Are smart contracts doomed?

[Hueristic]

... - even though it had a disclaimer...

Disclaimer was added after the fact, scammers through and through. Lets not try to rewrite history here. I'm glad the exchanges caught the Hackers from dumping their ill gotten ETC.

[d@nte]

I do not know, but I would like to know what important companies use or are trying to implement it.

[bbc.reporter]

Ethereum is not smart contracts. Smart contracts is a term coined by Nick Szabo in the 1990's. So if Ethereum dies there will be other platforms created for facilitation of smart contract transactions. I am not really sure if OP is just posting the question for the sake of posting or is he really asking.

[Abiky]

Ethereum is not smart contracts. Smart contracts is a term coined by Nick Szabo in the 1990's. So if Ethereum dies there will be other platforms created for facilitation of smart contract transactions. I am not really sure if OP is just posting the question for the sake of posting or is he really asking.

I'm really asking by the way. I was just a little worried about what might happen to "turing complete smart contracts" in the future. Most recently, I have seen that the ETC team has taken initiative to keep the project going. I've seen their roadmap and declaration of independence and by the looks of it, this may get some traction in the next months if all goes well. I wonder if in the ETH side, they're planning to make a The DAO 2.0

Anyways, in the meantime I will keep an eye on both chains just in case.   

[dinofelis]

I'm really asking by the way. I was just a little worried about what might happen to "turing complete smart contracts" in the future.

This is an essential mistake.  The language in which one writes smart contracts shouldn't be Turing complete (and hence with an undecidable stopping).

Ethereum did it totally the wrong way, by putting "creativity" first, and "security/verifiability" as an aftertought.   It should be the other way around: the most important part of a contract is that it is well-understood, not that you are able to calculate a third order Feynman diagram with it.  The tricky part in "normal" contracts is the fine print, and most money on legal contracts is spend by lawyers checking all "hidden possibilities".

One should have started with verifiability, and built the system around that.  Ethereum did the opposite.  There's too much "software engineering" and not enough "mathematical proof" in ethereum.   But that is the problem with *any* Turing complete contracting system.  And there's no need for it.

A contract should have a finite, and relatively small state tree, that can be entirely checked.  That's grossly what expensive lawyers do with business contracts: check the state tree (with as a VM: the legal system).

[Spoetnik]

They were never "alive"  

The only thing that got any popularity etc was DAO a failed Pyramid scheme
..within a pyramid scheme LOL

APPS / DAPPS / Smart Contracts are a lame ass gimmick used to tack a scammy ICO token onto.

There is no real need for them.
We have no real use for integrating APP's on a block chain.

The idea was never serious and was doomed before it started.
The fact you all could not see this (long ago) means you are confused and blinded
by tech jargon and ICO / White paper dick holster jiggling.
And the ohhh sooo damn impressive pumped up manipulated ICO coin scam market caps.

When in reality NO ONE is using the damn things.

You all need to get smarter and exercise some common sense with this stuff.
And don't be fooled by crypto-snake oil salesmen for profit.
Quit being low hanging crypto-fruit !

@Dino
afterthought ?
What did you all learn ?
Anything ?
Nope.. you all went for Steem etc right afterwards.

[dinofelis]

There is no real need for them.
We have no real use for integrating APP's on a block chain.

Applications, no.  But smart contracts could be interesting in the following sense of what I'd call distributed war fare: imagine some entity wanting to kill certain well-known people (state head, corporate chief...), blow up something, .....  They could make an anonymous smart contract with a big reward for who-ever kills him, blows up the thing ....   This could go like this:

- a contract is proposed with a big sum in it.
- a "first taker" has to lock up himself a certain amount of money (it could also be a highest bidder...)
- if the target is reached before a certain date, the first taker gets his locked money plus the big sum
- if not, the taker's money goes to the owner of the contract

This is a way to do distributed warfare (it will probably be labelled "terrorism").  There needs of course to be a way to verify automatically that the target has been attained, but that could be some processing of news paper headings.

I think there's almost no other way to do distributed warfare.  This is one of the principal usages of smart contracts I can think of.

Of course, a counter attack consists in being the first or the highest bidder to take the contract, and then not to proceed.  But it costs the locked sum.  So in a way, this kind of smart contract would put a correct market price on the destruction or killing of someone where a balance is found between those not wanting this to happen, and those wanting it to happen. 

It would be a fair price for war acts.

I don't know if I would think of this as a positive evolution, but I don't see how it can be avoided honestly.  First of all this will start off as a joke, like the DDoScoin, but I think there's an obvious and unavoidable evolution in the direction of where money really counts historically: warfare.

