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That is a fair point; I appear to have overstated the case there. However, at least two things remain to be seen: 1) to what extent the Ethereum foundation's vision of a vast web of concurrent, interacting contracts is feasible under such restrictions, and 2) an actual example of a formally-verified contract (which would, I believe, depend on the platform itself being formally verified as a prerequisite.)

To expand on point 1, given that your technique should be generally applicable, why has it not taken over all the other applications of computing where security and correctness matter? The reason, I believe, is that it is, in practice, infeasible for many of the sort of things that are useful and that we actually want to do.




Right, I wasn't really proposing that people should restrict themselves to 10 proven correct ones. It was mainly meant as an existence proof.

I believe that people have made formally verified (trivial?) contracts (based on the spec of the vm iirc? Not sure), but I don't remember anything about a formally verified contract being used in practice. People definitely are making progress on the formal verification front (building foundations/infrastructure/etc.) but they aren't really there yet. ("There" being, ready for widespread use, and in widespread use)

I don't really understand why people buy into many of these ICOs. I mean, I'm somewhat enthusiastic about "smart contracts", but I don't actually own any cryptocurrency.

I don't mean to say that I think all ICOs are bad, but given the number that are failing, I find it hard to imagine that the people buying into them are doing enough research into them before buying for it to make sense.

Also, I don't understand why people aren't building contracts on top of a contract layer that handles arbitration for reversing fraudulent transactions yet? I thought that would have been built by now.


I appreciate the reality check!

> Also, I don't understand why people aren't building contracts on top of a contract layer that handles arbitration for reversing fraudulent transactions yet? I thought that would have been built by now.

Ittay Eyal and Emin Gün Sirer have suggested at least a partial solution along those lines. I believe there is some opposition from those who consider the inviolability of transactions to be a non-negotiable feature of crypto currencies, as arbitration implies arbitrators, but this might be part of the future of smart contracts.

http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/07/11/decentralized-escap...




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