Sadly I'm not very competent in terms of judging the technical aspect he's bringing up, but it also seems like it's a very biased view in some way?
Saying something is too easy to 'screw up' and 'too difficult to secure', in what regards? any reference of some situation?
I've myself seen a few contracts done poorly which led to bad issues, but it's just a bit stupid to say it like that I think.
It's a powerful tool but difficult to weld, basically? just all the more reason to make sure whoever handles it is competent and we get some standards (i guess like that math safe library? not sure) which would make it better in the future. it's still in an early stage, smart contracts development I mean.
Topic: The Truth About Smart Contracts (Read 86 times)
This is a really great article for anyone interested in learning more about smart contracts: https://medium.com/@jimmysong/the-truth-about-smart-contracts-ae825271811f
Here's the conclusion form the article:
"I wish smart contracts could be more useful than they actually are. Unfortunately, much of what we humans think of as contracts bring in a whole bunch of assumptions and established case law that don’t need to be explicitly stated.
Furthermore, it turns out utilizing Turing completeness is an easy way to screw up and cause all sorts of unintended behavior. We should be labeling smart contract platforms Turing-vulnerable, not Turing-complete. The DAO incident also proved that there’s a “spirit” of the contract which is implicitly trusted and helps resolve disputes more so than we realize.
Smart contracts are simply too easy to screw up, too difficult to secure, too hard to make trustless and have too many external dependencies to work for most things. The only real place where smart contracts actually add trustlessness is with digital bearer instruments on decentralized platforms like Bitcoin."
Here's the conclusion form the article:
"I wish smart contracts could be more useful than they actually are. Unfortunately, much of what we humans think of as contracts bring in a whole bunch of assumptions and established case law that don’t need to be explicitly stated.
Furthermore, it turns out utilizing Turing completeness is an easy way to screw up and cause all sorts of unintended behavior. We should be labeling smart contract platforms Turing-vulnerable, not Turing-complete. The DAO incident also proved that there’s a “spirit” of the contract which is implicitly trusted and helps resolve disputes more so than we realize.
Smart contracts are simply too easy to screw up, too difficult to secure, too hard to make trustless and have too many external dependencies to work for most things. The only real place where smart contracts actually add trustlessness is with digital bearer instruments on decentralized platforms like Bitcoin."
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