• dhork@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    The big problem is that it trivially easy to make new tokens, and give them the appearance of a market with fake liquidity. I know people think Smart Contracts are a real innovation, but 99.999999% of the time they are just used to make more crappy tokens.

    Crypto advocates say it’s security comes from the network effect of all the nodes working on extending the blockchain, but that security is of little value if it enables scams on higher layers.

    • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      Yup. Smart contracts aren’t even contracts, and they certainly aren’t smart.

      An algorithm is, by its nature, dumb. It does the thing it’s programmed to do, without any hesitation. It doesn’t stop to consider the situation or ask relevant questions. This is a terrible idea for a system that facilitates trades, because all someone has to do, to use the example you cited, is wash trade a newly minted token back and forth a few times to set a price, and then find a smart contract that’s happy to spew out some amount of a token you want, at the price you just set, like a busted slot machine.