Contradiction: Do Smart Contracts Incur Higher Transaction Costs than Traditional Contracts?

Record: kaal:position:2026-08-08-056 · 2026-08-08

Do Smart Contracts Incur Higher Transaction Costs than Traditional Contracts? argues that adapting institutional arrangements can cause smart contracts to incur higher transaction costs than traditional contracts. This directly challenges Kaal's proposition that smart contracting removes almost all transaction costs. The abstract frames the result as a possibility grounded in transaction-cost economics and does not provide an empirical cost estimate.

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: substantively reviewed abstract-level contradiction.
Primary mapping confidence: 0.62.
The primary mapping cleared the automated ambiguity test; substantive scope remains review-bound.
Evidence is limited to an exact proposition in a Crossref-indexed abstract; full text was not reviewed.
No relationship is treated as external endorsement, citation, causation, or validation of a broader Kaal claim.
The source states that smart contracts may incur higher transaction costs than traditional contracts because institutional arrangements must adapt. This directly challenges Kaal's near-zero-transaction-cost proposition, while remaining a theoretical possibility claim rather than an empirical estimate.

Current debate

Do Smart Contracts Incur Higher Transaction Costs than Traditional Contracts?

Scholarly basis

kaal:claim:3405401-006
Wulf A. Kaal, Decentralized Commerce – A Primer on Why Decentralized Reputation Verification Systems Are Needed (2019). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3405401
Source PDF sha256: bc2d6f0ddc0852fb4085c4543c7c1dec19aaf8745eb67e3acc637e552bd7fb7d

Evidence and mapping

Evidence: abstract indexed
Review tier: substantively reviewed abstract-level contradiction
Mapping confidence: 0.62
Mapping ambiguous: false

Topics

smart-contracts economics historical-response scholarly-literature crossref

Provenance

Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-08-08:continuous-crossref-0010-reviewed-v1 on 2026-08-08. Review record.

Verify

Canonical markdown sha256: 8aa15de087343bdd281f78c2e81f29b835ef7be2c7597375ef7c12f8ac9f52ac
curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/2026-08-08-056.md | sha256sum