Show HN: Building a no gimmick smart contract platform as a service

I do not mean to discourage you but what you are building is not smart contracts but just a worse version of aws.

Smart contracts are these social protocols that are secured by cryptography and the calculation is done by the node themselves decentrally, everything remaining visible to the whole world. Unlike the current "smart contracts" in ethereum which implement the protocol centrally in a piece of code - the 'protocol' is not decentralised, only the hosting of it.

I respectfully disagree. You do not need a decentralized, social protocol to build a smart contract or self-executing application platform. A smart contract is simply an agreement between parties, written in codes and enforced by a third-party. In the case of Ethereum, it is enforced by cryptography, nodes independently executing codes and validating the results. This is great but hard to scale or build certain kind of applications. Ethereum introduced decentralized smart contracts, but it does not mean smart contracts need to be executed and secured decentrally.

If a platform can provide multi-signature environment, security and the ability to enforce and execute codes, it is a smart contract platform.

Thank you for checking us out :-)

"Ellcrys" is a word that is likely subject to trademark and owned by Del Rey.

Its unauthorized use, is, at best, 'iffy.'

This aside, I've already written on HN about how I am deeply skeptical of self-executing contracts. Contracts can fit roughly into two types of categories:

1. Those with easily measured standards - which have largely already been automated without having to invent new technologies (e.g., turning on autopay on your cellphone).

2. Those with hard to measure standards - such as a "material advertise condition" - which do not lend themselves to automation without human intervention. In contracts of any sort of substantial complexity there will be myriad conditions that are intentionally vague - written this way because the circumstances are hard to predict, as catch-alls, and also to allow for some leeway to maneuver in the future. Or, to be more cynical, to allow your lawyers to argue over the definition in the future. This vagueness is a feature, not a bug, and even if we could implement AI technology to make these decisions with high degrees of precision, business people still not want to implement them because it is ceding control to an unknown third party. In other words, if you are selling a business, you are simply not going to have it be done through a self executing contract. It is not going to happen - it is just too nuts.

Then again, I do enjoy being proven wrong. So only time will tell. I am sure that more and more contracts will become the self-executing type, but I am also fairly sure that self-executing contracts will only ever amount to a small percentage of the contracts that are used 'in business.'

Source: corporate lawyer / former developer.

> ummm... huh ? This is a Shannara reference

Yes, it is :D