Smart Contracts Are Useless
medium.com
medium.com
Formexample, author writes in a way that implies that a smart contract will stop working if it runs out of gas. This is not true - a single function call will abort, and even that rarely happens because it’s possible to compute required gas in advance and set the gas limit to a proper amount.
The whole timekeeping mentions not being able to tell time. You can’t use exact time, but block numbers are very good approximations.
As for the orcales - yes they are needed, and they work well.
As for real world connection - what you do is you set a legally binding agreement between two companies or a company and public to honour the output of the contract. Problem solved.
All in all, the author uses these inaccuracies to show that smart contracts are impractical and have no use. This is absurd - see DeFi for example.
What's a "legally binding agreement between a company and [the] public"? Who signs it in the name of the "public"? How can a member of the "public" ensure that the agreement is kept? What does "legally binding" even mean, what courts are responsible?
Legally binding contract. You know, the law, lawyers, written signatures
For example, if a company says that they will give a prize to the first person who collects a 1000 bottle caps, the first person that does that can sue the company if it backtracks. Even if there was no agreement between the conoany and the person beforehand.
We used it for tokenising real world assets. The entity doing ITO behind the asset made a public promise to give the asset to a person chosen by the contract under certain conditions. Even though the person was not known in advance, they would have the right to sue the company if they didn’t fulfill the promise.
However, this kind of competition or prize is kind of the inverse of an oracle: The company says that they will give someone money for certain actions. The oracle is the inverse: It promises to perform certain actions for anyone who gives it money.
In some sense I realized that there is a similarity to mail order catalogues, where you don't have a contract with the company before sending them money out of the blue. But is that the law that an actual court would apply to a random website that announces "we will provide accurate data about X to anyone who sends Y amount of Ether to address Z"? Possible. (But again, not a contract with "written signatures".)
In my case it wasn’t oracles, but tying up real world assets to tokens. The company had to be obliged to fulfill what contract told it, and we managed to grt it working from a legal perspective.
It is a part of the European legal system, and provisions for it appear in German, Italian, Polish, Turkish and French laws.
It's a one-sided contract essentially, so there is no need for a member of public to sign it. But if you don't fulfill it, the affected member of public can sue you.