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Anything that connects to the physical world makes little sense at the moment as it defeats the purpose of such a smart contract. What you can do is anything t

Anything that connects to the physical world makes little sense at the moment as it defeats the purpose of such a smart contract. What you can do is anything that is related to moving ETH or ERC tokens/NFTs between addresses. So an example that you see often is a Kickstarter type contract. This contract collects ETH from many sources over a period of time but will only pay out to the payout address if the minimum is reached in that time period. Otherwise all the funds are returned. This contract is fully autonomous and can be validated to do what it is supposed to do. You don't have to trust a single company like Kickstarter to follow the rules or not cancled your compain. The project being a scam or not compleeting is another story. So in other words what you can do in a smart contract are financial constructs that are zero trust. The reason many scams happen is also in part that people are not checking that the contracts are solid and prevent rug pulls etc.

imtringued 4y ago
Yeah remember, you're supposed to upload your mind into the computer if you want to live in that kind of world. What will happen to you in the case of a fork? There will be two of you.
fwip 4y ago
> Anything that connects to the physical world makes little sense at the moment as it defeats the purpose of such a smart contract. Which is why they're useless except for implementing complicated financial schemes. Which, in practice, are mostly scams.
cortesoft 4y ago
I don’t understand the benefit of that… in the end, you have to trust the person you are sending the coins to to do what they say the will. This is true regardless of the smart contract. The only thing the smart contract does is guarantee that at least other people are also getting scammed. Come to think of it, though, it doesn’t even guarantee that. The person who created the contract and will get the funds if the minimum is reached could always just send ETH from one of their other own accounts to trigger the threshold.
- bmelton 4y ago
  It makes sense for things that the contract can control. If the contact enforces that when $tokenAmount is sent to $address, $asset is sent to $depositor. If and when more things exist on the blockchain, and/or more physical institutions sign on to it, and/or more and more digital goods are worth transacting in such a fashion, then smart contracts will make more sense. If neither of those materialize more tangibly than they do, it'll be hard to manufacture use cases for it, I think (though I am hardly an expert). But considering the types of things that are already mostly digital, it seems like we have the _potential_ to lean into the latter case. Domain names, accounts, Github subscriptions, e-books, music, rights to watch movies / television shows, etc., those things could all be integrated into the blockchain and enforced via smart contracts easily. Probably the best use case I've seen is stadium / conference tickets, but if we ever get to a phase where companies significantly adopt, we can do some interesting things, like communal ownership of assets. Ownership stake can be variable, depending on who is doing the most work. Profits could then conceivably be distributed among those who have earned it the most. "What to do next" could be a decision that is decided upon by a council of token-holders, for better or worse, and truly non-managerial workers could meaningfully participate in a company's decision-making, profit-sharing, etc.
  - cortesoft 4y ago
    Ok, let's take your example; concert tickets. You will still need to trust a central authority (the concert venue) to honor your ticket. Why not just let the concert venue own the whole thing?
    - bmelton 4y ago
