Why I stopped believing in the concept of smart contracts

Let’s continue the discussion in a couple of years, when we have some evidence …

XML did not fade away! XML is important because of the XML stack : XML/Schema/XSLT and has 0 alternatives AFAIK

again, your are conflating things !

we have plenty of evidence now, why wait !?

Because in the future we will see if smart contracts really have “taken control” .

Why so? “world computer”, I caught that at Ethereum, and Ethereum is basically about smart contracts, isn’t it? So, while Cardano did not take over the technical solution of Ethereum, Cardano did for sure keep a vision that is similar to Ethereum to some degree (not the same of course!)

This is my personal opinion: For many years I took XML as the way to go. Best ever! But today i am sick of it. Sick of seeing brackets <>. It will pass away, fortunately. I no longer love it. And I am not the only one! I pity all the people forced to work with the SOAP standard in companies. SOAP is exactly based on this elderly stack: XML and its schemas. And it sucks.

smart contract != world computer

OK! Show me the alternative!
You really don’t get it, it is not the <> or SOAP. It is the stack that makes XML powerful and without any competition !!!

If anything, the killer feature of smart contracts is not ‘world computer’ ala SONM, but the DAO!
Running decentralized autonomous companies on the Internet.

Alternatives to XML depend on the problem that you are trying to solve. What I am just trying to say is: In the past XML promised to solve a wide wide range of problems. Inter node communication was just one of them, but only one of many. Why is the protocol used by blockchain applications NOT based on XML? Because it has turned out over the years, that XML is just not suited for that kind of problems. Today, you do not even get the idea to use it in such a situation. The same applies to many other situations.

And here, once again is my analogy: What does make you sure that in ten years, the smart contracts hype did not end the way the XML hype ended, in a disappointment.

Of course, this is not all or nothing. There will always be XML and I am also sure that there will always be some sort of smart contracts. But I am not sure if they will live up to what people think they potentially can today. To me, they “smell” like a potential disappointment.

OK, I agree with you about “the DAO”. But can you image “the DAO” without smart contracts? I think that could be possible …

I can imagine it without ‘world computer’ but not without smart-contracts, not really, what alternative ?

They might, it might prevent some really stupid bugs, at the same time XML nor any other plain text format is optimal for bandwidth and storage! It actually makes more sense for smart contract based chains!

Exactly, the opposite, it is still used! In fact many new N00Bs banging on json and I dont what else vaporware simply DID not understand XML and thus they repeat mistakes that XML easily solves ! Now those devs are victim of the hype :smiley: of the hype go away from XML is verbous and I dont know what else non-sense!

Here is my prediction of the future of the Cardano project, and it is not completely pesimistic:

Cardano wil not succeed in setting up the defacto standard for “the DAO”. However, because of it’s technical excellence, it will succeed in solving many unsolved problems and it will be without alternative in this. There will be a Cardano blockchain that scales well, is secure and no energy waste. There will be more than one crypto currency on this blockchain. There might be some sort of Cardano smart contract, but this will disappear into oblivion. There will be other ways of writing DAO’s, not based on smart contracts. These ways will be domain specific and I cannot tell you how they will look like, because I honestly, really cannot predict the future :grinning::grinning:

The EVM is the world computer in Ethereum, isn’t it? How do you do smart contracts without some sort of “virtual machine” ?

ahh in that respect, yes, when you say computer I assume something you can program and contracts are already programmed for you!

Sweet Lordy McLordy. Yes, if you want code execution you are going to need a VM. Ethereum has one, EOS & Cardano will have one. Now clean yourself up, go back to your wife, stop taking drugs and pull yourself together. Remember, you are a white man.

not nice !

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I did not stop thinking about this, and still I am sure that
it is worth while considering the pros and cons int this topic.

Smart contracts in Cardano seem to be still quite far away in the road
map, but many people in the whole world are working on this (and many
companies), so I am sure: This is a race!

I see two sides: First of all, any conventional contract could be
registered very easily in almost any blockchain, just by taking the
hash number of a scan. Such a contract would not be smart in any way,
but it could be verified and it could also be digitally signed by all
involved parties. This is simple and it is already »in place«.

But secondly, smart contracts would be a different thing: They would
of course go far beyond simple registration.

What makes you sure that
the world will »wait« for Cardano’s smart contracts to become
reality? And what makes you sure that eventuell these future smart
contracts will really change the world as expected? They would have to
convince many people’s simple minds. Also mine!