Originally from Alternatives to the High Cost of Litigation

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Because smart agreements are based on code, they are, by their very nature, inflexible and incomplete. They are neither designed for general use, nor are they suited for it.

If smart agreements are, as some in the field ascribe them to be, “immutable, unstoppable, and irrefutable computer code,” that code must declare what will happen as a result of every possible contingency that might occur during the life of the contract.

Inflexibility results because the code is completely deterministic, embodying predefined rules typically reduced to codified “if-then-else” conditional programming statements. Any conduct by the parties that does not fall within the rules is simply ignored.