      tbf, it's not "my" idea, there are just a couple of NFT-based ticket sales startups that exist and I am aware of them. The main benefit I would see from the venue's perspective is in both scalping prevention and achieving price equilibrium with less effort, because smart contracts can allow a rake to be collected on each resale of a ticket. Beyond that, while this use case doesn't appeal to me, I know of people who've collected scrapbooks of concert tickets, but the NFTs of the tickets are a collectible item (to whatever extent someone deems a digital asset "collectible") and can be potential collected in a digital scrapbook as either social proof or memoria. That said, there's nothing in my view that mandates that the central authority doesn't own the whole thing. You can own the whole thing, either on your own token, or as a non-blockchain product altogether -- or not at all, but there are existing tools and technologies that allow for easier on-ramps than building it yourself and I think most venues don't particularly care what the technology is or that it's NFTs or that it's blockchain, so I don't know of any reason that a blockchain based offering couldn't find itself competitive in the marketplace unless their sales pitch is exclusively that.
boomerango 4y ago
If you are interested in learning more about the space, look into Chainlink oracles.
leashless 4y ago
This is not true. Let me quote the UK's Head of Civil Justice: 6. The theory is to dispel the myth that blockchain is a fringe technology used only by those wanting to risk their livelihoods or possibly make their fortunes on volatile cryptoassets like Bitcoin. 7. The blockchain is now at a stage in its development equivalent to where the internet was in or around 1995. The internet was unstoppable in 1995 and blockchain technology is unstoppable now. It will become ubiquitous in all major industrial and financial sectors, simply because it allows for the immutable recording of data, thereby reducing friction in commercial and consumer transactions and obliterating the scope for dispute as to what has occurred. 8. As the Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice in England and Wales, I hold an office that pre-dates modern trade in derivatives and reinsurance, even steam engines, powered flight, and certainly the internet. I am particularly and obviously concerned about the reputation and development of English law and the jurisdiction of England and Wales. 9. Many people do not realise that English law governs trading in €600 trillion of OTC derivatives annually, in €11.6 trillion in metals trading, in £250 billion in M&A deals, and in £80 billion in insurance contracts every year – just to take a few examples. My hope is that English law will prove to be the law of choice for borderless blockchain technology as its take up grows exponentially in the months and years to come. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Speech-MR-to-Smarter-Contracts-Report-Launch-Lawtech-UK-UKJT-Blockchain-Smart-Contracts.pdf https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Speech-M...
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  I don’t think this makes the case that you are claiming. Smart contracts are not the equivalent legal contracts, it’s a very good word. As for #6, I think people are more interested in more complicated rug-pulls involving NFTs then just trading BTC.
- shkkmo 4y ago
  This seems like a non-sequitor. It is not clear what you are disagreeing with or what point you are trying to make with that quote, besides that a top UK lawyer is pro-crypto.
  - 4y ago
dmitriid 4y ago
> that people are not checking that the contracts are solid Ah yes. It's the people's fault that they don't check code in esoteric programming languages running on esoteric VMs using made up words for everything.
- imtringued 4y ago
  https://docs.reflexer.finance/contract-translation/naming-transition https://docs.reflexer.finance/contract-translation/naming-tr... Sometimes it feels like Urbit...
root_axis 4y ago
> This contract is fully autonomous and can be validated to do what it is supposed to do Not really true, though you can at least look at the code for all the good it'll do most people.

