blockchain chronicles # 11 — Are the smart contracts reliable? And the unstructured identity for digital life
Smart contracts are among the most interesting features of blockchain technology.
Nick Szabo, who anticipated the concept in 1994, gave the example of a vending machine, which embed a “contract” in its software / hardware: you give me a coin and I give you a coffee (or a tea...). I always found it fun.
But perhaps the definition is not appropriate. Andrew Glidden believes that
In reality, “smart contracts” aren’t contracts. Rather, they’re a particular mechanism of enforcement for the contract that exists in the mind. In other words, the existence of a PET (Programmatically Executed Transactions) is evidence of a contract.
However, beyond the definitions, they remain instruments on which we are experimenting a lot. But do they work?
A recently published study analyzed more than 970,000 smart contracts on Ethereum: more than 34,000 (about 3.5%) were labeled as “unreliable” because there were blockchain state that violate the terms of the contract or prevent it from execution.
They are few? Too many? Perhaps it would be necessary to compare the data with statistics on the lawsuits related to contracts disregarded …
Italian magazine “Le Scienze” this month dedicates a dossier to cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Among the articles I found particularly interesting that of Natalie Smolensky, cultural anthropologist and director of business development of Learning Machine. She writes about trust and personal identity and how these two elements can be “transformed” by the use of blockchain technology. The identity, for example, does not necessarily have to be completely surrendered ithowut any limit to obtain access to digital and non-digital services. Often some fragments are enough to prove certain aspects of our identity, such as the age of majority or the achievement of a certain type of degree.
Another article that takes a look and a key paradox is this:
The public does not accept blockchains without easy-to-use applications, but often the ease is obtained with a centralization that reproduces the kind of control that the blockchain intended to avoid.
An example? The wallets.
