4 ms·

I quite like oracle based betting. Lots of sports/gaming/news apps have public APIs to see the results of something - aggregate them, plug them into a smart con

by exdsq 4y ago

I quite like oracle based betting. Lots of sports/gaming/news apps have public APIs to see the results of something - aggregate them, plug them into a smart contract, and bet a total stranger on the outcome of an event with internet money held in an escrow account paid to the winner. Getting pretty simple to set up nowadays with drag and drop oracle creation a with some cool results, such as betting $10 on a 1v1 CoD game.

peteforde 4y ago
Very few human social outcomes are truly improved by adding the ability to gamble.
- dtagames 4y ago
  It could be argued that gambling is central to human activity. Its ultimate form is the stock market. In essence, everyone gambles every day on many kinds of outcomes, from choosing foods that won't kill us to driving safely, investing in one career and hobby over another, or picking a mating partner.
  - peteforde 4y ago
    It'd be very hard for me to disagree with the spirit of your reply more than I do. Creating opportunities for people to gamble - new casinos, scratch-off tickets, those sad machines you see in bars - all of these are cash generation vehicles that historically have highly negative outcomes for members of the communities they are dropped into. Especially for groups that are already disadvantaged. This isn't academic speculation. As for gambling on every day outcomes - otherwise known as living your life - it's reasonable to say that one of the fundamental measures of progress as a species and a society is our distance from accidentally eating poisoned food, dangerous driving, a lack of opportunity and self-determination, and being forced to accept bad partners. In other words, the more we remove gambling, the better our lives become.
    - dtagames 4y ago
      I agree that casinos and crypto are predatory businesses. But I noticed you skipped the stock market -- which was my first and most important example. It would be difficult to argue in the modern world that the stock market is "bad" and we shouldn't have one. Yet it is undeniably a form of gambling -- the most advanced and expensive one, reserved for only the wealthiest gamblers.
      - peteforde 4y ago
        I actually don't think it's gambling, tbh. There's an interesting discussion to be had about truly free markets, for sure. However, the modern stock market is neither fair nor random. It's not accessible to you or I in the same way that it is to financial institutions. Front-running and dark pools are accepted as normal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP74RBTE8kI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP74RBTE8kI I would also suggest that Warren Buffett does not see the stock market as random or gambling. When he buys a company, it comes after huge amounts of research. A good stock trader obsessively researches the companies that they invest in. While it might not be anything like a guarantee of success, I sure hope you have better than Vegas odds when investing in a company that you've learned everything you can learn about without becoming an employee.
edflsafoiewq 4y ago
So speculation and gambling? Add crime too I guess.
jollybean 4y ago
Those are not 'smart contracts' in the sense you think they are. They are (probably) governed by some kind of broader contract, and can probably be 'undone' or come under regulator scrutiny. 'Smart contracts' are a neat way for parties to 'agree' on something in a distributed way - but there's just no way that they will live up to being 'regular contracts'. Maybe for some things like currency exchange - maybe. But for anything else that happens in this world, contracts are complicated and require nuance. And there's always lawyers and a Judge and regulators that might want to have a say. And while the application you've described is 'neat' - it doesn't really accomplish much. It's a novelty. I see zero use for blockchain thus far - other than the eventual appearance of a possibly useful kind of crypto asset that doesn't exist yet because BTC and Etherium are full of flaws.
- exdsq 4y ago
  > Those are not 'smart contracts' in the sense you think they are. > They are (probably) governed by some kind of broader contract, and can probably be 'undone' or come under regulator scrutiny. By smart contract, in this regard, I mean an Ethereum Solidity contract connected to an Oracle that has an Escrow component. The way I see it is there are many companies at the moment that sit in the middle and mediate things by offering escrow services and trust that if you send X you'll receive Y. Crypto lets you start moving those things into a P2P setting by its nature of atomic transactions, programatic contracts/money, etc... Which I find pretty cool and I think a lot of people who spend some time in the space find cool too. FWIW I was skeptical when I first found a bitcoin ATM at Google Campus in 2014 and only really 'got it' in 2020 after years of saying WTF is the point? And for me that was when I was trying to organise an esports tournament with some strangers online and couldn't decide on how payments would work, while the services that managed this (read some API results and paid out after 7 working days) took a 15% fee.
  - jollybean 4y ago
    Those are good thoughts - the issue with 'escrow' however remains complicated - it generally implies some kind of authoritative clearing of a contract by some kind of 3rd party. If 2 people are arbitrarily entering into a contract, then I'm not sure how much 'true escrow' can really be had.
trinovantes 4y ago
So instead of a centralized escrow, you want a decentralized contract to run on a centralized API? Either way, you're still trusting some 3rd party
gentleman11 4y ago
So it isn’t just gambling on crypto prices that web3 is good for; what people don’t realize is that it’s also really great for ordinary gambling? (Half joking)

by exdsq 4y ago

peteforde 4y ago

Very few human social outcomes are truly improved by adding the ability to gamble.

