Qualification: The 'Dark Side' of Smart Contracts: A Contract Theory Perspective

Record: kaal:position:2026-08-08-065 · 2026-08-08

The Dark Side of Smart Contracts states that smart contracts may govern transactions more cheaply than traditional contracts, firm hierarchies, and relational contracts. This independently corresponds to Kaal's Coasean account of smart contracts as a lower-cost substitute for firm organization. The proposition is qualified and does not establish minimal costs for transactions of every size or high transaction security.

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 qualification.
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 govern transactions more cheaply than traditional contracts, firm hierarchy, and relational contracts. This corresponds to Kaal's transaction-cost account of why smart contracts can substitute for firms, but the source uses a qualified possibility and does not establish minimal costs, transactions of any size, or high security.

Current debate

The 'Dark Side' of Smart Contracts: A Contract Theory Perspective

Scholarly basis

kaal:claim:3441904-011
Wulf A. Kaal, Blockchain-Based Corporate Governance (2019). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3441904
Source PDF sha256: e6b562527f7f19accaa35491db0a0db168b6a936755e1dca424e9f30bee7a815

Evidence and mapping

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

Topics

economics smart-contracts historical-response scholarly-literature crossref

Provenance

Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-08-08:continuous-crossref-0010-remainder-0001-reviewed-v1 on 2026-08-08. Review record.

Verify

Canonical markdown sha256: 494abb52d0a4cd4065d1d8f11ead95c0f8361df008bd2545b0526e1294f313c9
curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/2026-08-08-065.md | sha256sum