Matt Rice wrote: > It's smart contracts which is giving Ethereum a major edge over bitcoin. > So much so that people are overlooking all of the current warts.
“Smart contracts” are a concept that only computer nerds could come up with. People who deal with actual contracts in the real world (lawyers) aren't enthusiastic about the idea, because they know that contracts – like software code – tend to contain bugs that only show up “in production”. “Smart contracts”, unlike real-world contracts, make these bugs essentially unfixable (and the language used to write contracts on Ethereum seems to be particular prone to bugs, because it looks a lot like JavaScript but is different enough from JavaScript to contain loads of traps for JavaScript programmers). It will be interesting to see how the first lawsuits over “smart contracts” turn out. In the meantime, smart contracts seem like a pretty dumb idea. I certainly wouldn't trust my money to one, thank you very much indeed. As far as Ethereum goes, the fact that a “smart contract” on Ethereum can apparently be annulled retroactively – something that according to the hype shouldn't be possible at all – if only it turns out that the people in charge of Ethereum don't like it and/or stand to lose money (see “The DAO”) should give one cause for concern. Anselm -- Anselm Lingnau · ans...@tuxcademy.org · https://www.tuxcademy.org Freie Schulungsmaterialien für Linux und Open-Source-Software Free Training Materials for Linux and Open-Source Software _______________________________________________ lpi-examdev mailing list lpi-examdev@lpi.org http://list.lpi.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
