Dr Gideon Greenspan is the founder and CEO of Coin Sciences, the company behind the MultiChain platform for private blockchains.
In this opinion piece, Greenspan discusses blockchain-enabled smart contracts and why this application of the technology may be suffering from inflated expectations. As the developer of a popular blockchain platform, I sometimes gets asked whether Ethereum-like smart contracts are on the MultiChain roadmap. The answer I always give is always: ‘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, company recordkeeping and lightweight finance), we’ve yet to find the equivalent for Ethereum smart contracts.
It’s not that people don’t understand what they want smart contracts to do. Rather, it’s that so many of these ideas are simply impossible. 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 data along for the ride. Unfortunately, the reality of smart contracts is more mundane.
A smart contract is a piece of code that 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 that runs on a blockchain, and interacts with that blockchain’s state. And what is the 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 […]
