Smart contracts are contracts. They’re not smart. Neither are we for using them.

Let’s start with what a smart contract actually is: code that runs on a blockchain. That’s it. No AI. No intelligence. No magical enforcement of real-world agreements.

It’s a program. A particularly expensive, slow, and immutable program that you can’t fix when you get it wrong.

We call them “smart” because marketing works.

The theory is beautiful. Code as law. Automatic execution. No intermediaries. No trust required.

The practice is a graveyard.

// The DAO: $60M
// Parity Multisig: $280M  
// Wormhole: $320M
// Ronin Bridge: $625M
// Every week: something new

But sure. Trustless.

Here’s what “trustless” actually means: you’re not trusting a bank or a lawyer. You’re trusting:

  • The compiler to not have bugs
  • The VM to not have bugs
  • The consensus mechanism to not have bugs
  • The bridge to not have bugs
  • The oracle to not have bugs
  • Every library you imported to not have bugs
  • Yourself to not have bugs

We replaced trust in institutions with trust in code. Code written by humans. Humans make mistakes. The mistakes are now immutable.

Progress.

I’ve audited smart contracts. The process goes like this:

  1. Read the code
  2. Find obvious bugs
  3. Find subtle bugs
  4. Find bugs that aren’t bugs until someone exploits them
  5. Write a report saying “probably safe with these caveats”
  6. Watch it get hacked six months later

The audit doesn’t mean it’s secure. It means we looked and didn’t see how to break it yet.

// every smart contract, eventually
function withdraw() external {
    // TODO: check reentrancy
    // TODO: verify caller
    // TODO: validate state
    // ship it, we're running out of runway
}

The true believers say: “The technology is young. It will mature.”

Bridges have been hacked for five years. Reentrancy attacks have existed since 2016. We keep making the same mistakes because the incentives reward speed over safety.

Move fast and lose other people’s money.

You know what’s actually trustless? Cash in a briefcase. No smart contract required. No gas fees. No bridge exploits.

The problem is that cash doesn’t scale. So we built systems that scale but don’t work. And we call that innovation.

I’m not saying blockchain is useless. I’m saying we’ve confused “interesting technology” with “solution to everything.”

Some things should be centralized. Some trust should be in humans. Some contracts should be enforced by courts, not code.

Not everything needs to be immutable. Most things shouldn’t be.

The response to this is always: “You just don’t understand the technology.”

I understand it fine. That’s the problem.

Understanding how the sausage is made doesn’t mean you have to eat it.

We’ll keep building them anyway. The VCs need returns. The founders need exits. The community needs hopium.

And the hackers need targets.

It’s a symbiotic ecosystem. Everyone gets what they came for.

Smart contracts aren’t smart. They’re code. Code with money attached. Code that can’t be fixed.

We keep calling them smart because admitting they’re just “contracts that execute automatically and irreversibly with no recourse when something goes wrong” doesn’t fit on a pitch deck.

That’s the joke. That’s always been the joke.

We’re still laughing.