Well ... first, what's described in the article isn't that smart. It's actually dumb.

If we describe these code-as-law thingys as 'dumb contracts' it is crystal clear that 'YES' this is a dumb contract and any sane judge presented with one may well decide to give the participants exactly what they deserve, just like paper-based 'dumb contracts.'

The key innovation here is that we've gone to the remedy residing in programmer malpractice, rather than attorney malpractice. Which in turn, when it becomes obvious to all involved, hopefully will have a chilling effect on any smart programmer asked to write a 'dumb contract.'

It's called a "smart contract" because it's programmable (Smart) and can be executed based on specific conditions (Contract).

I've seen/read somewhere that Vitalik regrets naming them "smart contracts" though.

They are database triggers, but that's not enough grandeur for cryptoheads.

Looking at the various issues that have come up with these ‘smart contracts’ (aka the ethereum DAO issues up until now), I think anyone who wants to write one should be automatically excluded from being allowed to do so.

They should maybe be forced to learn what a dependent type system is so they can regret that their smart contracts are written in a language with no safety features.

https://juvix.org/ is looking rather nice but is still beta.

Yes, and if you use a smart contract to hire someone to build a deck on your house, I suspect any resulting legal disputes would be treated by the courts the same as if you had used a traditional contract.

The problem is that smart contracts do not come with the same capability to take your counterpart to a tribunal: you might not even know who your counterpart is, im which country they live or if there are multiple ones. Who are you gonna sue?

A "smart contract" is a computer program that manipulates balances on a ledger. There is no way you can use that to hire someone to perform a job because this isn't something that can be expressed in terms of balances. You would need an actual contract to do that. Also the parties that interact with the so-called smart contract have no agreement between them. What could they possibly have a dispute over?

Yes, a smart contract is not a legally-binding agreement, although it could be a component of a legally-binding agreement. That’s my point.

The smart contract in my hypothetical scenario might be something like a transaction with 3 parties: you (the customer), the construction company, and a third-party verification service, that executes your payment to the construction company when any 2 of the parties agree to execute. This theoretically prevents the possibility of any 1 party defecting and running away with a monetary benefit (including the third party verification service, which couldn’t run away with the cash like a traditional escrow service hypothetically could).

But my point is that even in this case, if the construction company and third-party verification service colluded to run away with the money without completing the work, you would still sue one or both of them, and my prediction is that the courts would treat this essentially identically to a scenario using traditional contracts.

But for this arrangement to work the customer, the construction party and the third-party need to enter into an agreement, i.e. a traditional contract. A traditional contract is legally binding, so of course the courts would treat it as legally binding. The smart contract may be part of the agreement but a smart contract by itself is not an agreement and something cannot be a legally-binding agreement if it isn't an agreement to begin with.

I suspect a court would tend to take the existence of the smart contract as a pretty clear indication of the intent of the involved parties. But of course if you’re entering a significant commercial agreement like this you had better make an explicit traditional contract as well.

People get so hung up on the word contract. Might as well spend time arguing that rodents make for bad I/O peripherals.