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A Current List of Use Cases for Ethereum

119 points by sethbannon 10y ago

PhrosTT 10y ago
Wow this is REALLY helpful thank you. I can just link to this now when people ask me what the point of Ethereum is.
kefka 10y ago
I'll say it bluntly, because I know some people here really like Ethereum. Ethereum sucks. (Note: I don't want it to...) 1. No checksums on user's accounts. BTC has had checksums from get-go. Ethdevs think that 0xdeadbeef hex keys are just fine. Except that one-off you did (or added a null/0 at the end) just dead-ended your transaction and lost money in the 'chain. Gone for good. Forever, nada, zilch. 2. Blockchain itself isn't checksummed. ?! When you download the chain to do the proof of work calculations, there's no guarantee that a 1-off error didn't creep in the chain you're working with. What's that do? It invalidates every 'work' you do. You're spinning cycles with 100% chance of NO payout. 3. There's no way to auto-pay an account's own gas costs. If I'm a dApp maker, I want to pay to submit the program. Cool. Now if User A wants to execute my app, they have to pay gas (or percents of eth coin). That's a huge suck. Massive suck. I want this cost taken care of so users aren't nickel and dimed to use the damned thing. Right now, nickel-and-dime it is. 4. Software is bad alpha quality. Search for "lost wallet ethereum", and you'll see thousands of people with lost coin. Many errors are the above one-off errors, others are code badly interpreted to lose coin, and others were import errors on the Kickstarter coin purchase. 5. The "Smart Contract" code is completely trapped within the Eth system. I can't query a website and check data from there, nor can I generate random numbers, nor can I do anything that isn't explicitly on the blockchain. That directly implies that gambling apps and similar are completely deterministic and knowable. Effectively, gambling on Eth isn't a random chance with an edge to the house; it's a mathematical guarantee that the house wins, and you lose. Until these flaws are fixed, this sstem isn't worth putting any more money in than you're willing to lose. Because loss is a distinct possibility with the sheer number of bugs and bad code there is.
- croddin 10y ago
  > 5. The "Smart Contract" code is completely trapped within the Eth system. I can't query a website and check data from there, nor can I generate random numbers, nor can I do anything that isn't explicitly on the blockchain. That directly implies that gambling apps and similar are completely deterministic and knowable. Effectively, gambling on Eth isn't a random chance with an edge to the house; it's a mathematical guarantee that the house wins, and you lose. Wouldn't the proof of work hashes be a good distributed source of entropy?
  - kefka 10y ago
    Possibly, but I can have my client delay-submit successful work as to game the system. And when Ethereum switches to Proof-of-Stake, bad shit will happen. (Mainly, its when you wager eth coin on the fact you have a correct-work. Its not hard to see the badness from that...).
    - bryondowd 10y ago
      Not an expert, and this is limited in what you could use it for, but for gambling purposes, couldn't this be dealt with by using the next X hashes after the bet is placed, where X is a large enough number that the likelihood of the better being able to produce that many successful blocks in advance is nil. So, at the simplest, you take a bet, and then use the next two hashes for your random seed to get a result. Even if a miner found a solution for the next hash and withheld it long enough to make a bet, he wouldn't have enough information to do better than random chance. And as I understand it, the entire blockchain relies on the fact that one miner shouldn't be able to generate two blocks faster than the rest of the mining pool. Increasing from two grants even greater certainty. Of course, the trade off here is that you have to wait for X blocks to be generated after a random number is requested and before being able to use it. So, your gambler has to sit around a bit to find out if they win, rather than instant feedback. (Of course, for gambling, you can hide this with some pretty animations of a roulette wheel, dice, horses running, etc.)
  - mhluongo 10y ago
    I believe that's open to tampering by miners (more easily than a sybil attack, IIRC).
jamespitts 10y ago
