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The three most common smart contract misconceptions…
As the developers of a popular Blockchain platform, Multichain we sometimes get asked whether Ethereum-like smart contracts are on our roadmap. The answer I always give is: “No, or at least not yet.” But in the hype-filled world of Blockchains, smart contracts are all the rage, so why ever not? Well… the problem is, while we now know of three strong use cases for permissioned Bitcoin-style Blockchains (provenance, inter-company records and lightweight finance), we’re yet to find the equivalent for Ethereum-style smart contracts.
It’s not that people lack ideas of what they want smart contracts to do. Rather, it’s that so many of these ideas are simply impossible. You see, when smart people hear the term “smart contracts”, their imaginations tend to run wild. They conjure up dreams of autonomous intelligent software, going off into the world, taking its data along for the ride.
Unfortunately the reality of smart contracts is far more mundane than all that:
A smart contract is a piece of code which is stored on an Blockchain, triggered by Blockchain transactions, and which reads and writes data in that Blockchain’s database.
That’s it. Really.
A smart contract is just a fancy name for code which runs on a Blockchain, and interacts with that Blockchain’s state. And what is code? It’s Pascal, it’s Python, it’s PHP. It’s Java, it’s Fortran, it’s C++.If we’re talking databases, it’s stored procedures written in an extension of SQL. All of these languages are fundamentally equivalent, solving the same sorts of problems in the same sorts of ways. Of course, each has its strengths and weaknesses – you’d be crazy to build a website in C or compress HD video in Ruby. But in principle at least, you could if you wanted to. You’d just pay a heavy price […]
