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0 pointstornato73y ago0 comments

Bitcoin has been around 13 years, but smart contracts only 7, and DeFi only around 4 years. Institutional-quality MPC wallets have been around less than two years.

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gregjor3y ago

Smart contracts are called triggers and automated workflows in other contexts. They have been around for decades. The crypto-world innovation, if you can call it that, is removing the possibility of undoing or reversing the action, and the misguided idea that programmers can write code that works reliably all the time, otherwise known as hubris.

DeFi by other names dates from prehistory.

tornato7OP3y ago

Yes, Vitalik has proposed calling smart contracts “persistent scripts” instead. It’s the trustless execution on-chain that makes them unique to other programs.

Whether or not they existed in other forms doesn’t change the argument that they are unique to crypto as of roughly 7 years ago and have made a huge impact on the ecosystem.

gregjor3y ago

A huge impact in terms of discovering bugs and getting hacked, with no recourse. Everything is “unique to crypto” because the “community” reinvents the wheel and gives it a cool-sounding name. Everything has a huge impact because the ecosystem is both volatile and fragile.

How are “persistent scripts” different from any other code? Transient scripts aren’t very useful.

“Trustless” is a meaningless buzzword. Anyone using the script trusts the developer and the people who control the blockchain it runs on. I think the history of Ethereum shows how that works out.

> The Ethereum network forked after an incident in July 2016. At that time, attackers exploited flaws in the smart contract code of a prominent application running on Ethereum called The DAO. In response to community concerns, the Ethereum Foundation implemented a hard fork to roll back all DAO-related transactions and allow the DAO's original contributors to reclaim their funds.

(https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/getting-started/crypto...)

Not so smart, and not so decentralized after all.

I trust my bank and its persistent database triggers and scripts far more than I trust the clown car of amateurs running Etehereum. Pretending that something is innovative doesn’t make it so.

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gregjor3y ago

DeFi by other names dates from prehistory.

tornato7OP3y ago

Yes, Vitalik has proposed calling smart contracts “persistent scripts” instead. It’s the trustless execution on-chain that makes them unique to other programs.

Whether or not they existed in other forms doesn’t change the argument that they are unique to crypto as of roughly 7 years ago and have made a huge impact on the ecosystem.

gregjor3y ago

How are “persistent scripts” different from any other code? Transient scripts aren’t very useful.

“Trustless” is a meaningless buzzword. Anyone using the script trusts the developer and the people who control the blockchain it runs on. I think the history of Ethereum shows how that works out.

(https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/getting-started/crypto...)

Not so smart, and not so decentralized after all.

I trust my bank and its persistent database triggers and scripts far more than I trust the clown car of amateurs running Etehereum. Pretending that something is innovative doesn’t make it so.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse