Editing Dumb contracts (section)

= Bitcoin today =

I think what happened was: people got greedy. They quickly realized that security is quite hard to get right and that the benefits for doing so are quickly lost for a company who can just use the same rhetoric as Bitcoin to claim the same benefits and people will still buy it. It’s depressing that this trick works but its also true: startups have long since tried to “iterate” on security and by the time anyone notices its usually too late.

There’s just isn’t an incentive for companies to try uphold the same high levels of security that Bitcoin introduced - even if a compatible cryptographic protocol exists for their use-case. If we think of Bitcoin as a security model its perhaps one of the hardest to uphold since it not only allows for complete decentralization of resources but its also highly resistant to collusion - all without becoming a closed, proprietary system.

Most smart contracts aren’t like that at all. In fact, most of the current smart contracts are simple representations of real world businesses and IOU-backed derivatives recorded on top of the blockchain. There’s really nothing new about that – the same old flawed trust models are still behind everything we do and you don’t need a blockchain to express that.

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