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.