Contracts are agreements between legal entities, human and non-human.
"Smart" contracts in it's current form allows for automatic execution between parties, where one or both parties can be another SC. I would put them im the juridical person or non-human camp legally speaking. This property can generate quite an advanced exexutiom through cascadation effect with a lot of deployed SC on the blockchain and is publicly auditable by anyone and will be audited by a lot of people if a huge amount of financial stake is present.
I personally see an immense upside in this approach rather then current contract law in TradFi, based solely on promises and insurance to customer front.
IMO one such deployed contract does indeed not make it smart but an inter-connected network of them can generate systems that can be indeed called smart.
If an offender removes key elements from your observation (or in the example adding a branch beside the scientists car) you will not even consider to form a new hypothesis?
That's quite convenient for those kids.
> the current bitcoin energy use is easily comparable or greater than the energy use of the people, buildings etc of the global finance industry
But energy consumption behavior of all people who are deployed in the global finance industry ≠ energy consumption of the median of Argentinan/Ukrankian people. I think you can agree that most people who work in finance are generally in at least low middle-class to super wealthy. If you compare the mobility/consumption index of such a class to median income level of countries where wealth is generally much lower, the equation changes drastically in favor of computers doing the job without having the urge to fly to fiji over the WE, up to 4x between poor and lower middle-class already [1]
Hopefully the next time Swiss people will have a chance to vote for an electronic ID (legislative process takes time, so thinking in timeframe of 3-5y), the solution will contain some parts of a self-sovereign identity / DID [1] with the state as original issuer and trusted multiparty keyholder in case the self-sovereign is to hard for folks. It would fit quite well with their other decentralized systems.
Though they are sunsetting their platform, there were a bunch of high quality newsrooms on Civil which can be supported via donations. I recommend checking out https://readsludge.com/ & https://popula.com/, for local news Block Club Chicago, FAQ NYC, Gotham Gazette, The Colorado Sun.
Another example of Google not even trying to give the account holder an option to pause tracking is the purchase/order-linking feature for purchases history. They scan the users Gmail account for orders/receipts and quietly storing that information into the purchases history as can be seen by going to https://myaccount.google.com/purchases.
Instead of giving the account holder an option to delete this history, their helper section vaguely mentions you can go to Gmail and "manage" the corresponding message. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/7673989
It would be interesting to see the main building blocks of Atlas and if any of it have relations or takes inspirations from Blockchain Tech (e.g. Ether-based http://otonomos.com/).
