Programmable smart contracts are a great idea in a world where programmers write bug free code. That world does not exist yet. Until we have near-perfect code writing AIs every new smart contract is just a disaster waiting to happen.
That's like saying legal contracts are a disaster because we do not live in an ideal world where lawyers don't do mistakes, and there are no legal loopholes.
Granted, bugs are much more common than legal loopholes, but in the same way an operating system's APIs and constraints are tested until it becomes reliable enough for other people to rely on it, I can see some standard types of contracts (in the same way as in the traditional legal system) becoming recognized for their robustness and used for common operations.
Legal contracts have a solution for bugs and loopholes, namely, the court system. I can write a three-line contract with the core terms on a napkin, sign it, and it will be okay, since everything not explicitly mentioned will be given reasonable defaults, and attempts to exploit stupid loopholes will be laughed out of the court. If someone defrauds me and gets me to sign a contract based on false information, they don't get to point to a loophole and figuratively take my firstborn, we have a process to void fraudulent contracts.
However, if you want contracts that cannot be overridden and are enforced by machines as written (not as intended, as in the legal system), then the bar becomes much higher, then you must get all the details explicitly right the first time and ensure that people don't sign fraudulent contracts, and I'm not sure if this is possible at all.
>When one obeys the letter of the law but not the spirit, one is obeying the literal interpretation of the words (the "letter") of the law, but not necessarily the intent of those who wrote the law. Conversely, when one obeys the spirit of the law but not the letter, one is doing what the authors of the law intended, though not necessarily adhering to the literal wording.
This is a very ancient concept and like all ancient concepts it's bound to be rediscovered every other decade on average.
"The code is law" is a wet dream for a dystopic authoritarian state and I don't understand why anybody, much less actual coders, would think that's a good idea.
"Thank you for subscribing to our contract for your $2 weekly subscription. By the way through a clever loophole obfuscated in our code the amount actually doubles every week. Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, Code is Law. Have a good day sir".
In the real world you have a safety net for these types of things, in many case you can break an abusive contract because society has created regulations that ban certain tactics. Ethereum has no such thing. A single mistake or intentional deception and like that, you've lost all your money. The code is law, nothing we can do sir. How is that a feature exactly?
Look at how dumb the average spam is, and yet there's no shortage of people falling for them. Yet it seems like the ethereum crowd genuinely believes that my mother is suddenly going to be able to proof Solidity scripts, something I wouldn't even trust myself to do with decades of programming experience behind me. I don't know if Ethereum is an economic bubble but it definitely is an intellectual one.
> "The code is law" is a wet dream for a dystopic authoritarian state and I don't understand why anybody, much less actual coders, would think that's a good idea.
How is that dystopic and authoritarian? Looks like you're throwing a bunch of buzz words for shock value with little argument to back it up. We already trust code as contract everyday every time you make a payment through SSL (anyone who lived through the 90's and early 2000's remembers how people were scared to death of online payment security and now it happens every millisecond). Ethereum is just a distributed version of that with no middle man, that is to say it can fail like SSL can when compromised but it doesn't mean we should throw it out the window just because it could sometimes fail. By that logic we should still be cavemen and forget about any technology ever.
> "Thank you for subscribing to our contract for your $2 weekly subscription. By the way through a clever loophole obfuscated in our code the amount actually doubles every week. "
I hope you're aware that the exact same thing happened with these indexed loans where people weren't aware that interests could fluctuate with time, right?
I gave some examples (that you quickly dismissed). Having a recourse through an other, hopefully compassionate and empathetic human being is not something I'm willing to give up on. If things go awry to the point where I could go bankrupt because of a small lapse in judgment I want to have recourses. That's why we have we have consumer laws. That's why we have the notion of abusive contracts.
SSL is hardly related. It's just a mean to secure a transaction and that's it. There's no contract involved. It's a tunnel for some data. A more apt comparison would be to say that I trust, say, Amazon's website to do the right thing when I give them my credit card infos. But the truth is that I don't even trust them that much, if they abuse it or get compromised I'll just notify my bank (if they don't notice it before I do) and I'm good to go.
If I buy a laptop on amazon and they sneakily bill me for two tons of whole grain rice flour and when I complain they said "but it was in the terms and conditions", do you think it would hold up in court?
