No. Definitely not.
Smart contracts are supposed to eliminate a huge swath of disputes, so often people don’t need courts at all. People can put business rules in place that aren’t violated - and not just for contracts.
For example bidders at Christie’s and Sotheby’s sometimes don’t have the money but the houses can’t make a big scandal. They try to hold another auction and sell it to someone else as if the guy sold it.
In crypto it would be trivial to endure bidders have put up the money. You can refund the lowest bidder below N winners. You can also ensure payouts happen at agreed-upon rates. You can prove escrow. And stuff like that.
Imagine a bunch of donors or investors seeing how their money is spent because it is on the blockchain. Or imagine a community having roles and knowing that each role was granted properly.
In web2 anyone who can get into the database can modify any records and then you hope court cases and chilling effects will undo the damage retroactively.
>Smart contracts are supposed to eliminate a huge swath of disputes, so often people don’t need courts at all
That just sounds like near total agreement with me.
Dont get me wrong, I love smart contracts conceptually. But if the parties to a smart contract desired court arbitration, they should include a function for it in the smart contract. Like a swing vote for a trusted third parties keys.
Without that, to me, you are signalling acceptance of the outcome of the code without arbitration. If you seek a court to interfere with the execution of a smart contract that never included a provision for arbitration then you are in my mind, as guilty of ignoring the intent of the smart contract as any hacker might be.
And if you were just going to court to dispute the smart contract, you may as well just have accepted a legacy contract. Escrow, multiple parties, etc etc all solved problems in the traditional legal space.
The key is that the smart contract framework introduces a feature that is used let’s say 2% of the time.
So I disagree even if you used that feature of the framework, that you “may as well have used a non smart contract”.
> In crypto it would be trivial to endure bidders have put up the money.
And also not in crypto, as has been done for thousands of years