Finding the Greedy, Prodigal, and Suicidal Contracts at Scale
It seems pretty clear to me that crypto-currencies and blockchain apps, as a technology, are quite unlike anything that have come before it, and fundamentally don&#x27;t integrate well with the wider world of technology (at least right now).<p>An obvious issue is that smart contracts cannot make use of information from the outside world (unless of course, fed from a single centralized party). Perhaps this can one day be worked around with some innovations from game theory, but I have not seen it. This demonstrates a lack of integration with the rest of humankind&#x27;s technology.<p>A smart contract, once published, cannot be amended. Let that sink in for a while. This breaks the most basic assumption people have about software companies: that they can be agile, move fast, push updates, and fix things.<p>As far as I can tell, due to the halting problem, one can never actually prove that a sufficiently complex smart contract will not be explosively broken at some point in the future. (The fix for contracts being explosively broken is a hard fork, which only works if you are explosively broken enough to convince a global majority of the network to go along. Your own token probably isn&#x27;t important enough.)<p>Immutability provides a lot of interesting benefits of course, but let&#x27;s not forget how explosively wrong it can go as well.<p>It all seems like the kind of tech you wouldn&#x27;t trust to a bunch of fast moving startups, many of which now have actual VC&#x27;s invested in their outcomes and will put time pressure on them.<p>It seems most of the HN crowd is well aware of this stuff. But I think it bears repeating, because man, this fishy odor is intense.