[dinofelis]

Human civilization has done nothing but evolve in complexity over time.  Why would this trend cease?  It won't.  Mole-men sustaining life in underground bunkers developing CERN portals to parallel dimensions is slightly more complex than President Garfield's medical treatment for bullet extraction/infection prevention just a century ago.

Smart contracts will ONLY INCREASE IN COMPLEXITY over time.  Just look at history (then extrapolate the future).

The point is that a smart contract is a totally different beast than "software".  A smart contract, like a normal contract, is stated once and for all, when the first two parties sign up ; in as much as it can "auto-mutate", this is part of the original contract.  There's nothing *unforeseen* that you can change in a smart contract. 

In fact, the closest you come to the situation of a smart contract, is firmware running on a space probe you cannot update remotely.  It has to work at launch, and can never be updated any more.

Now, look at normal contracts.  Normal contracts can be quite complex when you look at the paper work, but their state tree is in fact relatively simple.   The hard part of normal contracts is how the legal system will interpret the state tree: this is why you use expensive business lawyers to try and verify normal contracts.  A wild guess is that even a very complicated normal contract doesn't contain more than a few tens of leaves in its state tree ("if this, then so, and if so then this, but if not no, then that").  NO SINGLE NORMAL CONTRACT HAS EVER USED UNSPECIFIED LOOPS OR UNLIMITED RECURSION.  So no normal contract has ever needed a Turing-complete description language.  It is this absence of Turing completeness which allows to analyse the state TREE (and not a state GRAPH).

If you cannot formally make sure that the state tree is what you consider it should be, then you are using "frozen software" of which you have no formal proof that it doesn't contain bugs or exploits (if you have a formal proof, then these things cannot occur, because you have explored the full state space of your contract).

The holy grail of software development is to know how to write bug free and exploit free software in Turing complete languages, and in more than 50 years of software engineering, we never succeeded in doing so.  But in non-Turing complete systems, one can, with formal state tree verification.  We even know that this proof is not possible in Turing complete languages (the Halting Problem).

So, writing a contract, that cannot only never be altered, but that will run open to anyone, containing potentially a lot of money (bait for exploits), on a system where it is mathematically impossible to prove the absence of bugs or exploits, is NUTS.  Especially, because that aspect which renders the system unprovable (Turing completeness) is never used in real normal contracts.

smartcoins - the bitcoin derivitives that can be executed either now (like bitcoin) or sometime in the future making wills and annuities possible.  Translation - you don't have to trust a bank or third party to trade assets, or administer an annuity to your after you die, and they turn 18

But these are SIMPLE, small contracts with just a few leaves on the state tree.  You do not need Turing completeness to implement that.  In the same way that the statements in the "paper" version of these things also doesn't need any Turing completeness, unlimited recursion and all that.

PeerPlays = gaming smart contracts - you don't have to trust Joe Schmoe to hold the fantasy football prize money becasue the network will not release no money until the network reaches consensus on the final scores. 

This is again a simple contract with just a few states.

So it's not that smart contracts are not viable, and will disappear, it's just that COMPLEX smart contract platforms require a greater level of human trust than SIMPLER smart contract platforms like bitcoin.

These are NOT "complex" smart contracts.  They are very simple ones.

[dinofelis]

I agree 100%

Even though "Alan Turing Complete Ethereally Complicated Smarter Than You Contracts" will never be used for large scale business, it does not change the fact that Ethereum is a great tool for building and learning which "Limited State (You Don't Need To Be) Smart Contracts" will become popular among developers of global industry.

 

I like this :-)

Indeed, if instead of an expensive business lawyer, you need an expensive Solidity expert to verify your contract, we didn't advance a bit.  The idea of "smart" contracts is that you can easily set up one, it is CLEAR what it can do and will do, and no hassle, it is launched.  If you need a year of testnet validating, 3 independent security audits, and with a hesitating finger you launch it, hoping that the exploits will not be found too soon, a smart contract has lost all its raison d'être.

I think the problem with Ethereum is fundamental, in the sense that the BYTE CODE is Turing complete.  So even if you limit yourself to a subset of Solidity on the source level, the *actual contract* is the byte code running on the VM.  This code is very difficult to analyse, exactly because it has the potential of being Turing complete.  You could limit the instruction set in Solidity to something "provable on the source code level", but that doesn't guarantee that the byte code is going to behave exactly as assumed implicitly by the Solidity description.  The recursion error that occurred in the DAO was on the level of a misunderstood behaviour of a Solidity construct.  You have to check the byte code, and THAT is very very difficult with a Turing-complete instruction set. 
The bitcoin OP code language, although very limited, is much more provable.  I'm sure that one can make tools that give formal proofs of state trees for any bitcoin script (maybe these tools exist already, I don't know).

