Chris DeRose is a journalist, software developer, bi tcoin evangelist, public speaker and community director of the Counterparty Foundation.
In this feature, DeRose discusses blockchain-based smart contracts, and why he believes the cost-benefits of this application of the technology are not widely understood. Lost in our ‘pie-in-the-sky’ projections on the future of blockchains is the most important concern anyone should have on the technology: What are the opportunity costs? Nowhere is that more pronounced in the current debates then in the case of the "smart contract".
While I believe that smart contracts will provide a number of efficiencies in our blockchain future, there’s one category of smart contracts that I’m most skeptical of – that of the recently popular "Turing complete" smart contract.
All smart contract platforms in use today fall into roughly two broad categories that are divided along the lines of whether the platform is or isn’t " Turing complete ." So what does this feature enable? Turing completeness is a property of any programming language that allows a computer to simulate anything that our universe contains.
If a language is Turing complete, it can provide all of the logic we’ve grown accustomed to in our computers. Turing completeness enables a computer to ‘loop’ and process its own output in iteratively complex terms. This property is absent in nearly all public blockchains. But with the modern advent of Ethereum , this feature is now available to aspiring blockchain coders.
Though this feature is the innovation that Ethereum has advertised as its competitive advantage, it’s a trivial switch to flip ‘on’. So, why wasn’t this feature included in earlier blockchains?
Bitcoin implemented the world’s first smart contract system, and intentionally switched this feature ‘off’. Bitcoin supports a number of simple contract types ranging from "multisig", (the transfer of value given approval by […]
