Cardano SL: No, it doesn’t need smart contracts

In his latest AMA, Charles mentioned he was considering making SL smart contract friendly.

I don’t think that’s a good idea. The whole reason why SL exist in its simple form is to avoid Fuck ups. It’s far better to experiment with CL and leave SL as the basic layer.

I always thought this design choice was simply brilliant and I am a bit disappointed that a fundamental change like this is being considered.

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It’s not about making SL smart contract friendly, it"s about making SL able to run directly simple smart contracts, Marlowe I guess.

really? u sure?

Why do we need smart contracts on SL? it defeats its main purpose, which is to be a dumb layer. There was a lot of wisdom in the original design. I am not saying they have decided yet, but if they do it won’t be the step in the right direction.

I always thought CL was for smart contracts… why contaminate SL with smart contract capability?

Ethereum is a prime example of why settlement layer shouldn’t be mixed with a computational layer. Let’s stick with that, please.

The concept of chimeric ledger has been in the roadmap for SL for some time. Atomic swap contracts to convert from one asset to another could be implemented as native capability - third party developers need not code these smart contracts.

Just a thought - by no means I am arguing for or against it.

I have nothing against natively-supported atomic swap contracts. They are probably needed to implement the two-way peg with sidechains…

My issue is with smart contracts as something of a security risk. They should be treated with caution and certainly not forced upon those who bought into the security of the SL/CL architecture.

The fact that they may choose SL for financial smart contracts sends a bad message about the security of CL.

I have yet to find a good rationale for changing the original design… maybe more details will come out soon, but SL would be terrible for any real world application of financial contracts as it is (designed to be ) slow. Not a layer you want your TPS-hungry financial contracts to reside on.