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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 regardl

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.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      > I don't know of any reason that a blockchain based offering couldn't find itself competitive in the marketplace The main reason is that you have shown exactly zero reasons why anyone shold adopt it in a space that's already mostly solved the issue of selling tickets to people. You are teling people to create insane complexity just to solve the single case of selling a single ticket to a single person and pretend that's all there is. And telling people "but it's blockchain so it's good actually". That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works.
      - bmelton 4y ago
        > And telling people "but it's blockchain so it's good actually" I did literally the opposite of that when I said "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." Restated, I am saying that "but it's blockchain so it's good actually" is not a viable sales pitch. All the rest of my comment are reasons that I think are pitchable features. You seem to have imagined me saying something I didn't and are arguing against what you've imagined I said.

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.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > I don't know of any reason that a blockchain based offering couldn't find itself competitive in the marketplace The main reason is that you have shown exactly zero reasons why anyone shold adopt it in a space that's already mostly solved the issue of selling tickets to people. You are teling people to create insane complexity just to solve the single case of selling a single ticket to a single person and pretend that's all there is. And telling people "but it's blockchain so it's good actually". That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works.
    - bmelton 4y ago
      > And telling people "but it's blockchain so it's good actually" I did literally the opposite of that when I said "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." Restated, I am saying that "but it's blockchain so it's good actually" is not a viable sales pitch. All the rest of my comment are reasons that I think are pitchable features. You seem to have imagined me saying something I didn't and are arguing against what you've imagined I said.