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To take your Slock.it example, isn't Ethereum still adding value to the interaction even if your trust is broken? You have a cryptographic proof with a timestam

To take your Slock.it example, isn't Ethereum still adding value to the interaction even if your trust is broken? You have a cryptographic proof with a timestamp that you transacted with the individual, who then failed to follow through. Suppose every user who "slocks" something has to put up a stake, or an account with some Ether in it. If there is then a dispute a user could submit it to a decentralized jury of some sort, also putting up their own stake, and which ever party loses has to pay damages from the linked account. Ethereum isn't interesting solely because it allows computations, but also because it provides a immutable datastore (as bitcoin does) that then can be used in Smart Contracts and systems. I see it as a platform for building trust, not a guarantee of trust.

mootothemax 11y ago
You have a cryptographic proof with a timestamp that you transacted with the individual, who then failed to follow through. Do you, though? One large problem with bitcoin is that you cannot prove that you don't own a given address. IF this is also true for Ethereum, all you really get is proof that you sent money to an address; not that the address necessarily belongs to anyone.
- jpereira 11y ago
  Well the address would be registered into the Slock.it system, so you have proof that a certain lock belongs to a certain address. In a way though your point still stands, a user could always claim that someone else put the listing up or someother situation beyond their control, UNLESS there is previous history within the slock.it ecosystem, which would be very easy to see.
  - readysetmain 11y ago
    Slock.it sounds like brain crack. They spend all their time writing few paragraph blog posts and no code is produced. Even if it was produced, why would someone use an easy to game system over a centralized system with insurance and a dispute system?
  - nomercypercy 11y ago
    So slock.it is going to need a central registry of all users. You realize that storing that much data on the blockchain and interacting with it will likely end up using more money then they would make in fees.
- halomru 11y ago
  But you can prove that you controll an address. To solve your concern you only transact with people who have proven in a publicly verifiable way that they control the address they provided you with.
  - mootothemax 11y ago
    >To solve your concern you only transact with people who have proven in a publicly verifiable way that they control the address they provided you with. And how can those people prove that they didn't receive your money? As in, I want to dispute that the address you've sent money to is under my control.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
usrusr 11y ago
How do you prove that they did not follow through? It's the ebay/brick problem all over again and i see absolutely no way a blockchain could make it better (but many ways it could make it worse). "Decentralized jury", aka p2p conflict resolution sounds quite expensive and like a system even more ripe for gaming: this would not be servers slowly heating a room for some fractional hint of a reward, this would be people who would be extremely unlikely to donate their time unless they have some form of hidden agenda (which might be as generic as white supremacists, to pick any random group, always voting in favor of disputants who drop subtle hints of the "right" ethnicity in their problem description texts). And due to the extra-legal nature of the system, there would not even be a law against it.
- jpereira 11y ago
  Why does it need to be a fractional hint of a reward? There are numerous way a system like this could be set up to incentivize jurors. As for your second point the proposed solution for that, as mentioned by varav in another comment, is Schelling Point[1] consensus, as described[2] by Vitalik Buterin. In essence, you call multiple random assessors, with no knowledge of each other, to respond to your given question, or in this case to pass judgement. They're then rewarded based on how close they are to the "average" or consensus. Augur[3] and Truthcoin/Hivemind[4] use a similar idea, and the former is deployed live. I don't think there's an automatic or immediately clear solution, but its by no means impossible, and the value added by Ethereum could justify coming up with one. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_%28game_theory%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_%28game_theory%29 [2]: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/03/28/schellingcoin-a-minimal-trust-universal-data-feed/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/03/28/schellingcoin-a-minimal... [3]: https://augur.net https://augur.net [4]: http://bitcoinhivemind.com/ http://bitcoinhivemind.com/
  - usrusr 11y ago
    If randomly called assessors can decide not to assess, the subset of actual jurors stops being random. The market research industry is battling this problem all the time: it's easy to poll opinion from stay at home moms and retirees, but it's near-impossible to access most high income groups (and the implicit selection within that group that derives from this difficulty will make the results pretty much useless, psst, don't tell their customers). If you incentivize assessors enough to make the rate of non-assessors sufficiently small, you not only make the process very expensive, you also open the door far and wide to non-assessing by not seriously considering the options and selecting one of the "truths" at random. Market research has this pretty much under control because they ask so many questions in one go and random-voters tend to enter subjectively-random values that are quite visible to statistical analysis, but i doubt this could be transferred to conflict resolution, because the requirements for a serious answer are so much higher there. I really doubt that this is solvable, not every problem is a good match for a crows-* solution.

