Smart contracts are a pile of money exposed directly to the internet with no firewall in the way. And no recourse when things inevitably go pear shaped. They’re somewhere between self funding bug bounties and just straight up honeypots. It’s interesting the folks with piholes and boobie trapped routers are the first to get behind this idea.
> Smart contracts are a pile of money exposed directly to the internet with no firewall in the way. And no recourse when things inevitably go pear shaped.
When you say it like that, it sounds like you're poking fun at the stupidity of defi and cryptocurrencies in general.
But what if there were public contracts, with billions of dollars locked in them, with no firewalls, essentially a huge self funded bug bounty, widely publicized, running for literally years, and it... just works as intended?
You probably still wouldn't like it because it doesn't fit your mental model of how security should work.
But if years go by and any of it keeps working despite the massive bug bounties, people will build on the stuff that works. 90% of smart contracts can fail, as long as knowledge is gained and confidence goes up in the 10% that are left. The contracts are composable, so if something works, you can reuse it in a trusted way. After all, anything with billion dollar bounties that survived this long must be pretty strong.
The contracts provide a feature that you can't get anywhere else: trustless decentralized computing. The "pile of money exposed directly to the internet" is actually a feature that tests trust.
It might not seem like a big deal to you, but for banks or funds or nations or anyone with very large sums of money, the ability to withdraw/transfer/borrow/lend with no possible downtime or fraud is extremely appealing.
With all the billions being thrown at this problem, I don't see how smart contracts could fail.
> when things inevitably go pear shaped
If you really believe all of these contracts will inevitably go pear shaped, are the billions not enough incentive for you to go find the bugs yourself?
> It’s interesting the folks with piholes and boobie trapped routers are the first to get behind this idea.
Yes, these people are called "early adopters". They're excited by new technologies, even when they involve risk. You should try it sometime.
That's a means, not an end, and has no intrinsic value. Any value it has is extrinsic - derived from its applications. Of which there are none that are better handled that way.
TCP/IP has no intrinsic value either. What's built on it has value.
> ...withdraw/transfer/borrow/lend with no possible downtime or fraud is extremely appealing.
Really? No possibility of fraud? Are you sure? Might want to click through the link at the top of the page. Didn't half of DeFi go down with AWS? Didn't Solana get DDOSd and also have to get rebooted recently? Can't you nuke any NFT on OpenSea from orbit by filing a DMCA complaint with Google? I suggest this position is aspirational... at best.
> If you really believe all of these contracts will inevitably go pear shaped, are the billions not enough incentive for you to go find the bugs yourself?
That's not my area of expertise, but there are plenty of folks for whom it is. I trust this task is in good hands already.
> Yes, these people are called "early adopters". They're excited by new technologies, even when they involve risk. You should try it sometime.
I do, when those new technologies have value. I've been daily-driving Rust since 2015. I've been following crypto since 2016, I've used a number of chains a number of times. I heated my condo mining ETH for a while on a 3090. Closed out the position via dex. It's pretty dang pointless. Not everything new is good.
