“My hypothesis for why smart contracts haven’t entered the mainstream is that the architecture hasn’t been flexible enough to deal with the complexity of real-world use cases. “
At this point, you gotta know it’s a blockchain propagandist writing this. He thinks low adoption is only because they’re new or not flexible? Here’s alternative explanations:
The huge bandwagons of financial opportunity that are cash, plastic, checks, ACH, and other stuff in existing banking system. Consumers and businesses use them to pay for stuff. Their risks are well-understood. So, most ventures default on sending or receiving payment with the ways the other parties send or receive payment. Kinda obvious. ;)
On the contract side, our legal system has refined its ways of doing that for over a century. Any lawyer can understand the basics of contract law. There’s also free advice from groups like Nolo. Case law hints at likely interpretations. Most ways to do fraud in a contract are easy to spot for a non-lawyer with the rest easy to spot for a lawyer. The creation of contracts for common situations can even be automated. The agreements can be sent cheaply through email and web pages. The easiest, safest form of contract is currently done in legal system. A person starting a venture will already be signing agreements. Natural to go with what works with well-understood risks.
The cryptocurrencies and smart contract organizations keep getting hit with massive frauds on top of unstable value.
The people pushing cryptocurrencies or smart contracts first have to convince a huge pile of people their opportunity/risk tradeoff is better than defaults in 1 and 2. They also need to get 3 down to the risk of 1 and 2 in common case. Then, they have to address stuff like flexibility. I mean, they can go ahead building what will be necessary. It’s not the root cause of no adoption, though.
“This is what eventually became Interledger, the open protocol for sending payments across different ledgers.”
Interledger was one of the only things I liked in this space. From what I read, you could use it with the existing financial system and new schemes. Good idea.
“ written in any programming language securely with hardware-enforced virtualization. And the timing couldn’t be better. “
The timing really couldn’t be better: the rising number of attacks on hardware make the hardware-enforced virtualization a bit less convincing in what security it offers. I’m not sure how much it will impact their use case. I’m doubling down on one of my old recommendations to use the simplest CPU’s you can with a load balancer in front of them. They could start with simpler ARM’s running something like seL4 or Tox depending on what it can handle. If going from there, classic trick was another PC, card computer, or something in front of trusted one that accepted TCP/IP/whatever, checked incoming data, converted it to simpler form, and passed that onto trusted box. One can use something like LANGSEC tooling for simpler form. Takes networking stack out of TCB on trusted platform on top of reducing traffic and interrupts.
“My hypothesis for why smart contracts haven’t entered the mainstream is that the architecture hasn’t been flexible enough to deal with the complexity of real-world use cases. “
At this point, you gotta know it’s a blockchain propagandist writing this. He thinks low adoption is only because they’re new or not flexible? Here’s alternative explanations:
The huge bandwagons of financial opportunity that are cash, plastic, checks, ACH, and other stuff in existing banking system. Consumers and businesses use them to pay for stuff. Their risks are well-understood. So, most ventures default on sending or receiving payment with the ways the other parties send or receive payment. Kinda obvious. ;)
On the contract side, our legal system has refined its ways of doing that for over a century. Any lawyer can understand the basics of contract law. There’s also free advice from groups like Nolo. Case law hints at likely interpretations. Most ways to do fraud in a contract are easy to spot for a non-lawyer with the rest easy to spot for a lawyer. The creation of contracts for common situations can even be automated. The agreements can be sent cheaply through email and web pages. The easiest, safest form of contract is currently done in legal system. A person starting a venture will already be signing agreements. Natural to go with what works with well-understood risks.
The cryptocurrencies and smart contract organizations keep getting hit with massive frauds on top of unstable value.
The people pushing cryptocurrencies or smart contracts first have to convince a huge pile of people their opportunity/risk tradeoff is better than defaults in 1 and 2. They also need to get 3 down to the risk of 1 and 2 in common case. Then, they have to address stuff like flexibility. I mean, they can go ahead building what will be necessary. It’s not the root cause of no adoption, though.
“This is what eventually became Interledger, the open protocol for sending payments across different ledgers.”
Interledger was one of the only things I liked in this space. From what I read, you could use it with the existing financial system and new schemes. Good idea.
“ written in any programming language securely with hardware-enforced virtualization. And the timing couldn’t be better. “
The timing really couldn’t be better: the rising number of attacks on hardware make the hardware-enforced virtualization a bit less convincing in what security it offers. I’m not sure how much it will impact their use case. I’m doubling down on one of my old recommendations to use the simplest CPU’s you can with a load balancer in front of them. They could start with simpler ARM’s running something like seL4 or Tox depending on what it can handle. If going from there, classic trick was another PC, card computer, or something in front of trusted one that accepted TCP/IP/whatever, checked incoming data, converted it to simpler form, and passed that onto trusted box. One can use something like LANGSEC tooling for simpler form. Takes networking stack out of TCB on trusted platform on top of reducing traffic and interrupts.