7 ms·

Some of your examples need oracles to deliver information into the script, which is (oh no!) your counter party so you're back to square one again. It doesn't w

by 0x8D3A 11y ago

Some of your examples need oracles to deliver information into the script, which is (oh no!) your counter party so you're back to square one again. It doesn't work in any other way due to the realities of distributed consensus. The example of a poker system within Ethereum is incredibly unlikely, a social network or Uber clone the same but for meatspace issues rather than cryptographic ones. I've still yet to come across a single person who can give me a compelling reason for Ethereum to exist other than "this is awesome because it will change the world" or other similar drivel. It's always impossible due to limits in Ethereum's design, limits of reality, or just stuff you can do in Bitcoin anyway and nobody has realized.

drcode 11y ago
The goal is to minimize counterparty risk, not entirely eliminate it... you are right that in many cases that just isn't possible.
- 0x8D3A 11y ago
  Even in cases where it might be possible the end result to a human is often completely unusable. You might hate the Uber taxi cartel or whatever, but at least using them you have some degree of privacy (with "smart contracts" your privacy is absolutely gone, and not just financial privacy) and customer service. For example there's a fad of putting "ownership" of physical assets into bitcoin tokens for example, fine, that works until someone steals the token and not the physical asset. Now who owns the asset? Reality is out of sync with what the block chain says so, there's no support to help me get it back and no backdoor. Privacy is even harder. With Bitcoin everyone knows what you spend, where you spend it, probably what you spend it too with some extrapolation. With "smart contracts" now everybody knows who your arbitrator is, who you play poker with, what brand of fridge you own. There's no getting around that if you want a public ledger.
  - bachback 11y ago
    Much agree - those are the big conceptual holes in smart contracts. The concept still has a lot of merit, in the very long term. It's a bit like trying to imagine Google in 1993. Most of the things one can assume are most likely going to be wrong, including even the usages of these systems. I'd personally start with extending the Bitcoin script and thinking about better ways for multiple users to use it.
    - 0x8D3A 11y ago
      It boils down the point that you don't actually want to be doing computation at that level anyway. There's a very good reason that Bitcoin Script should be simplistic, why the hell would you want to be doing any sort of detailed computation at that level? With n nodes on the network you amplify the load n times, why not do it on an oracle where it's practically free? There's already comments by the Ethereum developers that it will be incredibly hard for a client to ever bootstrap from genesis once they launch, just due to the insane amount of script execution time. If you're taking input from an oracle (you almost always are), you have the same level of trust in it anyway, you just moved computation into the stupidly expensive and massively redundant portion of the system. The 'solutions' for distributed oracles with ShellingCoin and related garbage is just hand wavy nonsense with so little basis in reality that it's not worth talking about.
      - bachback 11y ago
        I agree that there is a lot drivel, but I'd extend that to Bitcoin discussions also, where rarely economic underpinnings get discussed. There is this notion of a contract. In a democracy a valid contract is an agreement (say between 2 parties) which is enforceable by courts and executive. Enforceable means that there is a cost of cheating. Even the most simple purchase contains a purchase agreement. If Alice walks into Bob's store and takes something without paying, then this is what we call theft (although the precise details of theft can be argued about ad infinitum). In the real world when we enter agreements, we usually know to some extent who we are dealing with (Alice knows Bob's store). What would an arbitrary agreement over a network look like? That's hard to say. An analogon of a court is some arbitrary human decision, which can serve as an input. In Bitcoin there is no notion of an agreement, only cash transactions (and some limited facilities for escrow). I believe that the concept of an oracle, and several other crypto-terms like Zero-knowledge proofs are an academic dead end. For my purposes I'm assuming that most people who want to use crypto systems don't understand or care about these things. There will be a great need for mapping abstract concepts to useful tools, such as an GUI operating system maps very abstract physical calculations and processes and makes them usable. I suspect 99% of Bitcoin users don't understand public-key cryptography, much less Elliptic curves and distributed systems. "Key", "signature" and "coins" are useful metaphors. What is already happening are the first beginnings of joint stock ownership developing (DAC's) with mixtures of online formal agreements and informal agreements. Voting is not a panacea, but it helps. That's the kind of contract that can be developed in the short term.
natrius 11y ago
Distributed oracles exist both via prediction markets like Augur and simpler constructions like ShellingCoin.
- 0x8D3A 11y ago
  ShellingCoin has pretty hand wavy economic justifications and won't see real world use (or if it does, it'll see use until it loses people lots of money due to faulty incentives).
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - drcode 11y ago
    Look, nobody disagrees with you that there's a risk of failure when people try building new things. Are you saying you have citations that prove ShellingCoin won't work? Are you saying you have a citation from an ethereum developer that these ideas are 100% certain to work out on the first attempt? If not, why are you complaining about people unconnected to you trying these new ideas out as an experiment? Nobody disagrees that these are new and untested ideas.
    - 0x8D3A 11y ago
      > If not, why are you complaining about people unconnected to you trying these new ideas out as an experiment? No, I take issue with them selling broken shit to people for tens of millions of dollars.
      - drcode 11y ago
        You're trying to change the framing of this conversation. The 4 comment parents above this one all concern Schellingcoin and Augur. Nobody has spent a nickel on those systems. I agree that the core ethereum tech is 100% fair game for criticism, but that's not what's being discussed here.

by 0x8D3A 11y ago

drcode 11y ago

The goal is to minimize counterparty risk, not entirely eliminate it... you are right that in many cases that just isn't possible.

