we hear about cool and new bitcoin ideas every day and also how these ideas will improve the standing of bitcoin. a cool feature that makes it better than fiat.
i want to talk about one such feature. bitcoin can reduce the trust we need when money is involved. let us say i want to bet a friend of mine and to make sure we pay after the bet is resolved we use a smart contract.
this sounds fine and reduces the trust needed.
but in fact we just shifted the trust to the coder who made the smart contract. sure we could verify the code, but how many people can do this (remember the DAO)? my mother can certainly not.
so in order to make smart contracts a big point for bitcoin we will need generations and maybe even have some sort of basic smart contracts training in schools. so this is not very likely.
even today nobody reads the fine print and just trusts that everything will work out fine (most people think they can sue to get the money back is something fishy happens). but all we need with smart contracts is just one misspelled letter and the money can be lost without recovery.
people are dumb, so fiat works just fine for them. bitcoin might be to advanced for people to really go mainstream without destroying many peoples lives, because they made a small mistake or trusted the wrong code/people.
can we solve this problem? should we get used to the losses? or is this one of the reasons bitcoin will never go mainstream?
