties. The same human process that infers ill-specified intent can be corrupted to not execute that intent. If you want a human bootstrap, you hire a lawyer as an oracle which decides whether to process the contract specified in the blockchain.