Contracts with terms that can be changed retroactively by one party. What could possibly go wrong? The whole point of this smart contract stuff is supposed to eliminate the need for trusting a party.<p>The article has full details on how to create a contract changeable by one party, then hand waving about "writing a contract that uses tokens and voting mechanism to allow the community to decide whether to update or not." No details on how that's supposed to work. Who's "the community", anyway? The parties to the agreement are the ones involved.<p>A mechanism where all parties to a contract could agree to replace it with a new contract would be useful. That's a normal contract activity. You do that whenever you renew a lease.<p>The Etherium promoters want this because they botched the design. Smart contracts as byte coded programs are too error prone. The DAO debacle, and this latest demand for a "state change" because someone botched a big contract, indicate that. Smart contracts should have been in some declarative form like decision logic tables, not Turing-complete programs with race conditions.