Has there been any significant progress toward using Bitcoin’s purported Turing complete semantics to implement smart contracts general enough to support something like Silk Road? I ask in part because while wondering what became of Nick Szabo (who went all-but-silent on social media a few years ago) I ran across the above article that, in the process of debunking the idea Nick is Satoshi (which Nick has also denied), linked to a video demonstrating Turing capability which Nick seemed to deny in a prior public appearance.
While I didn’t follow that demonstration (no time to think about it in adequate depth) there does seem to be pretty wide-spread confusion about Turing completeness due, mainly, to the fact that all computers are finite state machines which means they are not “Turing complete”. This gets into the hardware software distinction where software supports “codes” that may or may not have Turing complete semantics, regardless of whether this is a hardware fiction. Said fiction is central to any “out of memory” condition in any program, and the associated exception handling.
This, further, is central to the profoundly destructive claim that because the Algorithmic Information Criterion is “arbitrary” because of the “arbitrary choice of UTM” – a claim that is intuitive nonsense on the face of it if one simply considers the fact that the natural sciences use arithmetic – the axioms for which are not “arbitrary” in any but the most vacuously pedantic sense. This is what drove me to concoct NiNOR Complexity
NiNOR Complexity is of some theoretic interest in its own right but it should not have been necessary to concoct it to nuke the social pseudosciences and get on with solving the TFR catastrophe: