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Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

plasma.io

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Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#21

Post by darawk »

mrep wrote: post #18
AlwaysBCoding wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then why has nobody done that then? It blows my mind how so many people proliferate how useful blockchain companies can be yet despite all of the different blockchains, ICO's..., practically none [1] have taken off because they are technologically and economically worse than current market products and services. [1]: Illegal markets are the only market I have seen that do like it because companies/governments have sp…

Nobody has done it because it's inefficient right now, and the ecosystem is still only trusted by a relatively small minority of nerds like myself and others here. This proposal is a solution to one of those problems.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#22

Post by will_brown »

AlwaysBCoding wrote: post #5
contingencies wrote: post #2

Smart 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.

You do know people can launch a crowdfunding project that is decentralized, They don't need an ICO or blockchain, just a website.

But there is a reason people don't do that, something to do with the value centralized platforms provide.

Plus I'm not entirely sure anyone should trust smart contracts to actually perform such a function, next thing you know someone other than the project created takes all the funds pursuant to the smart contract, but hey that's the beauty of a smart contract it's infallible, so what ever it does it was intended to do, be damned with what people thought and understood it would do.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#23

Post by flyGuyOnTheSly »

contingencies wrote: post #2

Smart 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…

I've been thinking the same thing over the last few months...

I see all of these "prediction markets" and "gambling platforms" being launched and claiming that they are "fully autonomous".

Well where do they get the outcome information from? It must be from a person.

You cannot program a smart contract to know who has the most reliable sports scores or political information. AI does not exist yet.

If I bet that Hillary Clinton won the election, and she lost to Trump, what's stopping a hoard of Clinton supporters from voting (or tweeting or however the DAO collects their "data") that Clinton actually won the election and stealing my winnings?

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#24

Post by flatline »

atarian wrote: post #20
contingencies wrote: post #2

Smart 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…

>Anything meaningful basically has to interact with the real world through agents external to the contract This is where people are betting to take a risk that the law will change to legalize and maybe even incorporate these contracts. Take a prenuptial agreement for example. Instead of having a lawyer, a smart contract could automatically split ether from an account into two addresses. https://www.coindesk.com/prenu…

Something in the real world still has to trigger the divorce condition in the contract. By the time all the legal documents of the divorce are finalized I don't see why a written prenup would be inadequate. Besides nobody is going to store all their assets in etherium. Even if they did how would the contract track future earnings to another account, etc? It's a completely impractical solution to a problem well-served by current means. Like pretty much every other example I've heard. On-chain gambling is the only thing of practical value that I've seen Etherium offer so far.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#25

Post by will_brown »

atarian wrote: post #20
contingencies wrote: post #2

Smart 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…

>Anything meaningful basically has to interact with the real world through agents external to the contract This is where people are betting to take a risk that the law will change to legalize and maybe even incorporate these contracts. Take a prenuptial agreement for example. Instead of having a lawyer, a smart contract could automatically split ether from an account into two addresses. https://www.coindesk.com/prenu…

Unless the smart contract doesn't split the funds, but directs them all to the husband, notwithstanding what the Wife believed the smart contract would do.

But yes, young families should convert all their assets to ETH and tie it up in their prenuptial smart contract until they divorce because lawyers suck.

But assuming the smart contract will actually split the amounts equally...how does the smart contract know when the parties marriage is dissolved? And money isn't the only thing involved in marriage, sometimes there are children, does the smart contract automatically split the children in half too or do we have to turn to the lawyers still?

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#27

Post by colordrops »

contingencies wrote: post #2

Smart 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…

The value comes from a hybrid of blockchain contracts and legal contracts. The contracts that actually manage an asset would run on the blockchain, and the legal contracts would enforce the rights to that asset in the physical world. Managing the asset in the blockchain would avoid unnecessary fees, opacity, and cheating, and the legal contract binds the results to the real world.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#28

Post by jackfraser »

flyGuyOnTheSly wrote: post #23
contingencies wrote: post #2

Smart 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…

I've been thinking the same thing over the last few months... I see all of these "prediction markets" and "gambling platforms" being launched and claiming that they are "fully autonomous". Well where do they get the outcome information from? It must be from a person. You cannot program a smart contract to know who has the most reliable sports scores or political information. AI does not exist yet. If I bet that Hilla…

> You cannot program a smart contract to know who has the most reliable sports scores or political information.

You can't do that as a human, either. All you can really do is look at someone's record to see how their predictions have panned out historically. Given the right data sources, a program could do this no problem, and assign metrics to individual sports commentators as well as subsets of their consensus on any particular topic.

Given the nerdy propensity of the fantasy sports guys, there's no reason to assume this kind of data won't be available eventually.

As for politics, I'll agree with you there - neither human nor AI is going to be able to produce particularly reliable commentary any time soon!

> If I bet that Hillary Clinton won the election, and she lost to Trump, what's stopping a hoard of Clinton supporters from voting (or tweeting or however the DAO collects their "data") that Clinton actually won the election and stealing my winnings?

This is called a 'coup' when it happens IRL, and happen it does. The chief difference here is that in reality, pitchforks and torches are needed for these efforts; online it's a little bit physically safer.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#29

Post by stingrae »

tribby wrote: post #15
AlwaysBCoding wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

without the 5%, kickstarter would not be a successful marketing platform. financial transactions are just part of what they do.

I think the 5% doesn't even include the financial transaction which is another 3% that goes to stripe. People give Kickstarter the 5% for the marketing and trust the platform tries to build.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#30

Post by TTPrograms »

contingencies wrote: post #2

Smart 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…

> Smart contracts are being suggested as the building block of "autonomous corporations"

By who? I'm not aware of any major developers suggesting this. As far as I can tell this is just a strawman promoted on HN. The Dao was a single instantiation of this sort of idea promoted by a small number of non-core developers - it doesn't define the idea of smart contracts.

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