Darryle Hawes

Thanks Mark, this is a great conversation and I appreciate the back and forth. Respectfully, dreams of crypto’s promise have long since faded and it’s time to move on (and it’s not “still the early days”). Blockchain’s technological DNA is laden with sluggishness, clunkiness, costliness, inefficiencies, security issues and a slew of other problems, which renders blockchain not just difficult to scale but also challenging to use. Concerned.tech Hence, blockchain faces extraordinary obstacles to evolving into the magical financial and societal panacea that its promoters have been promising for over 15 years. It may be possible for some trusted, well governed third party to operate a blockchain as an “enterprise,“ “centralized” or “permissioned” blockchain, but why? All that creates is a very poor, slow, difficult to manage database. Your experience with “smart contracts” is an exception. To me, blockchain’s hype relating to smart contracts is seriously flawed. First off, the problem with smart contracts is that they are neither “smart” nor “contracts.” Smart contracts are more akin to self-executing purchase orders, which can be written by anyone to do anything, including to steal, delete, purloin and pilfer. This is precisely what US DOJ alleges a company called Forsage’s founders did in yet another notorious DeFi/blockchain deception. By writing smart contracts that not only automatically orchestrated a horrendous fraud but also moved investor funds wherever the founders wanted, DOJ alleges that Forsage’s founders were able to effortlessly steal $340M from their investors. There exists no intelligence, trust or privity in smart contracts, just code, which is not only often flawed and rife with error and vulnerabilities but can also be easily manipulated to do whatever the coders want. Second, financial intermediaries like banks, brokerages, credit card companies, financial apps, etc. play a critical beneficial role for people. They offer redress and relief when there is fraud, negligence or even a mere mistake. They allow for reversal, remedy and recourse. They are policed by sophisticated regulatory oversight and intricate consumer protections such as mandatory auditing, inspections, record-keeping, net capital requirements, licensure of individuals and much more. On the other hand, “code” is perilous and replete with incessant bugs, inestimable fork possibilities and cybersecurity and privacy vulnerabilities galore, with infinite oportunities for deceit, double-dealing and error. Code does not allow for settling conflicts or managing mistakes. In fact, code is comprised solely of what coders want, which can too easily leave customers penniless, helpless and financially decimated. Professor Kelvin Lowe sums up the problems with smart contracts neatly in a recent article: “At its heart, smart contracts are simply clever marketing for automation. . . . Even first-year law students quickly become acquainted with the difficulties of drafting complex agreements in natural languages. The challenges of doing so in code – where there is no arbiter such as a court to either add lines of code that go without saying (implied terms in legal contracts), or reinterpret code that must have gone awry (interpretation of legal contracts) – are orders of magnitude higher. It is thus unsurprising to see hackers target all manner of smart contracts in the cryptoverse – DAOs, bridges, etc– whether these are legal contracts or not. Worse yet, much like the amber in Jurassic Park, blockchain immutability preserves bugs in smart contracts for all and sundry to exploit for as long as the smart contract is live.” Respectfully, this is why blockchain can never triumph over traditional databases and why there is no crypto–killer app. Because “code is law” is not just an exploitive groupthink catchphrase and rickety, unsound ethos, it’s also wildly ineffectual.