Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts
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Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts
#2Smart contracts are being suggested as the building block of "autonomous corporations" (implying "do anything!") yet nearly anything meaningful basically has to interact with the real world through agents external to the contract for most business cases. Given this severe limitation, could someone clarify what the whole shebang is supposed to be about?
I actually saw Vitalik speak last week or so here in Shenzhen came away less convinced than ever of their theoretical utility for anything but a tiny fraction of users.
In short, adding a decentralized network of paid/incentivized actors to any existing potential cryptographic problem space (a fair rough summary of the smart contract notion?), in particular the subset relevant for most businesses, doesn't seem to solve anything particularly well and typically decreases critical measures of engineering elegance such as simplicity, comprehensibility, predictability, etc. while increasing negative measures such as technical lock-in to piles of rapidly evolving technologies for which hiring and building is expensive and error-prone.
Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts
#3Smart contracts are being suggested as the building block of "autonomous corporations" (implying "do anything!") yet nearly anything meaningful basically has to interact with the real world through agents external to the contract for most business cases. Given this severe limitation, could someone clarify what the whole shebang is supposed to be about? I actually saw Vitalik speak last week or so here in Shenzhen cam…
There is no shebang. I haven't found a decent use case for smart contracts either. I'm no hawk but "coin" seems less than fiat to me.
Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts
#4> Instead, we seek to design a system whereby computation can occur off-blockchain but ultimately enforcible on-chain
This seems to be the direction that blockchain and smart contract tech needs to go if it aims to be scalable. Conduct the vast majority of your business off-chain, and resort to the blockchain in the event of a dispute.
Kind of like how two parties in a business relationship will generally act on good faith, but may choose the nuclear option of legally enforcing a contract if the relationship sours.
Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts
#5Smart contracts are being suggested as the building block of "autonomous corporations" (implying "do anything!") yet nearly anything meaningful basically has to interact with the real world through agents external to the contract for most business cases. Given this severe limitation, could someone clarify what the whole shebang is supposed to be about? I actually saw Vitalik speak last week or so here in Shenzhen cam…
What about Kickstarter? A $500 million+ company that takes a 5% vig on all transacted funds can effectively be replaced with a few lines of code.
If total ETH sent to contract address by date X > Amount Y then send the ETH to the fundraiser, else return the ETH.
Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts
#6There are already ETH based projects that are trying to take this one, like this one https://www.agrello.org/
Looking forward to seeing results
Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts
#7Smart contracts are being suggested as the building block of "autonomous corporations" (implying "do anything!") yet nearly anything meaningful basically has to interact with the real world through agents external to the contract for most business cases. Given this severe limitation, could someone clarify what the whole shebang is supposed to be about? I actually saw Vitalik speak last week or so here in Shenzhen cam…
There is no shebang. I haven't found a decent use case for smart contracts either. I'm no hawk but "coin" seems less than fiat to me.
This whole "disruption of silicon valley" from a financing perspective is pretty compelling no?
Even it smart contracts on ethereum are used for nothing other than the facilitation crowdfunding coin offerings, it would still have "shebang".
Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts
#8Smart contracts are being suggested as the building block of "autonomous corporations" (implying "do anything!") yet nearly anything meaningful basically has to interact with the real world through agents external to the contract for most business cases. Given this severe limitation, could someone clarify what the whole shebang is supposed to be about? I actually saw Vitalik speak last week or so here in Shenzhen cam…
What about Kickstarter? A $500 million+ company that takes a 5% vig on all transacted funds can effectively be replaced with a few lines of code. If total ETH sent to contract address by date X > Amount Y then send the ETH to the fundraiser, else return the ETH.
It's true that the underlying payment systems could (should?) be built this way, but imo that's a very small portion of what most websites do.
Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts
#9Smart contracts are being suggested as the building block of "autonomous corporations" (implying "do anything!") yet nearly anything meaningful basically has to interact with the real world through agents external to the contract for most business cases. Given this severe limitation, could someone clarify what the whole shebang is supposed to be about? I actually saw Vitalik speak last week or so here in Shenzhen cam…
What about Kickstarter? A $500 million+ company that takes a 5% vig on all transacted funds can effectively be replaced with a few lines of code. If total ETH sent to contract address by date X > Amount Y then send the ETH to the fundraiser, else return the ETH.
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Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts
#10Smart contracts are being suggested as the building block of "autonomous corporations" (implying "do anything!") yet nearly anything meaningful basically has to interact with the real world through agents external to the contract for most business cases. Given this severe limitation, could someone clarify what the whole shebang is supposed to be about? I actually saw Vitalik speak last week or so here in Shenzhen cam…
Yep, the technological downsides of blockchains are so bad that the only market where it actually makes sense to use them is the illegal market because governments have a much harder time of controlling it.