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by habinero 485 days ago
> People can only act as themselves, they can't log into the database and corrupt all the data in a table, so there is no need to recover from massive systemic corruption

I don't understand why you think this is so critical? This is a solved problem - just have backups and basic security. If it's really critical, there's a lot of ways to log changes. It's not a big deal.

> Business rules of smart contracts are enforced, and you know that the state transitions happen exactly as they should

Ok, but we have that already. They're called regular contracts. If they have bugs or unexpected problems or someone doesn't follow through, you can get the state to make them.

> In an auction, the highest bidder is the one who actually wins, it can't be hacked

And how often is this a problem, exactly? The article says it happens maybe once every five or six years.

> 2-5

We have all of this already. Banks, HR software, escrow, reserves. It works fine.

You want the ability to unwind a contract or a transaction if something goes wrong. In fact, the contracts are only really used if things go wrong. Most of the time, the parties just follow the contact voluntarily.

1 comments

To add on: if someone's "irreversible" crypto transaction goes awry, do people really think they're not going to go to court and/or that courts won't do exactly what courts do in every other case of fraud?

"Your honor, the smart contract was clear as day: this fraud was totally above board" is not going to work. I promise.