Not to overhype the potential of Ethereum, but one can also go beyond the obvious "next steps" and start to see entire new avenues that a technology opens up. I say "start to see" because it is very hard to predict how one particular avenue of unforeseen capability might lead to success! In the early web, there were many of these kinds of use cases talked about and a lot of effort was made to bridge the technological gaps to get to the anticipated capabilities. One use case that stands out in this regard is ecommerce (before secure web connections existed). But the real interesting advances are those that are not obvious from the get-go! These stem from creative modifications, and of course the very long slog of trying to realize the potential of those modifications. It takes confidence in the people who do the work, and it takes many, many failures. Social software stands out as an example of this long slog that ends in success. It took more than a decade of incremental advances -- from forums and chat rooms in the early web to the blogging scene in the early 2000s -- to get to where it stands today: a set of widely-implemented and widely-understood capabilities. So definitely consume that list of use cases, and understand the near-future better. But if you're interested in assessing and leveraging the full potential of Ethereum, definitely learn about its basic capabilities, then open up your imagination. You might see a glimmer of what could be, and perhaps be a part of getting there.
kaonashi 10y ago
The most prevalent seem to be pyramid schemes and gambling apps.
natrius 10y ago
It's a lot easier to find prior art that new technology can improve on once you've found a good metaphor for it. Here's the one I use: Scribes once wrote the history that coordinated societies on scrolls. Ethereum is a digital scroll in the cloud that any app can write permanent entries to. Lots of social problems became much easier to solve once we had written records with a trusted source of truth, and now we can have trusted records for literally any interaction between people that we're willing to make public. As a bonus, there are no scribes we have to trust because the economics of blockchains allow us to hire arbitrary scribes off the street who lose money if they attempt to manipulate records. All individuals can interact as equals without an overseer. The social problem I'm using Ethereum to solve is our drastic underinvestment in public goods—goods that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable, so they're hard to get people to pay for. My hypothesis is that we can put contributions on a digital scroll to unite people in purpose, and perhaps we can build a society that checks the scroll to reward people who have contributed to public goods. Developers who know how to wield these digital scrolls can have as much impact on their society as those who controlled the physical scrolls, but since we can't force people to acknowledge our scrolls, we can only have an impact if we build interactions people actually want to adopt voluntarily. Digital scrolls tie our hands—overt attempts to control users will be routed around.
kang 10y ago
Each of these use cases can be done with bitcoin too. Pick any and I'll tell you how if you couldn't figure out.
kang 10y ago
Each of these use cases can be done with bitcoin. Pick any and I'll tell you how to do it if you couldn't figure it out.
deftnerd 10y ago
I'm rebuilding an old hackathon project, ChainProof, to use Ethereum. It's basically a service that lets people submit facts about themselves and automated or trusted notaries verify the information and vouch for it. DAOs and smart contracts would be able to use the knowledge in really cool ways. A DAO could requires participants to be KYC verified, limited to college students, be accredited investors, pass a background check, etc. Neat thing is that once those checks are done, it'll be attached to their Ethereum identity so they don't have to redo the verification for every compatible service or DAO. Ethereum might have some weaknesses at the moment but it's a lot more exciting than Bitcoin.
Animats 10y ago
Digix: "Gold in tokenized form on the Ethereum blockchain..." Digix: "[ANN] Gatecoin Hacked, only BTC and ETH is currently affected, all DGD tokens are safe."[1] OK, do we have a use case that works? [1] https://medium.com/@Digix https://medium.com/@Digix
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  That part caught me, too. First, I wonder how they were getting it backed by gold and seemlessly. Second, they said the gold investments are safe if they collapse. So... somehow the original source will know for sure that it's yours and easily convert it back to cash? Have any idea what they're using on gold side to do that? It was harder a long time ago when I looked into gold investments as the digital ones were shady enough that I was concerned with money laundering investigation. Getting caught in theirs, that is.
lucio 10y ago
I am missing something? 1. "Gold Investing" >No brokers, no banks, no fractional reserve, near-zero fees, immediate, and secure You need a vault, and also you need that the entity controlling access to the phisical stuff (i.e. gold) is willing to comply. 2. "Crowdfunding" The "smart contract" will need "gas" to run, so there's a "fee" to be payed, not 0%.
rofflez 10y ago
Btc is cool because it requires nothing but the network. The moment you require counterparty (as is the case in the examples), you might as well let the counterparty control the 'logic' of the case as well.
aftbit 10y ago
How do you reach "off-chain" with ethereum? For example, if I invest in gold with Digix, how do I know that I can actually get my gold if Digix decides not to give it to me?

