If you are not a programmer, you will require a “great expense” of a programmer to write it for you (with no way for you to verify it).
After you have your “smart contract” you have no way to enforce it if the other party doesn’t abide by it.
The “great expense” of lawyers and courts provide a host of features smart contracts can never even imagine providing:
- identity validation (that the signatories are who they say they are)
- actual validation of terms (that they are not mutually exclusive, that they are reasonable, that they benefit the parties etc.)
- enforcement of the contract
There are many other things: like verifying that a party can actually pay for goods/services, that co-signatories are notified and/or agree to the contract, that goods/services are as described in the contract etc. etc. etc.
The point would be that smart contract make sense if and only if they can be meaningfully deployed inside a single platform. I agree that they make little sense for physical systems.
But something along the lines "I will pay you X bags if you send me a signed pdf with a specific hash" makes total sense.
They strongly should not be used for anything that would need a lawyer. That would just be a ticking bomb.
> But something along the lines "I will pay you X bags if you send me a signed pdf with a specific hash" makes total sense.
How would it make any sense? Who is there to enforce that I will actually send you _X_ bags? That I will send you X _bags_? Who is there to verify that contract for a non-programmer?
There are literally no use cases for smart contracts because they will always need either a complete trust between the parties or a third-party arbiter for all the things that lawyers and notaries and banks already exist.
If you are not a programmer, you will require a “great expense” of a programmer to write it for you (with no way for you to verify it).
After you have your “smart contract” you have no way to enforce it if the other party doesn’t abide by it.
The “great expense” of lawyers and courts provide a host of features smart contracts can never even imagine providing:
- identity validation (that the signatories are who they say they are)
- actual validation of terms (that they are not mutually exclusive, that they are reasonable, that they benefit the parties etc.)
- enforcement of the contract
There are many other things: like verifying that a party can actually pay for goods/services, that co-signatories are notified and/or agree to the contract, that goods/services are as described in the contract etc. etc. etc.