Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisshroba | Hacker News Reader

I think the point isn’t so much immutability for the sake of immutability but rather immutability for the sake of keeping power out of a centralized entity. With the scheme proposed in this article, you could do things like have contract changes only be authorized by, say a 2/3 vote of token holders, or any other complex logic you want to implement in a smart contract. Of course if there is some contract that has a single individual with the power to make arbitrary modifications, it likely won’t be successful, but with decentralized ownership I think it could work.

View on HN

Yes, that sounds reasonable. It's kinda worrying that some popular smart contracts implement "Pause" functions, callable only by one address (usually the creator of the contract).

You, as the user, can see those functions and choose not to use those contracts. With a closed source or black box api you don’t have that power as an individual

So in this wonderful future we're building anyone who wants to safely execute a transaction should be a specifically skilled programmer? Sounds more dystopian than other possibilities

Couldn't you say the same thing about the long legal documents that we all sign when signing up for commercial banking products?

We're all legally protected from unfair or arduous clauses in contracts because of legislation.

You mean how in the current world we live in to do pretty much anything you need to know how to boot up a computer, login, open up a web browser, connect to a remote server over a tcp protocol, navigate through a series of special documents rendered by the browser, access a separate protocol called email, reopen a hyperlink from the email in a new instance of a web browser, and then finally you can actually do something?

The reason all those things are so easy to do is down to years of work optimising the UI and handling errors well- we’ll get there with smart contracts too one day

I get what you mean, I feel like transparency should never be a "if you're in the know you're protected, if not you're taking a gamble".

This is probably a good case for natural language as a program. If smart contracts can be immutable natural language contracts that can be proven to compile to code in a repeatable manner then we're making progress.

Pause functions are actually considered a matter of best practice. It's a way of mitigating the contract's risk. Now, who gets control of the pause function is an entirely separate discussion worth having. The controlling address could be a contract implementing a multisig scheme, allowing for the decision to be made by more than just a single individual.

https://consensys.github.io/smart-contract-best-practices/ge...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com