119 points by sethbannon 10y ago

Wow this is REALLY helpful thank you. I can just link to this now when people ask me what the point of Ethereum is.

kefka 10y ago

I'll say it bluntly, because I know some people here really like Ethereum. Ethereum sucks. (Note: I don't want it to...) 1. No checksums on user's accounts. BTC has had checksums from get-go. Ethdevs think that 0xdeadbeef hex keys are just fine. Except that one-off you did (or added a null/0 at the end) just dead-ended your transaction and lost money in the 'chain. Gone for good. Forever, nada, zilch. 2. Blockchain itself isn't checksummed. ?! When you download the chain to do the proof of work calculations, there's no guarantee that a 1-off error didn't creep in the chain you're working with. What's that do? It invalidates every 'work' you do. You're spinning cycles with 100% chance of NO payout. 3. There's no way to auto-pay an account's own gas costs. If I'm a dApp maker, I want to pay to submit the program. Cool. Now if User A wants to execute my app, they have to pay gas (or percents of eth coin). That's a huge suck. Massive suck. I want this cost taken care of so users aren't nickel and dimed to use the damned thing. Right now, nickel-and-dime it is. 4. Software is bad alpha quality. Search for "lost wallet ethereum", and you'll see thousands of people with lost coin. Many errors are the above one-off errors, others are code badly interpreted to lose coin, and others were import errors on the Kickstarter coin purchase. 5. The "Smart Contract" code is completely trapped within the Eth system. I can't query a website and check data from there, nor can I generate random numbers, nor can I do anything that isn't explicitly on the blockchain. That directly implies that gambling apps and similar are completely deterministic and knowable. Effectively, gambling on Eth isn't a random chance with an edge to the house; it's a mathematical guarantee that the house wins, and you lose. Until these flaws are fixed, this sstem isn't worth putting any more money in than you're willing to lose. Because loss is a distinct possibility with the sheer number of bugs and bad code there is.

croddin 10y ago
> 5. The "Smart Contract" code is completely trapped within the Eth system. I can't query a website and check data from there, nor can I generate random numbers, nor can I do anything that isn't explicitly on the blockchain. That directly implies that gambling apps and similar are completely deterministic and knowable. Effectively, gambling on Eth isn't a random chance with an edge to the house; it's a mathematical guarantee that the house wins, and you lose. Wouldn't the proof of work hashes be a good distributed source of entropy?
- kefka 10y ago
  Possibly, but I can have my client delay-submit successful work as to game the system. And when Ethereum switches to Proof-of-Stake, bad shit will happen. (Mainly, its when you wager eth coin on the fact you have a correct-work. Its not hard to see the badness from that...).
  - bryondowd 10y ago
    Not an expert, and this is limited in what you could use it for, but for gambling purposes, couldn't this be dealt with by using the next X hashes after the bet is placed, where X is a large enough number that the likelihood of the better being able to produce that many successful blocks in advance is nil. So, at the simplest, you take a bet, and then use the next two hashes for your random seed to get a result. Even if a miner found a solution for the next hash and withheld it long enough to make a bet, he wouldn't have enough information to do better than random chance. And as I understand it, the entire blockchain relies on the fact that one miner shouldn't be able to generate two blocks faster than the rest of the mining pool. Increasing from two grants even greater certainty. Of course, the trade off here is that you have to wait for X blocks to be generated after a random number is requested and before being able to use it. So, your gambler has to sit around a bit to find out if they win, rather than instant feedback. (Of course, for gambling, you can hide this with some pretty animations of a roulette wheel, dice, horses running, etc.)
- mhluongo 10y ago
  I believe that's open to tampering by miners (more easily than a sybil attack, IIRC).