imtringued 4y ago

Yeah remember, you're supposed to upload your mind into the computer if you want to live in that kind of world. What will happen to you in the case of a fork? There will be two of you.

fwip 4y ago

> Anything that connects to the physical world makes little sense at the moment as it defeats the purpose of such a smart contract. Which is why they're useless except for implementing complicated financial schemes. Which, in practice, are mostly scams.

cortesoft 4y ago

I don’t understand the benefit of that… in the end, you have to trust the person you are sending the coins to to do what they say the will. This is true regardless of the smart contract. The only thing the smart contract does is guarantee that at least other people are also getting scammed. Come to think of it, though, it doesn’t even guarantee that. The person who created the contract and will get the funds if the minimum is reached could always just send ETH from one of their other own accounts to trigger the threshold.

bmelton 4y ago
It makes sense for things that the contract can control. If the contact enforces that when $tokenAmount is sent to $address, $asset is sent to $depositor. If and when more things exist on the blockchain, and/or more physical institutions sign on to it, and/or more and more digital goods are worth transacting in such a fashion, then smart contracts will make more sense. If neither of those materialize more tangibly than they do, it'll be hard to manufacture use cases for it, I think (though I am hardly an expert). But considering the types of things that are already mostly digital, it seems like we have the _potential_ to lean into the latter case. Domain names, accounts, Github subscriptions, e-books, music, rights to watch movies / television shows, etc., those things could all be integrated into the blockchain and enforced via smart contracts easily. Probably the best use case I've seen is stadium / conference tickets, but if we ever get to a phase where companies significantly adopt, we can do some interesting things, like communal ownership of assets. Ownership stake can be variable, depending on who is doing the most work. Profits could then conceivably be distributed among those who have earned it the most. "What to do next" could be a decision that is decided upon by a council of token-holders, for better or worse, and truly non-managerial workers could meaningfully participate in a company's decision-making, profit-sharing, etc.
- cortesoft 4y ago
  Ok, let's take your example; concert tickets. You will still need to trust a central authority (the concert venue) to honor your ticket. Why not just let the concert venue own the whole thing?
  - bmelton 4y ago
    tbf, it's not "my" idea, there are just a couple of NFT-based ticket sales startups that exist and I am aware of them. The main benefit I would see from the venue's perspective is in both scalping prevention and achieving price equilibrium with less effort, because smart contracts can allow a rake to be collected on each resale of a ticket. Beyond that, while this use case doesn't appeal to me, I know of people who've collected scrapbooks of concert tickets, but the NFTs of the tickets are a collectible item (to whatever extent someone deems a digital asset "collectible") and can be potential collected in a digital scrapbook as either social proof or memoria. That said, there's nothing in my view that mandates that the central authority doesn't own the whole thing. You can own the whole thing, either on your own token, or as a non-blockchain product altogether -- or not at all, but there are existing tools and technologies that allow for easier on-ramps than building it yourself and I think most venues don't particularly care what the technology is or that it's NFTs or that it's blockchain, so I don't know of any reason that a blockchain based offering couldn't find itself competitive in the marketplace unless their sales pitch is exclusively that.

boomerango 4y ago

If you are interested in learning more about the space, look into Chainlink oracles.

leashless 4y ago

This is not true. Let me quote the UK's Head of Civil Justice: 6. The theory is to dispel the myth that blockchain is a fringe technology used only by those wanting to risk their livelihoods or possibly make their fortunes on volatile cryptoassets like Bitcoin. 7. The blockchain is now at a stage in its development equivalent to where the internet was in or around 1995. The internet was unstoppable in 1995 and blockchain technology is unstoppable now. It will become ubiquitous in all major industrial and financial sectors, simply because it allows for the immutable recording of data, thereby reducing friction in commercial and consumer transactions and obliterating the scope for dispute as to what has occurred. 8. As the Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice in England and Wales, I hold an office that pre-dates modern trade in derivatives and reinsurance, even steam engines, powered flight, and certainly the internet. I am particularly and obviously concerned about the reputation and development of English law and the jurisdiction of England and Wales. 9. Many people do not realise that English law governs trading in €600 trillion of OTC derivatives annually, in €11.6 trillion in metals trading, in £250 billion in M&A deals, and in £80 billion in insurance contracts every year – just to take a few examples. My hope is that English law will prove to be the law of choice for borderless blockchain technology as its take up grows exponentially in the months and years to come. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Speech-MR-to-Smarter-Contracts-Report-Launch-Lawtech-UK-UKJT-Blockchain-Smart-Contracts.pdf https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Speech-M...

dinkumthinkum 4y ago
I don’t think this makes the case that you are claiming. Smart contracts are not the equivalent legal contracts, it’s a very good word. As for #6, I think people are more interested in more complicated rug-pulls involving NFTs then just trading BTC.
shkkmo 4y ago
This seems like a non-sequitor. It is not clear what you are disagreeing with or what point you are trying to make with that quote, besides that a top UK lawyer is pro-crypto.
- 4y ago

dmitriid 4y ago

> that people are not checking that the contracts are solid Ah yes. It's the people's fault that they don't check code in esoteric programming languages running on esoteric VMs using made up words for everything.

imtringued 4y ago
https://docs.reflexer.finance/contract-translation/naming-transition https://docs.reflexer.finance/contract-translation/naming-tr... Sometimes it feels like Urbit...

root_axis 4y ago

> This contract is fully autonomous and can be validated to do what it is supposed to do Not really true, though you can at least look at the code for all the good it'll do most people.