0x8D3A 11y ago
Even in cases where it might be possible the end result to a human is often completely unusable. You might hate the Uber taxi cartel or whatever, but at least using them you have some degree of privacy (with "smart contracts" your privacy is absolutely gone, and not just financial privacy) and customer service. For example there's a fad of putting "ownership" of physical assets into bitcoin tokens for example, fine, that works until someone steals the token and not the physical asset. Now who owns the asset? Reality is out of sync with what the block chain says so, there's no support to help me get it back and no backdoor. Privacy is even harder. With Bitcoin everyone knows what you spend, where you spend it, probably what you spend it too with some extrapolation. With "smart contracts" now everybody knows who your arbitrator is, who you play poker with, what brand of fridge you own. There's no getting around that if you want a public ledger.
- bachback 11y ago
  Much agree - those are the big conceptual holes in smart contracts. The concept still has a lot of merit, in the very long term. It's a bit like trying to imagine Google in 1993. Most of the things one can assume are most likely going to be wrong, including even the usages of these systems. I'd personally start with extending the Bitcoin script and thinking about better ways for multiple users to use it.
  - 0x8D3A 11y ago
    It boils down the point that you don't actually want to be doing computation at that level anyway. There's a very good reason that Bitcoin Script should be simplistic, why the hell would you want to be doing any sort of detailed computation at that level? With n nodes on the network you amplify the load n times, why not do it on an oracle where it's practically free? There's already comments by the Ethereum developers that it will be incredibly hard for a client to ever bootstrap from genesis once they launch, just due to the insane amount of script execution time. If you're taking input from an oracle (you almost always are), you have the same level of trust in it anyway, you just moved computation into the stupidly expensive and massively redundant portion of the system. The 'solutions' for distributed oracles with ShellingCoin and related garbage is just hand wavy nonsense with so little basis in reality that it's not worth talking about.
    - bachback 11y ago
      I agree that there is a lot drivel, but I'd extend that to Bitcoin discussions also, where rarely economic underpinnings get discussed. There is this notion of a contract. In a democracy a valid contract is an agreement (say between 2 parties) which is enforceable by courts and executive. Enforceable means that there is a cost of cheating. Even the most simple purchase contains a purchase agreement. If Alice walks into Bob's store and takes something without paying, then this is what we call theft (although the precise details of theft can be argued about ad infinitum). In the real world when we enter agreements, we usually know to some extent who we are dealing with (Alice knows Bob's store). What would an arbitrary agreement over a network look like? That's hard to say. An analogon of a court is some arbitrary human decision, which can serve as an input. In Bitcoin there is no notion of an agreement, only cash transactions (and some limited facilities for escrow). I believe that the concept of an oracle, and several other crypto-terms like Zero-knowledge proofs are an academic dead end. For my purposes I'm assuming that most people who want to use crypto systems don't understand or care about these things. There will be a great need for mapping abstract concepts to useful tools, such as an GUI operating system maps very abstract physical calculations and processes and makes them usable. I suspect 99% of Bitcoin users don't understand public-key cryptography, much less Elliptic curves and distributed systems. "Key", "signature" and "coins" are useful metaphors. What is already happening are the first beginnings of joint stock ownership developing (DAC's) with mixtures of online formal agreements and informal agreements. Voting is not a panacea, but it helps. That's the kind of contract that can be developed in the short term.

natrius 11y ago

Distributed oracles exist both via prediction markets like Augur and simpler constructions like ShellingCoin.

0x8D3A 11y ago
ShellingCoin has pretty hand wavy economic justifications and won't see real world use (or if it does, it'll see use until it loses people lots of money due to faulty incentives).
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- drcode 11y ago
  Look, nobody disagrees with you that there's a risk of failure when people try building new things. Are you saying you have citations that prove ShellingCoin won't work? Are you saying you have a citation from an ethereum developer that these ideas are 100% certain to work out on the first attempt? If not, why are you complaining about people unconnected to you trying these new ideas out as an experiment? Nobody disagrees that these are new and untested ideas.
  - 0x8D3A 11y ago
    > If not, why are you complaining about people unconnected to you trying these new ideas out as an experiment? No, I take issue with them selling broken shit to people for tens of millions of dollars.
    - drcode 11y ago
      You're trying to change the framing of this conversation. The 4 comment parents above this one all concern Schellingcoin and Augur. Nobody has spent a nickel on those systems. I agree that the core ethereum tech is 100% fair game for criticism, but that's not what's being discussed here.