It’s fascinating living in a country whose legal system treats vowing before God to stay with someone exclusives until death as absolutely meaningless but will treat a smiley face picture as a legally binding statement.
Also in a contractual matter (such as marriage), if the “exchange of value” or guarantor is entirely mythical how can such an agreement be binding? It’s not like the injured party can collect from the guarantor.
That’s why some contracts require a payment of a dollar (e.g. patent assignment to your company) so it can be “for value received”. Now if you’re a cryptoweenie I suppose you’d say that the “fiat dollar” is just as mythical…good luck litigating that.
* If we subscribe to principle that "legal system impacting everyone equally" and "personal religious beliefs" should be separate (and I do!:), then "vowing before God to stay with someone" should indeed be "legally absolutely meaningless", unless you also enter in a bespoke legal contract, understood by both parties to be such, with details on what happens when two parties want to terminate the contract, jointly or individually. Basically, if you want to talk "legal contract", let's talk legal contracts, which are rarely truly inescapable and have well established means of binding and exit. If you want to talk divine commitments, by all means, but that's really between you and your divine being of choice, and it is my understanding that most divine systems handle such cases appropriately (whether by eternal damnation or multiples of readily-available virgins, et cetera:). Just, let's not mix them up to make some vague points.
* "Smiley Picture" and "funny written scribble" (a signature) have similarities. We readily in most legal systems accept "if I use a funny written scribble to really really mean something, no take-baksies!", then what's the real difference to smiley picture?
* Or put it another way, what are the first principle under which a signature should count for something, or a written expression, that a emoji, used to convey same meaning, should not? I.e. if I ask "will you deliver to this contract", and you text back "Yup!" or thumbs up emoji, what is the difference? https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/thumbs-up-emoji-...