From what I’ve heard, the biggest problem is the inputs. You can write a ‘smart’ contract that says ‘if I get a pizza, user9000005 pays user30000004 XXX bitcoins’ but there’s no direct sensor for ‘user9000005 has a pizza.’ Someone has to manually put it in. At that point, it’s not automated. It’s just a payment processor with way less certainty, so why bother?
It’s harder to doctor, but that’s not really the big worry with a contract. Contract disputes are usually more along the lines of ‘he didn’t pay me’ or ‘she didn’t deliver the goods.’ It’s much rarer for it to be an ‘I signed a contract that said BLAH, but they forged a contract to say BLAGH and faked my signature on it.’
As for censorship, I’m not sure what you mean. A government would find it difficult to obscure an on-chain contract but that’s also not really an issue. I don’t want to guess what you mean.
You’re thinking on a very narrow definition of a contract, here’s a simple contract example that’s currently being censored and wouldn’t be censorable on Blockchain: Buy NSFW games.
A simple contract could sell you NFTs for game keys that could be redeemed on Steam/Itch/GoG or even the own dev site. So there’s no middleman who could oppose this transaction and say which sort of games can or can’t be sold. This whole thing would be completely automated, secure for every part and non-censorable.
You’re hearing contracts and thinking on paper legal documents, whereas smart contracts usually refer to programs acting on tokens, the code that acts on those tokens is the contract, in the example above the generation and transfer of the tokens would be the contract.
Its the same problem; any regulation is likely to occur at an exchange level. Successful exchanges will eventually buy out the unsuccessful ones.
They require enough capital to run that they are centralized rather than decentralized. They need to be trusted by users. Its very obvious they’re the weak link here.
Yeah, there’s this whole concept of “Oracles”, which were supposed to be trustable sources for facts, but they can mainly deal well with things like stock prices or weather data.
It would also have been possible for these Oracles to employ people to fact-check things in case of a dispute. So, user30000004 might claim that the pizza has been delivered and wants their money for it, while user9000005 says nothing got delivered, so then you have someone physically drive out to user9000005 and see if there’s pizza there or not.
But yeah, you still have the problem that a pizza isn’t hard to hide/eat, so you’d need to do some expensive detective work to try to figure out the truth. And that just isn’t worth the cost…
From what I’ve heard, the biggest problem is the inputs. You can write a ‘smart’ contract that says ‘if I get a pizza, user9000005 pays user30000004 XXX bitcoins’ but there’s no direct sensor for ‘user9000005 has a pizza.’ Someone has to manually put it in. At that point, it’s not automated. It’s just a payment processor with way less certainty, so why bother?
Why less certainty? It’s more certain and less censorable than any other digital payment method.
It’s harder to doctor, but that’s not really the big worry with a contract. Contract disputes are usually more along the lines of ‘he didn’t pay me’ or ‘she didn’t deliver the goods.’ It’s much rarer for it to be an ‘I signed a contract that said BLAH, but they forged a contract to say BLAGH and faked my signature on it.’ As for censorship, I’m not sure what you mean. A government would find it difficult to obscure an on-chain contract but that’s also not really an issue. I don’t want to guess what you mean.
You’re thinking on a very narrow definition of a contract, here’s a simple contract example that’s currently being censored and wouldn’t be censorable on Blockchain: Buy NSFW games.
A simple contract could sell you NFTs for game keys that could be redeemed on Steam/Itch/GoG or even the own dev site. So there’s no middleman who could oppose this transaction and say which sort of games can or can’t be sold. This whole thing would be completely automated, secure for every part and non-censorable.
You’re hearing contracts and thinking on paper legal documents, whereas smart contracts usually refer to programs acting on tokens, the code that acts on those tokens is the contract, in the example above the generation and transfer of the tokens would be the contract.
Exhanges can still ban specific users.
So? Just use another exchange, that’s the same as saying paper money is bad because pawn shops might ban specific users.
Its the same problem; any regulation is likely to occur at an exchange level. Successful exchanges will eventually buy out the unsuccessful ones.
They require enough capital to run that they are centralized rather than decentralized. They need to be trusted by users. Its very obvious they’re the weak link here.
Yeah, there’s this whole concept of “Oracles”, which were supposed to be trustable sources for facts, but they can mainly deal well with things like stock prices or weather data.
It would also have been possible for these Oracles to employ people to fact-check things in case of a dispute. So, user30000004 might claim that the pizza has been delivered and wants their money for it, while user9000005 says nothing got delivered, so then you have someone physically drive out to user9000005 and see if there’s pizza there or not.
But yeah, you still have the problem that a pizza isn’t hard to hide/eat, so you’d need to do some expensive detective work to try to figure out the truth. And that just isn’t worth the cost…