> A smart contract allows decentralised organisations to function, with democratic voting and transparency.

A smart contract is neither smart, nor a contract. It's a program, written in an esoteric language, and running in the world's most inefficient VM.

It's so bad and overcomplicated that "smart contract" authors themselves routinely make mistakes in code equivalent to the most basic of actual contracts. And since there's no avenue of recourse, these mistakes are irreversible.

"Smart contracts" also require the user to pay for any meaningful action.

As for "transparency", there's no transparency when something is enforced by code very few can read and understand (compared to actual contracts that can be read by humans).

As for "democracy", there's nothing democratic about "who has the most money has the most votes".

> Traditional contracts, businesses, and even countries fail all the time, but we haven't give up on them as concepts

Because we have thousands of years of history teaching us how to deal with those, and guess what, we've come up with multiple things like:

- regulations

- contract clauses dealing with failure

- avenues of recourse

- various methods of enforcement

Crypto bros pretend that these things are unnecessary, but then immediately turn to courts to sue scammers, or cry in cryptoforums when a "smart contract" bug wipes their wallets out.

Sorry, but you sound like tech skeptics in every generation ever, saying “the Dewey Decimal system works perfectly well, why do we need computers just to find a book”? (Yes, I have heard this exact objection raised by radio hosts to early computer pioneers who tried to explain why computers will become useful for regular people.)

Email became useful and replaced the post office

Web 1.0 became useful and replaced TV, radio, magazines

Web 2.0 became useful and allowed people to communicate but still hasn’t been truly decentralized

What makes you think that Web3 replacing trusted gatekeepers is not useful? You think “just trust me” is the best system we can possibly have for writing code that does some business logic?

For me it’s simple: if there is something that’s very valuable (some NFT, some role, some election, some large balance of USDT) then I prefer that my customers custody their own keys and deal with that themselves. Less liability for me. Rather than having a guy with keys to the database log in and potentially change the result of an election, and having to track down logs and deal with lawsuits etc. I just want smart contracts to deal with it, and each participant can only take the actions they are allowed to take - no exceptions. No central point of failure for security. No need for audits OF TRANSACTIONSby auditors who can also be corrupted.

How do we make sure that smart contracts are correct? Audits, battle testing and with Cardano we even have provable correctness. UniSwap likely has no exploitable bugs, for instance, or they would have been found. Every instance of UniSwap AMMs comes out of the same factory. THE END RESULT is far more reliable than any code that runs on only one machine by a “trust me” corp.

Sorry buddy, you can shill your centralized “trust me” all you want but you sound like Peter Schiff and his gold. You just don’t get it.

1. No liability for transactions, only for code

2. Open source infrastructure

3. No central entities who can corrupt the system in unlimited ways

4. People can only do what is allowed, no matter what

5. Code operates regardless of whether the central entity is around in 20-30 years

6. Different incentives (selling tokens is far more user-friendly than selling shares to a parasitic investor class that will cause you to extract rents forever and introduce dark patterns and lockin at the expense of the public).

7. Interoperability — on-chain data can be used for other smart contracts and any websites can read the data.

8. Global interoperability, no need to rely on a patchwork of currencies and money transmission legs and banks that Stripe takes care of for you. USDC is an ERC20 token and you write code, not connecting to a billion little APIs. Similarly to HTTP letting you go worldwide vs what Twilio had to do for you, or negotiating syndication by radio stations.

Of course I think blockchain is a first-gen technology but it enables this and a lot more !

Here's the problem: people don't care about even one of the eight things you listed there. None of these things matter to the common person, and they certainly don't matter to the preeminent payment infrastructure.

Nobody here is shilling for centralized services, most of us are veterans of decentralized tech giving you warnings. Many projects have encountered these same issues, and have died because they have no purpose. Blockchains are little more than nerd porn, the average banker isn't going to look a trustless infrastructure and all of the sudden "get it". That's one of many insurmountable problems that cryptocurrency faces, and it has been successfully blocking adoption of it in the real world for more than 10 years. You can't simply shrug off decades of decentralized failure without applying the lessons you learned from watching them fall. Unfortunately, every cryptocurrency I've found is tone-deaf to these concerns, and prefers to replace genuine conversation with marketing crap.

The only concrete use case you've offered “is unlikely to deliver substantial gains to the industry when compared to alternatives” such as shared databases, which don't require any costly consensus algorithm.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101298