ethereum

But in the end it is not a fruitful approach to understand ethereum and other smart contract systems.

The event calculus could be used to specify the behavior of the agents instantiated by ethereum smart contracts.

To be honest, half the people working as developers on Ethereum itself fail to bring up this point.

Thus ethereum is essentially a abstraction on bitcoin and introduction of a new currency token (ether) is unnecessary.

Room for ambiguity in ethereum can be added later, once computers are intelligent enough to negotiate ambiguity.

Since the vast majority of the people of this world are desperate or ignorant, ethereum can become a frightening tool.

It's actually better defined as 'site with data' which can be accessed via the Ethereum APIs.

I agree, I think the website is failing because it doesn't touch on a key topic, one that you mention: How does Ethereum handle non-blockchain items?

Theoretically, if ethereum allows a turing-complete language to be executed, a code could be written to hack the system itself.

Yes, there are some things that make me uneasy about this attitude of Ethereum being used as a kind of law.

What is really interesting is when parties sue each other in court over Ethereum contracts.

We need a trusted party to check that this is so, and the ethereum contract needs to have this verifier written in to it.

"Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference." So even the Ethereum developers describe the core use as contracts.

The achilles heel of a network such as ethereum (and bitcoin) is that "the crypto-economy" needs to stay causally disconnected from the other economy, that uses blockchains as a tool to run trusted fiduciary code (currency, insurance, identity, reputation).

It interrogates the intersections between law and contracts as it pertains to the shift from Bitcoin to Ethereum.

The blockchain gives you most of that, although the storage bits are probably better served by something like Ethereum.

Ethereum, by automating contract enforcement is going to end up being a tool for the powerful against the weak.