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Comment by xalava | Hacker News Reader

This article seems to miss the point and practical use of Smart contracts. Smart contracts offer revolutionary new to transact gloablly. There are flaws, but the ones presented here are mostly tradeoffs. For each section:

- Reliance on external data is the same problem for any program.

- Smart contracts can be upgraded

- confidentiality is being adressed with ZKP

- to discuss about the legal status is to miss the main point of Smart Contracts.

- Any code has bugs and security flaws. The mitigation must combine traditional security and financial backstops. This is the consequence of relying on code

- Smart contracts execution is one of the most secure you can achieve. It comes with tradeoffs.

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> to discuss about the legal status is to miss the main point of Smart Contracts.

No.

Contracts only work because they are backed by a law court, allowing judgement by a (supposedly) neutral third party. That third party is able to rectify any points of law that might have been bent/broken.

That means that if someone commits fraud on the basis of a dodgy contract, you have _some_ chance of recovering your money/property and putting that person in jail.

Smart contracts basically allow people to hide gotchas in badly written/obfuscated code. So now you need to be really good at both legalese and which ever language the "smart" contract is written in. Its not like there are many accessible test suites out there to help a mortal.

I get the promise, but if I was moving serious amounts of money/goods/services, I sure as hell would be paying for a lawyer to draft a contract. Because if someone is going to destroy my livelihood, I want to make sure they go the fuck to jail.

What makes you think that smart contracts will not be backed by law? Even the word contract is in smart contract. This means if you fail to pay your end of the agreement police/courts will come after you. That part doesn't change.

> Even the word contract is in smart contract

The word Fun is in fundamental, doesn't make it fun.

Contracts are written in specific ways, either because they are directed by law, or because they are trying to reference law to make something happen (or not happen).

Convention, rulings and specific laws have been built over time to make sure that certain practices are stopped or encouraged.

In the UK(and therefore possible common law), there is the concept of a verbal contract, which is implied or sealed when money is exchanged. For example when I buy something physical from a website, its distance selling, which means that regardless of what the site says, I am entitled to send the item back within 14 days and get a refund(with some conditions).

Smart contracts are not either smart or a contract. its an implied contract at best, which means the legal outcome is undefined. the onus is on you to prove that it was a contract, and that your contract complied with the relevant implied laws for the transaction you are doing.

As of today, smart contracts are to contracts what the full-autonomous driving of Tesla is to full-autonomous driving.

Brilliant, this is far more succinct than I could have put it.

I don't think it makes sense to talk about enforcing a smart contract with law enforcement.

You could perhaps have a legal contract that goes along with the smart contract, and which refers to the smart contract, and this legal contract could be enforced through law stuff.

But, I think that's a different idea than the law backing smart contracts.

- Reliance... a traditional contract moves already in its problem space.

- Upgraded... so can a traditional contract as well.

- Confidentiality... I keep my traditional contract in a safe box.

- Legal status... if smart contracts aren't (mainly) concerned with legality then they're not really contracts, are they.

- Mitigation... must combine traditional backstops (like traditional contracts) PLUS code analysis and such novel topics, so it gets more difficult with smart contracts.

- Execution... I don't even know how that translates in the traditional contracts world, so I guess it wasn't needed traditionally.

> Smart contracts offer revolutionary new to transact gloablly.

They certainly do that.

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