Reading Smart Contracts Without Being a Programmer

You don’t need to be a software engineer to meaningfully evaluate a crypto token’s smart contract — and Felix Bick’s How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps explains exactly how in Chapter 81.

Bick starts with an important accessibility point: for cryptocurrency tokens and DeFi projects, a smart contract’s code is often publicly viewable on blockchain explorers, and while fully auditing code requires technical expertise, several free automated scanning tools can flag common red flags — honeypot characteristics, unusual owner permissions, hidden minting functions — without requiring the user to personally read code.

The chapter also addresses professional audits directly, with an important caveat: checking whether a project has undergone a professional third-party security audit, and verifying that the audit was performed by a reputable, established firm with a track record, rather than an unknown or affiliated entity, provides additional assurance, though audits reduce rather than eliminate risk, since audited projects have still occasionally been exploited or have still turned out to be fraudulent in ways an audit doesn’t necessarily catch.

Bick’s practical summary is genuinely reassuring for non-technical readers: non-technical users can still meaningfully reduce risk by using accessible scanning tools before purchasing any unfamiliar token, checking whether liquidity is locked, and verifying that contract ownership has been renounced or is held by a legitimate, accountable multi-signature arrangement rather than a single anonymous wallet.

This chapter is valuable precisely because it democratizes a form of due diligence that might otherwise seem restricted to technically sophisticated readers — Bick shows that meaningful smart contract due diligence is accessible to anyone willing to spend a few minutes with the right free tools.

For anyone considering purchasing a newer or smaller crypto token, this chapter of How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps gives Felix Bick’s accessible, non-technical path to real technical due diligence.