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I still think smart contracts are pretty stupid for your everyday person that wants their government to make them whole when they get fleeced. The whole idea o

I still think smart contracts are pretty stupid for your everyday person that wants their government to make them whole when they get fleeced. The whole idea of contract in a legal sense is a human construct. The age old bitcoin joke is that loans are gifts. I’ve used bitcoin for a decade and never touched binance. Mt. Gox creditor never bothered filing a claim either. I could tell you stories about 10 other domains and sites that were trusted that did the same thing. Not your keys, not your coins; not in funny internet money land.

qqii 6y ago
Smart contacts doesn't prevent people from investing in ponzi schemes. What smart contracts do provide is a stricter framework to express guarantees. A good example of a real, everyday use case for smart contracts is NBA Top Shot. Unlike regular collectable the smart contact guarantees the company cannot decide to manufacture more of a rare item, it allows verification of the supply and traded value. A lending contract like Aave simply formalises the economic contracts behind lending. By doing so it can provide stricter guarantees about enforcement. It's not so much of a contract but a strict set of bindings that the EVM will enforce. If you've stayed away from binance perhaps you've used or hear of atomic swaps? They're especially smart contacts that aren't tied to any chain. A strict set of rules and moves to guarentee that the contract of swapping is withheld by both parties.
- leppr 6y ago
  Doesn't diminish your point in itself, but NBA Top Shot is a bad example since it runs on a centralized chain (Flow) and even recently had drama about a user being locked from withdrawing their funds [1]. There are tons of ways trust assumptions about smart contracts can be misunderstood. The current general education level about crypto seems similar to when snake oil sellers where sprinkling "artifical intelligence" in their products to make them "smarter". A drip of "blockchain" and suddenly your product is "trustless". [1]: https://defited.medium.com/my-centralized-experience-dapper-3d3e3a99cbd7 https://defited.medium.com/my-centralized-experience-dapper-...
  - qqii 6y ago
    I did not know this, thank you for brining it up! From the story it looks like this is the classic issue of bridging blockchain with the real world. Am I right in understanding he's trying to withdraw USDC from Flow to Ethereum (https://support.meetdapper.com/hc/en-us/articles/360059124673-Withdrawing-your-Dapper-Balance-in-USDC https://support.meetdapper.com/hc/en-us/articles/36005912467...) and requires KYC and the process is actually centralised? I'd have imagined that Cricle would have build a decentralised flowUSDC-ethUSDC bridge but perhaps there's a regulation reason which also explains the KYC requirements. If this is the case, hopefully someone else can pick up the slack and create a Flow-Eth bridge/atomic swap.
- babyshake 6y ago
  Is there anything preventing them from creating multiple instances of the same "moment" in Top Shot? If not I don't see why the rareness of items in Top Shot is just an illusion.
leppr 6y ago
What would you think of a smart contract that acts trustlessly 99% of the time, but has an escape hatch governed by a set of more or less decentralized/authoritative entities in a multisig? We already have an escape hatch for generalized catastrophic events in the form of hard forks, but I expect in the future more fine-grained schemes to manually resolve local issues will become the norm.

qqii 6y ago

Smart contacts doesn't prevent people from investing in ponzi schemes. What smart contracts do provide is a stricter framework to express guarantees. A good example of a real, everyday use case for smart contracts is NBA Top Shot. Unlike regular collectable the smart contact guarantees the company cannot decide to manufacture more of a rare item, it allows verification of the supply and traded value. A lending contract like Aave simply formalises the economic contracts behind lending. By doing so it can provide stricter guarantees about enforcement. It's not so much of a contract but a strict set of bindings that the EVM will enforce. If you've stayed away from binance perhaps you've used or hear of atomic swaps? They're especially smart contacts that aren't tied to any chain. A strict set of rules and moves to guarentee that the contract of swapping is withheld by both parties.

leppr 6y ago
Doesn't diminish your point in itself, but NBA Top Shot is a bad example since it runs on a centralized chain (Flow) and even recently had drama about a user being locked from withdrawing their funds [1]. There are tons of ways trust assumptions about smart contracts can be misunderstood. The current general education level about crypto seems similar to when snake oil sellers where sprinkling "artifical intelligence" in their products to make them "smarter". A drip of "blockchain" and suddenly your product is "trustless". [1]: https://defited.medium.com/my-centralized-experience-dapper-3d3e3a99cbd7 https://defited.medium.com/my-centralized-experience-dapper-...
- qqii 6y ago
  I did not know this, thank you for brining it up! From the story it looks like this is the classic issue of bridging blockchain with the real world. Am I right in understanding he's trying to withdraw USDC from Flow to Ethereum (https://support.meetdapper.com/hc/en-us/articles/360059124673-Withdrawing-your-Dapper-Balance-in-USDC https://support.meetdapper.com/hc/en-us/articles/36005912467...) and requires KYC and the process is actually centralised? I'd have imagined that Cricle would have build a decentralised flowUSDC-ethUSDC bridge but perhaps there's a regulation reason which also explains the KYC requirements. If this is the case, hopefully someone else can pick up the slack and create a Flow-Eth bridge/atomic swap.
babyshake 6y ago
Is there anything preventing them from creating multiple instances of the same "moment" in Top Shot? If not I don't see why the rareness of items in Top Shot is just an illusion.

leppr 6y ago

What would you think of a smart contract that acts trustlessly 99% of the time, but has an escape hatch governed by a set of more or less decentralized/authoritative entities in a multisig? We already have an escape hatch for generalized catastrophic events in the form of hard forks, but I expect in the future more fine-grained schemes to manually resolve local issues will become the norm.