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Well there are smart contracts which can act as an escrow service. I don't know how that works in reality, though. If smart contracts have to be deterministic h
by nobody271 8y ago
Well there are smart contracts which can act as an escrow service. I don't know how that works in reality, though. If smart contracts have to be deterministic how can they be used to guarantee that, say, a delivery was made? I want to belieber.
- PeterisP 8y agoThe way how that's usually done within smart contracts relies on a trusted (the key word here) "oracle" that is considered to hold the truth about reality. E.g. you may have a smart contract that's conditional on the price of some stocks in the future or on the result of some sports game. It'll get the information about the price of these stocks from some place which is assumed to tell the truth, that's the oracle - for example, it could be some NASDAQ service or the sports league website. However, it's obviously not guaranteed to tell the truth about the reality, you need to trust it, because if it lies, there's no recourse afterwards. If I make a "real" bet on the superbowl results and bribe the superbowl website admin to publish a wrong result on the official site for 5 minutes at the right time while my bet is settled, then the bet will be revoked afterwards by the courts; however, if it's a smart contract looking at that site, then once I've cheated the escrow service, then I've won because it was falsely trusted.
- nobody271 8y agoWhat if the oracle stops working or gives inconsistent results? Do you think having to rely on oracles is a major flaw in that they will become trust authorities?
- hanniabu 8y agoThis is where consensus comes in. Projects like Blocknet have the ability where you can request an answer from N amount of nodes and the response will be that of the majority.