<story><title>Many Smart Contract Use Cases Are Impossible (2016)</title><url>https://www.coindesk.com/three-smart-contract-misconceptions/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>This article outlines the basic problem. If you want smart contracts that do anything off chain, there have to be connections to trusted services that provide information and take actions.  If you have trusted services available, you may not need a blockchain.&lt;p&gt;The article points out that you can&amp;#x27;t construct an ordinary loan on chain, because you have no way to enforce paying it back short of tying up the loaned funds tor the duration of the loan. Useful credit fundamentally requires some way of making debtors pay up later.  It&amp;#x27;s possible to construct various speculative financial products entirely on chain, and that&amp;#x27;s been done, but it&amp;#x27;s mostly useful for gambling, broadly defined.</text></comment>
<story><title>Many Smart Contract Use Cases Are Impossible (2016)</title><url>https://www.coindesk.com/three-smart-contract-misconceptions/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>libertymcateer</author><text>I have been saying this for quite sometime on this forum - contracts have to deal with ambiguous circumstances and expressly contemplate being resolved in courts. Ambiguity of contracts is a &lt;i&gt;feature&lt;/i&gt;, not a bug, as it is in the interest of &lt;i&gt;both&lt;/i&gt; parties to be able to argue about certain unanticipated events when they occur.&lt;p&gt;Quoting my own comments from a while back:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The vast majority of contracts do not have syntactically testable conditions. They just don&amp;#x27;t. Whether the conditions in a contract have been met is very often a matter of huge debate - this is what &amp;quot;law suits&amp;quot; are about. Unless you can create a condition that is testable by code, you cannot have a contract that self-enforces with the block chain. The conditions set forth in contracts are extremely complex and reasonable people can differ. I cannot imagine how you would have a contract be triggered on the insolvency of a privately held corporation - good luck defining insolvency and good luck getting access to the underlying books. Copyright infringement is also a preposterous idea - the amount of semantic judgment that must be made to determine if a work is infringing is enormous. Only the very simplest of conditions - comparing numbers, checking the time, can be reliably automated, and if you are getting a lawyer to write your contracts, odds are there is substantially more complexity in the agreements than this, which is why you hired the lawyer in the first place. In addition, a fair portion of contracts that can actually be set up to work this already are - and the blockchain is not necessary. They are things like credit cards and they work pretty good without the blockchain.</text></comment>