Tag Archives: dApp

Blockchains, dApps, and Smart Contracts—A Critical Review

Blog post by Dave Peck and the PSL team. Some issues they discuss:

Very few categories of data belong on-chain …

Today’s smart contract programming models are deeply flawed …

  • Smart contracts can’t reference the “real-world”. They can only reference the blockchain itself. This is known as the “oracle problem” and it makes blockchains a necessarily closed system. This may sound like a trivial problem, but it is actually profound. For instance, it forces smart contract developers to jump through hoops to build “price oracles” when they want their on-chain code to reference real-world asset prices. Companies like Chainlink act as oracles,
  • Smart contracts can’t be upgraded …
  • Smart contracts require complex distributed systems to run, effectively, forever.

Distributed consensus technology could change radically in the next decade.