Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

by David Gerard

There are five groups of people who want smart contracts: Computer programmers who don’t have an aptitude for social or legal conventions, but do have an aptitude for programming, so they’d like social and legal conventions to work a bit more like that. Anarcho-capitalists who want to replace the government with a small DOS batch file. (Particularly ones who are also in the first group.) Businesses who want to automate away dealing with customers, but still take their money. People selling you flim-flam with a thin veneer of technology on top, who have, as we’ve noted, found rich pickings in smart contracts for ICOs. Innovative entrepreneurs who have come into conflict with the traditional legal system previously, and would like something deterministic enough that they can take your money and escape through the cracks. (See also group 4.)

Even Vitalik Buterin has acknowledged that for smart contracts to work as advertised, we would need to create a human-equivalent artificial intelligence to understand what people meant the contract to do334

You can replace the term “distributed ledgers” with “shared Excel sheets” in about 90 percent of talk about blockchain and finance. – Tracy Alloway363

IBM’s promotional e-book Making Blockchain Ready for Business366 is a good example. It sells vague and implied future potential – “discover what new business models could emerge if trust & manual processes are eliminated”; “how might a faster, more secure, standardized, and operationally efficient transaction model create new opportunities for your business?” Almost every solid-looking “is” statement concerning blockchains – “an enterprise-class, cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers that can transform the way business transactions are conducted globally”; “highly secure blockchain services and frameworks that address regulatory compliance across financial services, government, and healthcare” – is really a “might” or “could”; no blockchain has all the claimed abilities in the present day, and certainly not Hyperledger, the basis of IBM Blockchain.

A sure tell of a reality-free writeup, completely detached from earthly considerations, is when a writer talks about “Blockchain”, capital B, no “the”.367 You should try mentally replacing the word “Blockchain” with “Cloud” and see if the article seems eerily familiar.