>I hope you're aware that the exact same thing happened with these indexed loans where people weren't aware that interests could fluctuate with time, right?
Ah, and it's clearly something we aim to emulate, right?
If anything that's a very good example about how the average person can be tricked into accepting a terrible contract if they don't know any better. Do you think it would've worked better if the loan was expressed in Solidity code?
> That's why we have we have consumer laws. That's why we have the notion of abusive contracts.
That could still exist with Ethereum.
> SSL is hardly related. It's just a mean to secure a transaction and that's it.
Your browser's code trust the code on the server hosting the SSL cert and authority server. So, it's just code involved here.
> If I buy a laptop on amazon and they sneakily bill me for two tons of whole grain rice flour and when I complain they said "but it was in the terms and conditions", do you think it would hold up in court
Again, you could also sue someone for tricking you into a bad ethereum contract and it would not hold in court either. Not sure what your point is here.
> Ah, and it's clearly something we aim to emulate, right?
No it is not, my point is that bad things happen no matter who's involved (humans or code) and just because some bad things may happen doesn't mean we should stop using it, but we should go with the most efficient and secure one, which for now is probably humans of course. See also plane crashes.
>Your browser's code trust the code on the server hosting the SSL cert and authority server. So, it's just code involved here.
Yes, but "there" is only a small part of the full story. When I make a payment over SSL I don't make an immutable, untraceable and irreversible transaction. In order to be able to receive the payment the other party has to register with a bank and other legal entities etc... Putting money to an ethereum contract is closer to sending cash in an envelope to some PO box in a foreign country. Good luck getting it back if something goes wrong.
>Hopefully after said compassionate human had their lunch break.
Humans make mistakes, humans are unreliable. That's why we have a bunch of checks and balances in any decent justice systems to avoid miscarriages of justice. They're still possible, doesn't mean that the right solution is to get rid of it altogether.
>Again, you could also sue someone for tricking you into a bad ethereum contract and it would not hold in court either. Not sure what your point is here.
So code isn't law, law is law? I think my point is perfectly clear, you just keep moving the goalpost. My point is that those "smart" contracts are great for thieves but of dubious values
Regardless, do you think those people whose wallet was compromised because of the faulty contract will manage to get their money back? Who are they suing, the thieves? The wallet company who wrote the faulty contract? How you do get the money back? Can you freeze the account? Reverse the transactions? Blacklist the coins? The whole cryptocurrency system is designed to make those things impractical, if not downright impossible.
Again, great for thieves and black market sellers but if I just want to buy a laptop on amazon why would I ever bother with this? What's the use case?
> In order to be able to receive the payment the other party has to register with a bank and other legal entities etc... Putting money to an ethereum contract is closer to sending cash in an envelope to some PO box in a foreign country
This shows either little understanding of smart contracts or little imagination. Retailers could make each of their sells contract a 3 party multi-sig contract where the three parties would be you, the retailer and your bank and if you complain to your bank and your bank accepts your request after reviewing the retailer's claim then the money would go back to your account. There could also be other legal entities in the multi-sig contracts such as insurances or others.
> My point is that those "smart" contracts are great for thieves but of dubious values
See my previous point and why this is not correct.
> Regardless, do you think those people whose wallet was compromised because of the faulty contract will manage to get their money back? Who are they suing, the thieves? The wallet company who wrote the faulty contract? How you do get the money back? Can you freeze the account? Reverse the transactions? Blacklist the coins? The whole cryptocurrency system is designed to make those things impractical, if not downright impossible.
They won't get their money back because they didn't pay for an insurance. Coinbase for example guaranties US$ 100k in case of theft. If Ethereum becomes a thing, there would be a whole market of insurances offering what Visa or Coinbase or your local bank offers today.
Last but not least, you're getting robbed every day with fiat money with inflation policies, only you don't see it but it is happening. Inflation lowers the value of your fiat money and that's like robbing you a part of your money without your consent. And you pay a fee for that insurance you mention every time you use your credit card, so not free either and again, any ethereum or bitcoin provider could offer the same insurance for a fee (and coinbase already does to some extend).
One could argue that legal contracts are less binding than smart contracts. There is a distinction made between the 'letter and spirit of the law'.
Furthermore, a contract, or at least a clause, will become invalid if it goes against existing law in a country (at least this applies to the EU). E.g, I cannot sign a contract in which I sell my kidney to you, as commercial organ trading is outlawed in many countries.
