# kaal:position:2026-08-08-065

**Affirmed position.** 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.

**Status.** affirmed  **Published.** 2026-08-08

**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: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4905724

**Extends.** kaal:claim:3441904-011: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3441904-011

**Scholarly basis.** Wulf A. Kaal, Blockchain-Based Corporate Governance (2019). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3441904

**Source PDF sha256.** `e6b562527f7f19accaa35491db0a0db168b6a936755e1dca424e9f30bee7a815`

**Evidence level.** abstract indexed

**Mapping 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 at https://kaal-signal-desk.wulf577462.chatgpt.site/#review.

**Record type.** This is a dated commentary position that extends a scholarly corpus claim. It is not a verbatim claim extracted from the paper.

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the position.