Nick Szabo  🔑

That take has many problems. 1/almost all biz logic is in P, so that verification is about as expensive as the original computation. 2/in biz logic verification is seldom simpler than the original computation. 3/Turing completeness is largely orthogonal to P vs. NP.

I don’t know if that’s what Greg meant, but from my experience what most people try to do with Ethereum’s “smart contracts” is just adding semantics to multisig. You get the same properties, but get to name the function call. That’s very wasteful, and it’s security theater too

No, multisig is very far from the only thing people do.

Well I wouldn’t and didn’t say “only”, but I think that multisig, together with tokenization, is what most people attempt to do with EVM “smart contracts”. What else?

CFDs, derivatives, rule-based pools of money, trust-minimized intermediation of cash flows, tons of things.

Maybe I’m talking to the wrong people. I wish I knew more folks who are interested in using smart contracts for that kind of thing. Usually I find myself walking clients through why smart contracts might not be the best fit for a dating app

On this particular topic (in contrast to most others crypto-related), people focused on Bitcoin are definitely the wrong people to talk to. But the Ethereum community is very noisy so it is hard to find the many valuable needles in its haystack.

If Turing complete smart contracts could indeed produce value, that still leaves a big question: if it should be on a standalone “Turing complete, decentralize all the things” chain or built on top of a secure, low entropy, immutable sound money (as a sidecchain / other layer)