Nick Szabo  🔑

The potential of a Turing-complete blockchain: CFDs, derivatives, rule-based pools of money, trust-minimized intermediation of cash flows, tons of things.https://twitter.com/paralleldown/status/1031948909785096192 …

As a programmer, it intuitively seems to me that blockchains primary function is to be a source of trustless truth. Turing-complete systems can then anchor on data in blockchains for this, not having to be become blockchains in themselves.

Sometimes -- probably many many times, no reason to think this will be less common than when Turing completeness is needed in normal programming -- you need a Turing-complete program to be that trust-minimized truth, anything less can corrupt the computation in undesirable ways.

There is data and then there are programs or algorithms, that work on the data for new output. The turing-complete algorithms themselves can be verified ad-hoc, there is no need to put them in a blockchain.

The algorithms are typically business logic and iterations over dynamic sets in polynomial time, and their verification code is typically at least as complicated as the original algorithm. So no there is no general win from verifying instead of just running them.