dtagames 4y ago
It could be argued that gambling is central to human activity. Its ultimate form is the stock market. In essence, everyone gambles every day on many kinds of outcomes, from choosing foods that won't kill us to driving safely, investing in one career and hobby over another, or picking a mating partner.
- peteforde 4y ago
  It'd be very hard for me to disagree with the spirit of your reply more than I do. Creating opportunities for people to gamble - new casinos, scratch-off tickets, those sad machines you see in bars - all of these are cash generation vehicles that historically have highly negative outcomes for members of the communities they are dropped into. Especially for groups that are already disadvantaged. This isn't academic speculation. As for gambling on every day outcomes - otherwise known as living your life - it's reasonable to say that one of the fundamental measures of progress as a species and a society is our distance from accidentally eating poisoned food, dangerous driving, a lack of opportunity and self-determination, and being forced to accept bad partners. In other words, the more we remove gambling, the better our lives become.
  - dtagames 4y ago
    I agree that casinos and crypto are predatory businesses. But I noticed you skipped the stock market -- which was my first and most important example. It would be difficult to argue in the modern world that the stock market is "bad" and we shouldn't have one. Yet it is undeniably a form of gambling -- the most advanced and expensive one, reserved for only the wealthiest gamblers.
    - peteforde 4y ago
      I actually don't think it's gambling, tbh. There's an interesting discussion to be had about truly free markets, for sure. However, the modern stock market is neither fair nor random. It's not accessible to you or I in the same way that it is to financial institutions. Front-running and dark pools are accepted as normal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP74RBTE8kI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP74RBTE8kI I would also suggest that Warren Buffett does not see the stock market as random or gambling. When he buys a company, it comes after huge amounts of research. A good stock trader obsessively researches the companies that they invest in. While it might not be anything like a guarantee of success, I sure hope you have better than Vegas odds when investing in a company that you've learned everything you can learn about without becoming an employee.

edflsafoiewq 4y ago

So speculation and gambling? Add crime too I guess.

jollybean 4y ago

Those are not 'smart contracts' in the sense you think they are. They are (probably) governed by some kind of broader contract, and can probably be 'undone' or come under regulator scrutiny. 'Smart contracts' are a neat way for parties to 'agree' on something in a distributed way - but there's just no way that they will live up to being 'regular contracts'. Maybe for some things like currency exchange - maybe. But for anything else that happens in this world, contracts are complicated and require nuance. And there's always lawyers and a Judge and regulators that might want to have a say. And while the application you've described is 'neat' - it doesn't really accomplish much. It's a novelty. I see zero use for blockchain thus far - other than the eventual appearance of a possibly useful kind of crypto asset that doesn't exist yet because BTC and Etherium are full of flaws.

exdsq 4y ago
> Those are not 'smart contracts' in the sense you think they are. > They are (probably) governed by some kind of broader contract, and can probably be 'undone' or come under regulator scrutiny. By smart contract, in this regard, I mean an Ethereum Solidity contract connected to an Oracle that has an Escrow component. The way I see it is there are many companies at the moment that sit in the middle and mediate things by offering escrow services and trust that if you send X you'll receive Y. Crypto lets you start moving those things into a P2P setting by its nature of atomic transactions, programatic contracts/money, etc... Which I find pretty cool and I think a lot of people who spend some time in the space find cool too. FWIW I was skeptical when I first found a bitcoin ATM at Google Campus in 2014 and only really 'got it' in 2020 after years of saying WTF is the point? And for me that was when I was trying to organise an esports tournament with some strangers online and couldn't decide on how payments would work, while the services that managed this (read some API results and paid out after 7 working days) took a 15% fee.
- jollybean 4y ago
  Those are good thoughts - the issue with 'escrow' however remains complicated - it generally implies some kind of authoritative clearing of a contract by some kind of 3rd party. If 2 people are arbitrarily entering into a contract, then I'm not sure how much 'true escrow' can really be had.

trinovantes 4y ago

So instead of a centralized escrow, you want a decentralized contract to run on a centralized API? Either way, you're still trusting some 3rd party

gentleman11 4y ago

So it isn’t just gambling on crypto prices that web3 is good for; what people don’t realize is that it’s also really great for ordinary gambling? (Half joking)