Real Satoshi Mafia 🎲

smart contracts aren’t contracts. they aren’t smart. and they aren’t contracts. here’s why. and my prediction for why 2025 will change everything. when smart contracts finally become smart. and real contracts. ok so here it goes... mention the phrase ‘smart contract’ to a normie, and they won’t know what you mean. but they’ll have an idea. everyone knows what a contract is. so maybe it’s like the contracts which we sign with our employers. but smart. maybe it knows when things happen, like when we’re owed money. or maybe it can even enforce them. but smart contracts simply aren’t that. they’re self-executing logic on the blockchain. in 2025, i predict that’s going to change. and we’ll finally get *smart* *legal* contracts. you might not know this, but i’m also an attorney in new york. and as an attorney by training, i see the massive potential which smart contracts have for being truly smart contracts. in the sense of legal contracts. the ones that get signed in the millions every single day. the ones that secure trillions of dollars in value across every single country in the world. it’s almost insane that smart contracts haven’t yet made their way into the legal and business world yet. even the pmf which stablecoins have found is really just using dlt for transferring value - the pmf of stablecoins isn’t yet in using them to enforce business agreements. but why is that? it’s almost self-evident that this is the logical next step now that stablecoins clearly have pmf. imagine if a contract signed with pen and paper could actually become autonomous. in other words, it took on a life of its own beyond just the people who’d signed it. a contract saying that i would pay you $100,000 to build me a house would enforce the agreement on both ends. if you built the house and i didn’t pay you, the smart contract would transfer the funds from my account to yours. or imagine an employee options plan, vested over 5 years. if the employee remained employed for 5 years, they would get their share. all automatically. in fact, as vitalik noted in the ethereum whitepaper, nick szabo envisioned way back that blockchains would become systems for registering who owned what land (essentially, enforcing land law): the idea of taking the underlying blockchain idea and applying it to other concepts also has a long history. In 2005, Nick Szabo came out with the concept of "secure property titles with owner authority", a document describing how "new advances in replicated database technology" will allow for a blockchain-based system for storing a registry of who owns what land, creating an elaborate framework including concepts such as homesteading, adverse possession and Georgian land tax. However, there was unfortunately no effective replicated database system available at the time, and so the protocol was never implemented in practice. it might sound far-fetched, but it really isn’t. in 2024 we saw polymarket use smart contracts to enforce bets based on real-world events. and it works. the question of whether an event has actually happened is resolved using uma. these arbiters become the juries in the metaphorical court room. except this time, they actually have skin in the game. if they get to the wrong verdict, they stand to lose. so i see a world where legal contracts actually become smart. because of smart contracts. in this world, the smart contracts replace the court rooms. and protocols like uma become the juries. the value this will unlock is gargantuan. why? because legal certainty underpins all economic value. put simply, the more legal certainty there is, the more wealth is created. transaction costs go down. legal and admin expenses go down. people do business more. and even with people they don’t know or trust directly. the concept of the legal contract is one of the most brilliant inventions of mankind. but it also faces the biggest challenges it has ever faced. there aren’t enough courtrooms. there aren’t enough judges. there aren’t enough lawyers. the legal system is bursting at the seams. people talk a lot about the healthcare crisis: not enough hospitals, doctors, nurses etc. but the legal crisis is very real too. health tech is becoming a goliath industry. legal tech comes next. the tailwinds are the strongest they’ve ever been: ai agents, smart contracts, optimistic oracles… when i first heard about smart contracts almost a decade ago, this is what i thought they’d be used for. but back then it was more of a vision. there was still much to be proven. stablecoins weren’t yet a thing. oracles didn’t exist. but now they’re here. smart contracts as i thought they’d be aren’t just a pipedream. they’re now simply a logical extension of what we already have. we might finally no longer need attorneys. and as an attorney, i welcome that future.