Yep. The "oracle problem" is the crippling flaw (the main crippling flaw amongst a pile of others) in smart contracts.
As Matt Levine from Bloomberg put it:"My immutable unforgeable cryptographically secure blockchain record proving that I have 10,000 pounds of aluminum in a warehouse is not much use to a bank if I then smuggle the aluminum out of the warehouse through the back door."
Technology and business journalists writing about non-
cryptocurrency use cases for smart contracts never seem to mention that their "trustless" system will still involve trusting humans wherever it touches the physical world. You may have a tamperproof system for running contract code, but the inputs have to come from outside this secure space.
If third parties can't or won't settle accounts they can involve lawyers or regulators, the very people that some of the "code-as-contract" evangelists were arguing could be [largely] eliminated.
The point is that the blockchain makes little difference to a third party's ability to not honour most real goods and services contracts, and ascribing too much authority to its records can even reinforce their lie about paying you, because that's what the tamper proof record of the aluminium-filled warehouse says they did.
As Matt Levine from Bloomberg put it:"My immutable unforgeable cryptographically secure blockchain record proving that I have 10,000 pounds of aluminum in a warehouse is not much use to a bank if I then smuggle the aluminum out of the warehouse through the back door."
Technology and business journalists writing about non- cryptocurrency use cases for smart contracts never seem to mention that their "trustless" system will still involve trusting humans wherever it touches the physical world. You may have a tamperproof system for running contract code, but the inputs have to come from outside this secure space.