{"id":1161,"date":"2019-01-28T09:23:23","date_gmt":"2019-01-28T09:23:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/?p=1161"},"modified":"2019-01-28T09:23:23","modified_gmt":"2019-01-28T09:23:23","slug":"all-smart-contracts-are-ambiguous-by-james-grimmelmann-ssrn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/?p=1161","title":{"rendered":"All Smart Contracts Are Ambiguous by James Grimmelmann :: SSRN"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Smart contracts are written in programming languages rather than in natural languages. This might seem to insulate them from ambiguity, because the meaning of a program is determined by technical facts rather than by social ones.<\/p>\n<p>It does not. Smart contracts can be ambiguous, too, because technical facts depend on socially determined ones. To give meaning to a computer program, a community of programmers and users must agree on the semantics of the programming language in which it is written. This is a social process, and a review of some famous controversies involving blockchains and smart contracts shows that it regularly creates serious ambiguities. In the most famous case, The DAO hack, more than $150 million in virtual currency turned on the contested semantics of a blockchain-based smart-contract programming language.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Source: <em><a href=\"https:\/\/papers.ssrn.com\/sol3\/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3315703\">All Smart Contracts Are Ambiguous by James Grimmelmann :: SSRN<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Smart contracts are written in programming languages rather than in natural languages. This might seem to insulate them from ambiguity, because the meaning of a program is determined by technical facts rather than by social ones. It does not. Smart contracts can be ambiguous, too, because technical facts depend on socially determined ones. To give [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,42,5,28],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1161"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1162,"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161\/revisions\/1162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blockchain-society.science\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}