mootothemax 11y ago

You have a cryptographic proof with a timestamp that you transacted with the individual, who then failed to follow through. Do you, though? One large problem with bitcoin is that you cannot prove that you don't own a given address. IF this is also true for Ethereum, all you really get is proof that you sent money to an address; not that the address necessarily belongs to anyone.

jpereira 11y ago
Well the address would be registered into the Slock.it system, so you have proof that a certain lock belongs to a certain address. In a way though your point still stands, a user could always claim that someone else put the listing up or someother situation beyond their control, UNLESS there is previous history within the slock.it ecosystem, which would be very easy to see.
- readysetmain 11y ago
  Slock.it sounds like brain crack. They spend all their time writing few paragraph blog posts and no code is produced. Even if it was produced, why would someone use an easy to game system over a centralized system with insurance and a dispute system?
- nomercypercy 11y ago
  So slock.it is going to need a central registry of all users. You realize that storing that much data on the blockchain and interacting with it will likely end up using more money then they would make in fees.
halomru 11y ago
But you can prove that you controll an address. To solve your concern you only transact with people who have proven in a publicly verifiable way that they control the address they provided you with.
- mootothemax 11y ago
  >To solve your concern you only transact with people who have proven in a publicly verifiable way that they control the address they provided you with. And how can those people prove that they didn't receive your money? As in, I want to dispute that the address you've sent money to is under my control.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

usrusr 11y ago

How do you prove that they did not follow through? It's the ebay/brick problem all over again and i see absolutely no way a blockchain could make it better (but many ways it could make it worse). "Decentralized jury", aka p2p conflict resolution sounds quite expensive and like a system even more ripe for gaming: this would not be servers slowly heating a room for some fractional hint of a reward, this would be people who would be extremely unlikely to donate their time unless they have some form of hidden agenda (which might be as generic as white supremacists, to pick any random group, always voting in favor of disputants who drop subtle hints of the "right" ethnicity in their problem description texts). And due to the extra-legal nature of the system, there would not even be a law against it.

jpereira 11y ago
Why does it need to be a fractional hint of a reward? There are numerous way a system like this could be set up to incentivize jurors. As for your second point the proposed solution for that, as mentioned by varav in another comment, is Schelling Point[1] consensus, as described[2] by Vitalik Buterin. In essence, you call multiple random assessors, with no knowledge of each other, to respond to your given question, or in this case to pass judgement. They're then rewarded based on how close they are to the "average" or consensus. Augur[3] and Truthcoin/Hivemind[4] use a similar idea, and the former is deployed live. I don't think there's an automatic or immediately clear solution, but its by no means impossible, and the value added by Ethereum could justify coming up with one. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_%28game_theory%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_%28game_theory%29 [2]: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/03/28/schellingcoin-a-minimal-trust-universal-data-feed/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/03/28/schellingcoin-a-minimal... [3]: https://augur.net https://augur.net [4]: http://bitcoinhivemind.com/ http://bitcoinhivemind.com/
- usrusr 11y ago
  If randomly called assessors can decide not to assess, the subset of actual jurors stops being random. The market research industry is battling this problem all the time: it's easy to poll opinion from stay at home moms and retirees, but it's near-impossible to access most high income groups (and the implicit selection within that group that derives from this difficulty will make the results pretty much useless, psst, don't tell their customers). If you incentivize assessors enough to make the rate of non-assessors sufficiently small, you not only make the process very expensive, you also open the door far and wide to non-assessing by not seriously considering the options and selecting one of the "truths" at random. Market research has this pretty much under control because they ask so many questions in one go and random-voters tend to enter subjectively-random values that are quite visible to statistical analysis, but i doubt this could be transferred to conflict resolution, because the requirements for a serious answer are so much higher there. I really doubt that this is solvable, not every problem is a good match for a crows-* solution.