jamespitts 10y ago

Not to overhype the potential of Ethereum, but one can also go beyond the obvious "next steps" and start to see entire new avenues that a technology opens up. I say "start to see" because it is very hard to predict how one particular avenue of unforeseen capability might lead to success! In the early web, there were many of these kinds of use cases talked about and a lot of effort was made to bridge the technological gaps to get to the anticipated capabilities. One use case that stands out in this regard is ecommerce (before secure web connections existed). But the real interesting advances are those that are not obvious from the get-go! These stem from creative modifications, and of course the very long slog of trying to realize the potential of those modifications. It takes confidence in the people who do the work, and it takes many, many failures. Social software stands out as an example of this long slog that ends in success. It took more than a decade of incremental advances -- from forums and chat rooms in the early web to the blogging scene in the early 2000s -- to get to where it stands today: a set of widely-implemented and widely-understood capabilities. So definitely consume that list of use cases, and understand the near-future better. But if you're interested in assessing and leveraging the full potential of Ethereum, definitely learn about its basic capabilities, then open up your imagination. You might see a glimmer of what could be, and perhaps be a part of getting there.

kaonashi 10y ago

The most prevalent seem to be pyramid schemes and gambling apps.

natrius 10y ago

It's a lot easier to find prior art that new technology can improve on once you've found a good metaphor for it. Here's the one I use: Scribes once wrote the history that coordinated societies on scrolls. Ethereum is a digital scroll in the cloud that any app can write permanent entries to. Lots of social problems became much easier to solve once we had written records with a trusted source of truth, and now we can have trusted records for literally any interaction between people that we're willing to make public. As a bonus, there are no scribes we have to trust because the economics of blockchains allow us to hire arbitrary scribes off the street who lose money if they attempt to manipulate records. All individuals can interact as equals without an overseer. The social problem I'm using Ethereum to solve is our drastic underinvestment in public goods—goods that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable, so they're hard to get people to pay for. My hypothesis is that we can put contributions on a digital scroll to unite people in purpose, and perhaps we can build a society that checks the scroll to reward people who have contributed to public goods. Developers who know how to wield these digital scrolls can have as much impact on their society as those who controlled the physical scrolls, but since we can't force people to acknowledge our scrolls, we can only have an impact if we build interactions people actually want to adopt voluntarily. Digital scrolls tie our hands—overt attempts to control users will be routed around.

kang 10y ago

Each of these use cases can be done with bitcoin too. Pick any and I'll tell you how if you couldn't figure out.

kang 10y ago

Each of these use cases can be done with bitcoin. Pick any and I'll tell you how to do it if you couldn't figure it out.

deftnerd 10y ago

I'm rebuilding an old hackathon project, ChainProof, to use Ethereum. It's basically a service that lets people submit facts about themselves and automated or trusted notaries verify the information and vouch for it. DAOs and smart contracts would be able to use the knowledge in really cool ways. A DAO could requires participants to be KYC verified, limited to college students, be accredited investors, pass a background check, etc. Neat thing is that once those checks are done, it'll be attached to their Ethereum identity so they don't have to redo the verification for every compatible service or DAO. Ethereum might have some weaknesses at the moment but it's a lot more exciting than Bitcoin.

Animats 10y ago

Digix: "Gold in tokenized form on the Ethereum blockchain..." Digix: "[ANN] Gatecoin Hacked, only BTC and ETH is currently affected, all DGD tokens are safe."[1] OK, do we have a use case that works? [1] https://medium.com/@Digix https://medium.com/@Digix

nickpsecurity 10y ago
That part caught me, too. First, I wonder how they were getting it backed by gold and seemlessly. Second, they said the gold investments are safe if they collapse. So... somehow the original source will know for sure that it's yours and easily convert it back to cash? Have any idea what they're using on gold side to do that? It was harder a long time ago when I looked into gold investments as the digital ones were shady enough that I was concerned with money laundering investigation. Getting caught in theirs, that is.

lucio 10y ago

I am missing something? 1. "Gold Investing" >No brokers, no banks, no fractional reserve, near-zero fees, immediate, and secure You need a vault, and also you need that the entity controlling access to the phisical stuff (i.e. gold) is willing to comply. 2. "Crowdfunding" The "smart contract" will need "gas" to run, so there's a "fee" to be payed, not 0%.

rofflez 10y ago

Btc is cool because it requires nothing but the network. The moment you require counterparty (as is the case in the examples), you might as well let the counterparty control the 'logic' of the case as well.

aftbit 10y ago

How do you reach "off-chain" with ethereum? For example, if I invest in gold with Digix, how do I know that I can actually get my gold if Digix decides not to give it to me?