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0 pointsdatadata3y ago0 comments

> smart contracts don't work and are broken

This absolute statement is asserting that ALL smart contracts don't work. There is overwhelming evidence of some smart contracts working just fine, and of course a lot of smart contracts also have problems. It is wild to just drop all of the nuance of such a complicated issue. What new technology has been flawless without any failures along the way?

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4 comments · 2 top-level

colesantiago3y ago· 2 in thread

This 'flawless argument' is an irrelevant statement, we have given blockchain technologies over 15 years to improve, but the scams have been getting bigger in an unregulated environment.

I also don't recall any regulated bank accounts getting automatically drained or losing everybody's money due to a single scammer or a bad actor.

One single error or exploit in these smart contracts results in millions being drained. This happens on a weekly basis with a giant lack of consumer protection, unaccountability or any chance of getting your money back (which that is a huge unsolved problem). So yes, these smart contracts do not work.

It's a system designed to fail with thousands of disasters, rug pulls and scams just waiting to happen.

datadataOP3y ago

This is what the arguments you are making sound like to me:

One single failure on an airplane can kill hundreds of people, even a single line of code could crash several planes. There are just thousands of accidents waiting to happen. Planes do not work. They have had a hundred years to make planes perfectly safe. Every year more and more people fly. It is a system designed to fail.

colesantiago3y ago

The main difference you're not getting is that there is accountability and regulations for when these issues happen, Crypto has none of these and it has been over 15 years in its existence.

Crypto is a lawless 'decentralised' wild west that has zero accountability for when anyone loses their money in smart contract hacks, scams, wallet draining and rugpulls, in all cases your money is gone with no refunds or consumer protection.

So yes, it is a system designed to fail.

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dmitriid3y ago

Those things are neither smart nor contracts.

They are just pieces of code in esoteric programming languages running on world's slowest VMs. They encode primitive trivial rulesets and are still so complex that their own authors fail to see trivial errors even after multiple audits.

An actual real world contract such as buying or selling property (which I've done several times now) would be a beast of such byzantine proportions that it would take until the heat death of the universe to write and audit it. And it would still be unenforceable after that.

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