Nick Szabo  🔑

"turing complete is the wrong tool... what our systems do is verification, not computation. This cognitive error confers no advantage, outside of marketing to people with a fuzzy idea of what smart contracts might be good for...” gmaxwell, 2016 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1427885.msg14601127#msg14601127 …

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.