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Comment by tumdum_ | Hacker News Reader

> with turing-complete arbitrary computations in EVM this becomes very difficult.

I have very limited knowledge about EVM, but those computations are bounded by gas, right? Evaluating them is a finite process.

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Yes, each opcode has a gas cost. Some are quite expensive, like writing storage (changing network state). Each block has a target gas limit. Say 30 million. A single transaction cannot exceed that. Additionally, a transaction specifies a bid on how much they are willing to spend, in ether, per gas. That said, transferring funds does not typically require significant gas.

What you suggest is possible (evaluate the side effects of the transaction and present that information to the prospective signer). But at present they don't do that. I'm not sure about this specific case but often it's just a supplied text string (that can say anything) that's displayed. Basically the system depends on trust in whatever came up with the transaction payload.

You can at least display the parameters that you're passing into a contract function. That keeps you from getting hacked when interacting with a well-known trustworthy contract.

But the space of their effects on the Blockchain state is vast. You need software to translate those effects to a form human can interpret as "what I want"/"not what I want".

Ie. engineering work needs to happen in the UI they used to confirm the tx

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