In OP article the interfacing with real world is solved by some group voting.

In the real world, when disagreements arise, we have voting + due process + a hierarchy of courts. It could be argued that due process is an essential part of finding justice.

Baking due process into a smart contract is, although extremely interesting, probably impossible.

Great, but take the example in the article. I roll in with my heavies and at gun point force enough of you to vote that the contract was complete even if it wasn't. You can't engineer people away and when you try you've undoubtedly missed something.

But if you were just going to rob them at gunpoint, why did you need the smart contact?

Smart contacts exists so that you don't need the heavies nor the guns, you can just exploit a "bug" in the contract and run off with the cash, preferably without anyone knowing who you even are.

This boils down to the basic problem of a ruleset.

It's nice when everyone abides by the same ruleset. But there will always be individuals that will behave outside of it.

Like, we can all play capitalism and try to outcompete each other, but eventually there's going to be someone that just abandons that ruleset and murders all competitors.

Smart contracts are just a better ruleset, still not enough.

I always roll my eyes when crypto bros roll out the argument that BTC would bring peace because there's an immutable record of who owns what.

I can still just seize the factory, ledger be damned.

Or deploy a military to seize your private keys. Unless you're sole copy is in your own head it's on a hard drive SOMEWHERE

David Friedman's book 'Legal Systems Very Different From Ours' might provide some inspiration:

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsCo...

If your argument is that decentralized ledger technologies cannot in their current state or perhaps ever entirely replace governments then I guess any reasonable person will just have to give that to you. And I doubt as many "crypto evangelicals" would actually argue with you on this.

Right; distributed smart contracts complement legal systems, like a road network complements a rail network.

Of course, that’s just the simple, “immutable logic” kind of smart contracts. The “updatable policy” kind of smart contracts are really just a way to encode and implement a legal system. (See: the regulation model in security tokens.)

I also think people complement smart contracts. The difficulty of building smart contracts makes me think people and human processes will be the glue that binds many of them together.

Presuming this is a fancy sci-fi kind of anarchy: multi-sig escrow wallet requiring a 2-of-3 quorum of oracle triggers from observation cubesats owned by both parties plus some disinterested third party.

(People are already doing the virtual equivalent for prediction markets: everyone who cares runs their own oracle agent to forward result data from web2 sources into web3. You “just” need computer vision + good optics to bring that paradigm into the physical world.)

So, the only thing required is corrupting/intimidating a single party ? You're just straight up making things easier to be problematic.

And we see this in defi already - taking out a flash loan to rig a thin market that an oracle depends upon is a standard exploit.

Zero Knowledge Contingent Payments are one approach. Encoding everything that you might want to buy as an input to a ZKP system is a stretch, obviously. But at least, that's the spirit of this philosophy.

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-conting...

My thinking is that if the blockchain has sufficiently high fees and sufficiently high computational cost, then people have an incentive not to try to game it. That includes off-chain.

It leads to the question of what is the real purpose and utility of a distributed blockchain? If the blockchain can willy-nilly be gamed and won't be enforced, why have it?

You would either need an arbitration service or an oracle for that. Look into Kleros and Chainlink.