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Your reply appears disingenuous to me. Obviously the smart-contract has control over the tokens, the problem is that tokens are the only thing they can control

Your reply appears disingenuous to me. Obviously the smart-contract has control over the tokens, the problem is that tokens are the only thing they can control or even be trusted to reason about. People don't care about tokens, they care about all the other assets that blockchain enthusiasts are always talking about tokenizing like houses, art, land-deeds, shipping containers etc etc. None of that is workable. If your only point is to tell me that blockchain tokens can be moved around autonomously on the internet... great, welcome to a decade ago, now why is that useful?

rstuart4133 8y ago
> People don't care about tokens, they care about all the other assets that blockchain enthusiasts are always talking about tokenizing like houses, art, land-deeds, shipping containers etc etc. You were talking about smart contracts. My answer was about smart contracts I've seen deployed - things like the lighting network and Ethereum's ICO's. If you are saying using the blockchains to manage land-deeds will never work, well maybe you are right. As far as I am aware using a blockchain to directly manage the things you mention hasn't been made to work yet, and to be honest I don't see how it could be made to work. But using a block chain indirectly to control some of these things seems possible. That's what Ethereum ICO's endeavour to do, and perhaps out there is an ICO out there that works now (I haven't been following). If so it works via the mechanism I described. The ICO turns the "thing" being controlled (CPU Cycles, storage, or whatever) into a tradable commodity which is another way it the flow of the commodity is controlled by money. As you must be aware successful virtual currencies control the flow of money, which in turns means they can be used to control the flow of the commodity. Smart contracts control flow of virtual currencies. QED - smart controls can control commodities. None of this depends on governments, guns or violence. Instead it depends on there being a market. The reason the value in the virtual currency is secure is because there are lots of people willing to pay for it. The reason purchasing CPU Cycles is secure is because there are lots of people willing to sell you CPU cycles and so a vendor doesn't deliver CPU cycles the customers just move on, the vendor dies but the market continues on happily. How this could be extended to land-deeds is, as you say, difficult to imagine. But claiming this means "Smart contracts are DOA" is just plain wrong - they work for lots of things, just not the examples you happened to be thinking about.

rstuart4133 8y ago

> People don't care about tokens, they care about all the other assets that blockchain enthusiasts are always talking about tokenizing like houses, art, land-deeds, shipping containers etc etc. You were talking about smart contracts. My answer was about smart contracts I've seen deployed - things like the lighting network and Ethereum's ICO's. If you are saying using the blockchains to manage land-deeds will never work, well maybe you are right. As far as I am aware using a blockchain to directly manage the things you mention hasn't been made to work yet, and to be honest I don't see how it could be made to work. But using a block chain indirectly to control some of these things seems possible. That's what Ethereum ICO's endeavour to do, and perhaps out there is an ICO out there that works now (I haven't been following). If so it works via the mechanism I described. The ICO turns the "thing" being controlled (CPU Cycles, storage, or whatever) into a tradable commodity which is another way it the flow of the commodity is controlled by money. As you must be aware successful virtual currencies control the flow of money, which in turns means they can be used to control the flow of the commodity. Smart contracts control flow of virtual currencies. QED - smart controls can control commodities. None of this depends on governments, guns or violence. Instead it depends on there being a market. The reason the value in the virtual currency is secure is because there are lots of people willing to pay for it. The reason purchasing CPU Cycles is secure is because there are lots of people willing to sell you CPU cycles and so a vendor doesn't deliver CPU cycles the customers just move on, the vendor dies but the market continues on happily. How this could be extended to land-deeds is, as you say, difficult to imagine. But claiming this means "Smart contracts are DOA" is just plain wrong - they work for lots of things, just not the examples you happened to be thinking about.