It is a fragile, brittle system that is highly likely to fail, you only need to look here to see why. [0]
This absolute statement is asserting that ALL smart contracts don't work. There is overwhelming evidence of some smart contracts working just fine, and of course a lot of smart contracts also have problems. It is wild to just drop all of the nuance of such a complicated issue. What new technology has been flawless without any failures along the way?
They are just pieces of code in esoteric programming languages running on world's slowest VMs. They encode primitive trivial rulesets and are still so complex that their own authors fail to see trivial errors even after multiple audits.
An actual real world contract such as buying or selling property (which I've done several times now) would be a beast of such byzantine proportions that it would take until the heat death of the universe to write and audit it. And it would still be unenforceable after that.
I also don't recall any regulated bank accounts getting automatically drained or losing everybody's money due to a single scammer or a bad actor.
One single error or exploit in these smart contracts results in millions being drained. This happens on a weekly basis with a giant lack of consumer protection, unaccountability or any chance of getting your money back (which that is a huge unsolved problem). So yes, these smart contracts do not work.
It's a system designed to fail with thousands of disasters, rug pulls and scams just waiting to happen.
One single failure on an airplane can kill hundreds of people, even a single line of code could crash several planes. There are just thousands of accidents waiting to happen. Planes do not work. They have had a hundred years to make planes perfectly safe. Every year more and more people fly. It is a system designed to fail.
Crypto is a lawless 'decentralised' wild west that has zero accountability for when anyone loses their money in smart contract hacks, scams, wallet draining and rugpulls, in all cases your money is gone with no refunds or consumer protection.
So yes, it is a system designed to fail.
Of course, I’d say the benefits of cryptocurrencies are far smaller than the benefits of the internet (it’s pretty hard to compete with connecting almost the entire world into a single instant global network for the first time). But some benefits do exist, and I feel like you’re being wilfully blind if you disagree with that.
Of course, you might feel that the downsides (massively) outweigh the upsides. And that’s fine. Others will disagree.
One thing I think we can all agree on is that crypto is at least decentralized and permissionless enough to not go away any time soon, no matter who wants it gone.
I would agree with you that more regulation is needed, but to keep saying there is zero regulation is either ignorant or disingenuous. Regulation can also coexist with something that is decentralized and is not obviously adversarial, e.g. we have regulations for gold markets to prevent scams, etc.
The list of course is too large for this comment section so somebody has already done parts of the work. [0]
Any user would be very lucky to get their money back in these situations, but like I said, no refunds or consumer protection in the crypto space when you lose your money.
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EDIT: So? My point still stands about accountability, regulations or not, even Paypal knows the buying and selling of crypto assets is completely unregulated after 15 years.
The main point of this thread is that there is more evidence of broken smart contracts causing more damage to consumers and there is nobody to hold scammers accountable when a rugpull happens.
Because nobody is going to get their money back for them.
How is crypto, this brittle, 'decentralised' broken and unregulated system going to augment or replace the current financial system?