[jollybean]

It's worse than that.

Contracts are not code.

It's a complete misunderstanding to posit them as such.

Contracts depend first and foremost upon the legal regime in which they are valid. Every jurisdiction has rules, precedence, language means specific things.

There is quite a bit of variability in this stuff, which is why we have lawyers. And Judges.

Putting a contract into a crypto ... is basically pointless.

There's possibly more transparency, akin to publishing contracts on the web or something like that.

And of course, there is a 'narrow range of agreement possibilities' that could take place on crypto contracts, for example, things like stock options etc..

But generally speaking, even the contract cryptos are 'technologies looking for application'.

We don't want to 'nay say' new, dreamy ideas, but these new dreamy ideas, combined with a bit of hubris, arrogance, greed, lack of self awareness can create problems.

[crooked-v]

The most obvious example for 'contracts are not code': the most airtight contract in the world can get quickly voided in court if it turns out one of the parties was actually a minor at the time of signing, even if they hid that fact or didn't actually know it.

[fogihujy]

This. The foremost example being EULA's and warranties in countries where the law gives consumers far more rights than the copy/paste legalese texts that everyone accepts at installation/purchase.

[TeMPOraL]

> Contracts depend first and foremost upon the legal regime in which they are valid. Every jurisdiction has rules, precedence, language means specific things.

One could counter that no code ever stands alone, but is executed in terms of some runtime.

But I think I can bolster your point with two further thoughts:

1. Contracts are not meant to be code. The process of drafting a contract helps people arrive at a common understanding - a shared consensus, a "meeting of the minds" - and once signed, it then documents that understanding along with relevant context sufficient for third parties to be able to recreate that common understanding.

The contract is not executable - it, at best, is a declarative description of some of the outcomes. The actual execution is handled independently by the parties that entered the contract. The contract only exists so that common understanding can be preserved through time and shared with other people - whether it's because some party forgot the details, or it needs to be modified, or third parties (like lawyers, judges or arbitrators) need to be involved in dispute resolution.

2. To the extent a contract contains anything resembling executable code - say, the aforementioned declarative descriptions of outcomes, or imperative descriptions of specific behavior, or some attachments with deliverable specifications, etc. - these are all expressed in a very high-level programming language, i.e. natural language. This "code" is ultimately "executed" by sapient human beings. In other words, the programming language and runtime in questions are GAI-complete: that is, coding them up from scratch, e.g. to enable "smart" contracts to be comparable in utility to regular ones, would be equivalent to creating a human-level general-purpose artificial intelligence. We're not anywhere close to achieve that, thus by definition, "smart" contracts are too dumb to make sense when we can use the normal ones.