#加密市场反弹

Let's talk about a term that sounds quite “techy”: smart contracts. The name sounds a bit intimidating, but it’s neither truly “smart” nor a contract in the traditional sense.

Simply put, it’s a set of instructions that, once on the blockchain, cannot be altered.

For example, it’s like a vending machine in your community that dispenses water when you insert coins. You put in coins, it releases water, and the rules are set in advance. The key is—property owners have welded it to the ground, so no one can open it to change the price or secretly swap the water for cola at midnight.

On the blockchain, “welding” it in place is its core feature.

So why is it so rigid? Can’t bugs be fixed like in mobile apps?

Precisely because of this “rigidity,” it becomes the trust foundation of the on-chain world.

Think about it: apps can be updated anytime, even secretly adding terms you don’t agree with; banking systems have admin privileges behind the scenes, allowing transactions to be frozen or rolled back in special cases.

But smart contracts expose rules openly and lock them inside a glass case—everyone can see, but no one can change. This means:

· The project team cannot add “management fees” after you deposit large funds
· No one can secretly modify lottery odds via backend at midnight
· Rules are equal for everyone, including the code writers themselves

What you trust is not a person or team, but the transparent, publicly visible, and locked logic.

Since it can’t be changed, why do hacking incidents still happen frequently?

“Unchangeability” is a double-edged sword. It prevents backdoors but also means: if the code has vulnerabilities, those holes will remain forever open.

Common issues are often simple: miscalculating decimal points, missing permission checks, repeated calls not intercepted… In traditional software, these are normal bugs; on-chain, they become permanently open safes.

Hackers usually don’t create vulnerabilities—they just find the cracks that have always been there earlier.

But some projects can indeed “upgrade.” How is that possible?

Here’s a clever solution: the proxy contract pattern.

It’s like a project sets up a fixed mailbox (proxy contract) on the street, while the actual letter-processing post office (logic contract) can be changed in the background. To you, the mailing address remains the same, but the internal processing rules may have changed.

This design provides flexibility but also shifts some trust back to the users—you need to believe that the multisig team or governance community controlling the mailbox permissions won’t act maliciously.

That’s why you’ll notice an interesting phenomenon: the more core the DeFi protocol, the more it tends to minimize upgrades, even aiming for “write once, run forever.”

Let’s talk about the essence at the end

The immutability of smart contracts may seem like a technical choice on the surface, but at its core, it’s a philosophical trade-off.

It sacrifices flexibility in exchange for:

· Verifiability: everyone can audit the same code
· Predictability: rules tomorrow are exactly the same as today
· Anti-manipulation: no one can modify the game rules for you unilaterally

In the uncertain world of crypto, this “clunky” code becomes the most certain anchor. It’s not perfect, but it’s honest—and honesty is often the most important quality in long-term play.