 

It's the same scientific trade off as it ever was:

Do you want :

Robustness or Flexibility?
Speed, or Power?
Hot or Cold?

You can't have both, and if you compromise, then you will end up with neither.

I agree, and the big mistake of ethereum is to have written a software platform, like "java on blockchain" or something, while totally missing the FUNDAMENTAL software engineering problem of smart contracts: NO exploit from day 1 after launch EVER.  Ask any honest software engineer with some experience whether he's willing to bet his children's lives over his ability to write a piece of software in which NO SINGLE EXPLOIT will ever be found, without the possibility of pushing security updates, and he will tell you to f*ck off (or he really doesn't like his kids :-) ).

This is an unheard-of challenge in software engineering.  EVERYTHING should have been designed around that problem in ethereum, and it seems like it was an afterthought.  The very fact of promoting "Turing complete" platform illustrates this.

My idea is that ethereum is fundamentally flawed exactly for that reason, and that re-designing it, this time around provability and security, is a huge hassle if even possible.  Ethereum has been designed around the wrong paradigm (namely "software sophistication made easy" instead of "security and provability").  It is very hard to correct such a fundamental mistake in conception.

[Bemerand]

Why do you always keep spamming new threads with random questions you couldn't care less?

I was going to answer his question lol but i am thinking the same thing you are so....

[crowetic]

ETH is dead, but this by no means, means that smart contracts are dead...


In fact... many people don't know this... but BURST was the FIRST coin in the world to have Smart Contracts... We have a system called Automated Transactions based on CIYAM technology.

Our Smart Contract system is fully secure, and we have been doing our crawling before we decide to run...


ETH, on the other hand, didn't do this, they decided to jump in at a full sprint... without proper testing... and because of this, they lost a bunch of money, and likely killed their entire project (that is, if it wasn't the way they had planned things the entire time.)

Their failed attempt was because they did not do things they way they should have...


BURST and QORA, have already used their smart contract system to do a cross-blockchain coin transfer, and are currently using this technology to build a decentralized trade portal (decentralized exchange) that will include BTC, LTC and any newer bitcoin core coded coin.


Our Smart Contracts have been mostly used and tested in our CrowdFunding system, which has never had any issues, and is extremely functional. It allows for fully automated CrowdFunding, that either pays the starting account if the CF is fulfilled, or refunds to every investor if the CF is not fulfilled. This is a great starting Smart Contract. Not too extensive, but very functional.

We have also used our Smart Contracts to make the world's first decentralized provably fair lottery, which we will be expanding on shortly.

Automated Escrow in our worldwide person to person marketplace, is also used.


So, no, I do not believe that smart contracts are dead simply because one coin ran before they could crawl, did things in a ridiculous way, and had the obvious outcome.

I believe there is a VERY bright future for Smart Contract enabled coins, who choose to do things the right way, such as BURST and QORA.

[Spoetnik]

When i go to the store to buy a bag of chips i will show them all your massive walls of text page after page on why i should be able to buy my shit with your "smart contracts"

Tech masturbation is fun & all but get the fuck real already.

All those walls of text you all keep posting are for one purpose..
To tack an ICO coin onto and then trade on Poloniex.

Why is it so hard for you all to put your cock down and think of the reality.
People !

All those 7+ billion people around earth that use a PRACTICAL & FUNCTIONAL Currency.

What ?
Do you cocky fuckers here think you are going to re-invent "Currency" ?

NOW THAT IS FUCKING FUNNY !

..but sad for the brain dead peons who invest real money into these tech scheme with ICO coins.

This place sure attracts some Mensa fucking lunatics LOL
People so smart and nerdy yet blind dumb cocky obsessive and greedy.

Who is making a practical currency that is going to be ale to dethrone Bitcoin
..and have it launched even more fairly than BTC ?
Did you geniuses figure out yet that initial distribution of a currency is tantamount yet ?

How does a "Smart contract" relate to any of that ?
It doesn't .. it's a bad scheme.
Nothing but stupid bullshit not needed or wanted by anyone but idiot profiteers.

The words smart contract have sickened me since you all started loitering around here moaning on about it.
Like your other moronic ripped jargon like White Paper.
All those terms you throw around make my eyes roll till they bleed.

You all used IPO until i raped the word.
Then you switched to ICO and countless others..

Trust me the words Smart Contract are fucking dead.
Thank me for that but even more thank the scammy idiots beyond Ethereum.
And was Nick involved in ETH too ?
I bet half these older BTC blowhards were ..or still are.
Why ?

Think about it.