Let's Talk Smart Contracts

In theory, the competitive advantage of smart contracts is to enable and permit two separate parties to execute and enforce contracts without any intermediaries or trusted third parties thereby reducing any number of transaction costs and mediating costs.  Yet in practice, if the Bitcoin experiment has been an illustration, at some point actors on the edges could incur and become vulnerable to a sundry of counterparty risks and consequently may very well seek to introduce trusted agents and intermediaries into the transactional and mediation process (e.g., insurance agencies, judges, government agencies, NGOs, etc.).  In other words, while these decentralized applications seek to and have nominally removed the problem of "trust" in the network itself, they have thus far been unable to remove the real edged-case hurdle: the fickle human element.  There are some very clever and innovative projects and protocols being developed in this space including BitHalo, Notary Chains and several others represented on the panel -- each with its own merits -- however at this juncture it is recommended that novices and experts alike seek professional legal counsel before utilizing any of these tools "to replace the law."