Smart contracts are a horrible invention that don't do anything new. The equivalent in a normal SQL database (the original DLT) is just running a transaction; every SQL database under the sun has supported this for ages.
Smart contracts represent the first time in history when you can trust code to do what it says. The next best thing that even come close is Intel’s SGX extensions, where we trust Intel, or AWS key management service, where we trust Amazon.
The idea that everyone can custody their own private keys as they want AND no one can be “above the law” and circumvent the business logic, is really powerful. That assurance and level of trust in the code is what enables a whole slew of new applications that currently require human gatekeeper institutions, same as Web1 replaced radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, and centralized platforms like America Online, Compuserve and Minitel.
You just are myopically focused on the silly Web3 phase, same as people derided Web1 personal home pages with <blink> and <marquee> tags until the Web grew up.
For example https://intercoin.org/applications
This is extremely, extremely wrong. The operators of the network can change the smart contract VM whenever they want. There's nothing magic about it, the VM is just implemented in some code that all of the executor nodes happen to agree on at any given moment in time. In practice they don't change it, but neither would you if you were running a financial database on top of SQL.
And besides, the worst issue in software development is unintended bugs made by programmers. No programmer I know would ever trust any non-trivial code to simply "do what it says" because there could be complex bugs lurking in there somewhere. Smart contracts can't do anything about that, practically speaking they make it much worse by making it difficult/expensive to change the smart contract. There is nothing revolutionary or powerful about them, the point of them is actually to make them weak and expensive on purpose so the executors can charge increasing gas fees.
Edit: I looked at that list of applications, almost all of them could be done better without smart contracts or even without computers. Those things are all thousands of years old. The only exception on that list is NFTs, but NFTs are an entirely bogus concept that are yet another version of a ponzi scheme.
this is extremely, extremely wrong
Sure, they can “hardfork” the protocol in a backwards-incompatible way, but they’d have to get the fork adopted by everyone who is currently running (and “securing”) the other version of the database and its “stored procedures”. Often, the node operators don’t all know each other and it’s hard for them to all collude to run the hardfork. Often, the old network has large enough incentives for each individual to not switch, similar to how everyone always threatens to leave Facebook but it still has the same MAU because its network effect is so huge. Good luck leaving when all your friends are on it, etc. And Facebook doesn’t give you a steady stream of income, even. If it did, if you made more profit than it cost you to run a node, why wouldn’t you ALSO keep supporting the old network? I can think of one reason only — if the new network hardfork would pay you MORE and it would be a zero-sum game. It would have to break old contracts AND gain enough traction to pay all the node operators MORE than the old one. That’s quite a hurdle and becomes harder the bigger the original network was.
Bitcoin was forked multiple times, but even a sensible hardfork change like increasing the block size proved too hard to do. Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV are around but most Bitcoin ”miner” nodes still run the tried and true old blue.
Ethereum team had to put a “difficulty bomb” in there to try to get the miners to upgrade. See Ethereum Classic, for instance, it is still being run, despite having no widely adopted applications or stablecoins on it. So even without utility, you can have shitcoins running for years, and you’re talking to me about how ALL nodes can just abandon it?
Now about the bugs and correctness. Look… first of all, no one is claiming that smart contracts will solve every single problem, neither did Web1 but it solved enough that everyone left AOL and CompuServe and MSN and joined it. That’s a FACT. They also left Encarta and Britannica which were quite popular capitalist enterprises, paying all editors top-down from their profits, and instead Wikipedia eclipsed them all. They are now a rounding error.
But you bring a fair point — since smart contracts must be immutable to be trusted (like UniSwap Factory, or many other protocols) they have to be audited and battle tested before the public can trust them with large amounts of value (elections, money, etc.)
The ultimate in this is Provable Correctness, and there are now tools to actually prove a smart contract or a program is correct.
The second place is what Cardano is doing — running fuzzing with massive amounts of input through what is essentially a functional programming language (Haskell). What is not enough about that? You get the best of all worlds… trillions of tests, and then immutable code you can trust.
Disclaimer: I am not building on Cardano and have no connection to their ecosystem. Just that they are focused on moving the space to a more provably correct set of smart contracts, and it addresses your concern.