Is a smart contract able to make this distinction? I suppose as soon as it develops a moral consciousness it does.
Most "real life" contracts have bugs too. The difference is: the visibility of these contracts is very limited such that these bugs cannot be exploited by random hackers. And any exploit can be challenged in court. Ethereum takes away both - opening you up to be challenge by everybody with no recourse.
Legal contracts are enforced by courts, which are run by humans. Humans do not take things 100% literally and there is always an opportunity to change the law. For example someone would not be forced to empty their entire bank account and give it to some random person just because that person discovered a typo in the EULA.
With a big emphasis on "yet". Serious question: are the "halting problem" and the "yet" in your sentence dependent on each other? I.e., don't we need to first solve the halting problem before we can manage to write 100% bug-free programs?
There is no need to solve halting problem in general case. We can have heuristics that do not accept programs they are not sure about and it is programmer's job to make correctness more obvious.
My understanding is that the halting problem does not prevent formal proofs of Ethereum contract correctness because Ethereum contracts have gas limits that make them terminating.
And the entire concept of 'gas' to me seems to be a hacky work-around in order to implement a Turing-Complete language on the blockchain.
I'm not even sure it is needed -- the whole 'Turing-Complete' aspect of the EVM seems to be an engineering solution in search of a problem. And 'gas' is certainly not intuitive as a metaphor for end-users of Ethereum who would use it as a currency (how does a financial transaction "run out of gas", exactly?)
Gas is analogous to cycles of the EVM that the contracts uses when it executes. Someone suggested 'gas' should have been called 'cycles' to more clearly convey its meaning and avoid a lot of confusion. Anyway, gas/cycles must be limited given there are no access controls on use of the EVM. It's an effective DoS control. It's also orthogonal to Turing Completeness.
I don't see how you can "solve" the halting problem. But there are lots of ways to tiptoe around it and have some kind of formal verification of software.
We put our lives in the hands of code written by humans every day, e.g. cars, planes, trains, etc.
Perhaps the permanence of executing solidity contracts will at least motivate some safer, more secure practises, in the same way that the permanence of death does when programming vehicles that carry human lives.
It would be cool to see APIs for compiling Solidity contracts from safer languages with more concise type systems like Idris[1]. That said, I haven't had a proper dig into Solidity myself yet so it could very well offer some of these features. I'd love to hear some experiences from devs who have written a significant amount of code in it.
Not only is it regulated and tested, the question of liability is easy to answer: Product Liability is regulated by countless national and international laws.
But in the case of Ethereum Smart Contracts, who is liable in the real world?
It's possible to write provably correct code, though. At least then you reduce the problem to the issue of correctly specifying what the code is supposed to do. Certain classes of contracts might be small enough to do that.
Granted, the requirement for NASA-level code correctness would make smart contracts expensive to develop and put them out of reach of average developers.
They might still be a good idea, you just have to live with that risk. World is full of risks anyway and you might die tomorrow in a traffic accident. Sometimes risks are worth taking, such as leaving your apartment and risk walking under a car.
Everyone chooses risks that they take, and consider whether there exists enough benefits for the risks. It makes sense to take calculated risks. I'm opposing the viewpoint "there exist risks, therefore it shouldn't not be considered at all".
Come on, people are not saying that "risks exist", they are saying that the risks are very very likely.
It's a near certainty that I won't get hit by a car tomorrow - people do get hit by a cars but most people don't get hit by cars most of the time. There is a risk (a fraction of percent), but it's acceptable.
It's an even larger certainty that code will have bugs. As far as I've seen, all code will have bugs, as experience shows, even security oriented code carefully made and reviewed by experts tends to have bugs, but it is possible (though not as likely) that a small piece of carefully audited code will be bug-free. That's a bit different than the risk of getting hit by a car; it might be more fair to say that you have a "risk" of being bug-free comparable to the "risk" of winning a lottery.
It is possible that with sufficient investment in tools for writing safer code, unoverridable smart contracts will become useful enough to outweigh the risks.
It's also possible (and I feel that this will be the case) that in the end the risks will be too large anyway for large adoption, so we'll collectively decide that for most use cases smart contracts are useful only with a "social" mechanism for overriding them, contrary to the current "code is law" policy of Ethereum.
