Smart Contracts On A Public Blockchain

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Good or Bad?

Smart Contracts are all the rage lately, with Ethereum bringing them into the limelight but a lot of other currencies also support them.  The problem with smart contracts is that they are a huge potential for vulnerability and this has been proven with the theft of Ethereum tokens.  In fact a recent audit found most smart contracts on Ethereum are vulnerable (34,200 of them).

The idea itself is not bad but considering that public, permissionless blockchain has not been secure or functioning as well as the banks, we have a long way to go.  The proper IT development route to chart would be to keep those features as beta and non-public facing until they are fully tested and secured.  Clearly this hasn’t happened with Ethereum or the majority of cryptocurrencies.

I do think the implementation on Lumens and Ripple is a bit better but only time will tell. I strongly feel that any currency with smart contracts at this point are opening the door for good and bad here, and we must tighten the security before just messing around with it.  Right now blockchain technology and in particular cryptocurrency is very much like the ‘dot.com’ era, where things were at a all high and then came crashing down. But as a result of the dot.com bust, the world of ecommerce and internet developed rather quickly.

This too will have issues but only time will tell how it all plays out. I reason that Ripple and Lumens or cryptocurrencies that are more centralized are going to last for the long run. While others like Ethereum are going to burn out.

What do you think?

Cheers,
A. Yasir

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Areeb Soo Yasir

Business and technology have always gone hand in hand for me, and now I've built nearly 20 years of expertise. A few notable achievements: -> Tier III-Designed & deployed multiple mission critical datacenter environments in Canada, US, Hong Kong, Singapore & China. -> Software Engineering: Created a Linux OS from scratch, including a custom kernel to maintain millions of dollars in client infrastructure, deploy and report as needed. Created the “Windows Geeks” and “Password Pros” Windows Password Reset software recommended by Microsoft. -> Business Negotiations: Conducted intensive negotiations with branches of the Peoples Republic of China and the various state-run Telecom operations including China Telecom and China Unicom for access to their trillion dollar backbone infrastructure. We were the first western company to have such network access where other IT companies such as Vodafone and Google failed. -> Cloud Infrastructure Creation: Created the first proprietary “Clustered Cloud Architecture” that rivals competing Google, IBM, Microsoft & Alibaba alternatives. I'd love to chat #IT or #Linux or even #Business, so don't hesitate to connect. Cheers!

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