Smart Contracts Limitations

smart contracts are actually legally contracts (nor all that smart.)

Something like this would be a candidate for smart contracts.

Too bad smart contracts aren't.

Essentially it has the same issue as any other "smart contract" — the interface between the contract and the rest of the world cannot be monitored by the contract, and so must fall back on the existing legal system. This makes the "smart" part of the contract a lot less useful, so it's easier to just set up a normal contract.

Those are not 'smart contracts' in the sense you think they are.They are (probably) governed by some kind of broader contract, and can probably be 'undone' or come under regulator scrutiny.'Smart contracts' are a neat way for parties to 'agree' on something in a distributed way - but there's just no way that they will live up to being 'regular contracts'.Maybe for some things like currency exchange - maybe.But for anything else t

Why should law enforcement be a problem? I thought the idea behind smart contracts was that code is law?

tl;dr:* A blockchain is never the answer in the general case.* smart contracts require programmers to not only write bug-free code the first time (c.f. The DAO), not only make sure bugs in the underlying platform don't bite them (c.f. The DAO), but make sure the circumstances the contract runs in never change.* even Vitalik Buterin notes that smart contracts are an equivalent problem to strong AI in the general case <a href="https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06

hmm true. Maybe smart contracts also need a good old fashioned terms & conditions signed. At least that protects against unknown bugs and exploits?

would unintelligent contracts be better? (I kid I kid) :)

yes, I think this would be a good "smart contract" use case.