Why Developing smart-contracts is like the Nintendo Switch

So what does the Nintendo Switch, Paperclip, and Smart Contract development have in common? I'm explaining that in this video. This is the Nintendo Switch. It's one of the hottest gaming devices out today, and Nintendo spent more than 4 years and 1 billion dollars developing this device. With so much money spent, you'd think that they'd want to secure it from hackers. After all, if hackers manage to breach the device, they can allow people to play games for free, and Nintendo will lose a lot of money. Alright. Come on baby, come on, come on, come on. Yes! Hey, it worked! Because, well, people wouldn't buy games anymore. So hackers did exactly that. They managed to hack the Nintendo Switch with nothing but a small paperclip and a vulnerability in the hardware of the Nintendo. So this allowed hackers to play pirated games, and now Nintendo has a big problem because they can't fix it. The problem is, is that the hack is in the hardware. So unless they start replacing the hardware on these devices, they can't find a patch for this bug. And unfortunately, that means that the hackers can now start playing games and Nintendo will start losing money. So what does this have to do with smart contract development? Well, smart contract development is exactly like developing for the Nintendo Switch. It's exactly like developing for hardware. The issue is that when you deploy a smart contract onto the main end and start letting it operate, it's nearly impossible to change it. Very much like editing every single device of these out on the market. So that means when you're developing for a smart contract, you want to make sure it's free of bugs. If smart contracts get hacked, bad things happen. And we've seen that in the past as well. For example, the most infamous of that being the DAO, the decentralized autonomous organization that was on Ethereum and it was hacked. The hacker managed to bleed all of the Ethereum from the smart contract and it required an act of God to fix it. There's other examples of that as well. So for example, Beauty Chain, it had a hack in its ERC-20 contract, which allowed hackers to create infinite supply of Beauty Chain, obviously crashing the token price. The reason hackers can do this is because unlike code for software development or even software development, this code cannot be patched. It can't be fixed at a later time once this bug has been developed. And this doesn't just apply to Ethereum. This actually applies to this whole paradigm of blockchain smart contract technology. The reason being is that smart contracts are trustworthy because they can't be changed after they're deployed. So you can trust that the original creator of said contract won't change the terms on you. They won't rip you off. Ripped off begins with the R sound. If that is the case, then the smart contract creation process has to be very precise. It has to be free of bugs and it can't just be like, oh, it works. It's fine. Just like how the Nintendo switch it works. It's fine. It's now it doesn't mean it'd be free from hackers. There might be small procedures or small functions that are vulnerable and that can lead to a whole system failure. So this applies to all smart contracts, Ethereum, NEO, BeChain, EOS, whatever you have it. They all have the same issue. Once a contract is deployed, it can't be changed just like hardware. Now, does that mean we should stop developing? Does that mean we should stop making devices like the switch or stop innovating in smart contracts? Definitely not. It's just a hurdle that we have to overcome. Albeit a very tough hurdle. One cool fact is that a lot of smart contract developers, the smart ones at least, they'll use code that's already written. So they'll use tried and tested libraries or code. That way they won't make as many mistakes. After all, if it's survived time, then that's the best way to validate if code works or not. So that's what's happening right now. In terms of a lot of the smart contracts, developers are making slight modifications onto original code. And as we explore this space more, the code base would increase and we'll have more and more contracts out there. So I'm very optimistic about the future, but I also acknowledge that development for smart contracts is difficult. I hope you found this analogy amusing. Did you guys know about the Nintendo Switch hack? Leave a comment below about what you think. And as always, if you like this video, click the little like button down below and subscribe to this channel for more updates like this. Thank you guys so much for watching. See you next time.