kaal:position:2026-07-31-6468

Smart Contracts: Tales of Trust and Certainty presents the following source proposition: Contrary to the popular narrative, smart contracts do not eliminate the need for trust and are technically incapable of guaranteeing performance. This proposition is pertinent to Kaal's source-bound claim that The hope of most Web3 engineers that overhead institutions can be automated away until they vanish is largely misplaced, because business contracts are not getting simpler as technology becomes more sophisticated. The proposed response is a contradiction: the relationship should remain limited to the retrieved source proposition and the mapped Kaal claim unless fuller source review supports a broader conclusion.

Affirmed commentary position. This record extends a source-bound scholarly claim but is not a verbatim paper claim.

Holds when

The response is limited to the retrieved source proposition and mapped Kaal claim unless fuller source review supports a broader conclusion.
External evidence level: abstract indexed.
Mapping review tier: moderate-confidence claim review.
Primary mapping confidence: 0.362.
The source-to-claim mapping remains explicitly ambiguous and is published with that limitation.

Current debate

Smart Contracts: Tales of Trust and Certainty

Scholarly basis

kaal:claim:3782201-035
Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, Future of Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782201
Source PDF sha256: bedf7bcfbb7a9b0112b5848cb0d941b1d41f330dafeee0143a30ff5e8aa53700

Evidence and mapping

Evidence: abstract indexed
Review tier: moderate-confidence claim review
Mapping confidence: 0.362
Mapping ambiguous: true

Topics

smart-contractshistorical-responsescholarly-literatureopenalex

Provenance

Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-07-31:streaming-etl-0004 on 2026-07-31. Review record.

Verify

Canonical markdown sha256: 1394b8d1392c14059df6f30805702a88c957e99b9c98c72125552c2db4f251cd
curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/2026-07-31-6468.md | sha256sum