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Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

plasma.io

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Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#131

Post by decentralised »

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…

It's much more than "do anything", closer to "do anything I would normally have to get a team to do for me".

Think of a blockchain a OSS Visa like payment network where you and anyone else can build their own apps, be it something as trivial as a multi-sig or a token exchange, for instance. From this angle, I think it makes more sense to investigate Ethereum and smart contracts in general.

Regarding accessing external data, that is done via oracles and is a well researched topic with some notable implementations (Oraclize, Town Crier, etc), but I'd venture that the most common way to integrate a web3 with web2 is and will be at a middleware level, not directly on a smart contract.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#132

Post by dang »

doktrin wrote: post #57

The emperor has no clothes, or at very best is parading around the street in a loincloth made up of cryptocurrency whitepapers.

Please don't post unsubstantively about flamewar topics? This leads to generic flamewar tangents, the worst kind of subthread.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14976350 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#133

Post by jjn2009 »

Slartie wrote: post #80
jjn2009 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is actually incorrect you can verify a tls connection was made to a server and a particular output was given in that tls connection with oraclize it.

Which is just an implementation of precisely the oracle scheme I talked about. Introducing precisely the problems I mentioned: blockchain bloat, additional trust anchor which can never be 100% validated and thus destroys the idea of requiring zero trust in any particular individual person or system.

Extending the chain of trust down to the source of information isn't exactly going to happen at a snap of a finger. If you trust TLS and trust what the server gives you then today that is a fine option, the server is signing a piece of information and giving it to you, this is no different from you signing a transaction and publishing that transaction to bitcoin the trust ends in just the same way in each case with the caveat of 'value' being created from a web service. An attacker gains access to either the producer of the transaction (client code or web service) or the keys to sign the transaction (tls or bitcoin private key). That said I agree that modern web services could much more easily be made to give an incorrect response.

I don't think your argument applies any differently to other cryptography, it all looks like jumping through hoops for no guaranteed safety. If you believe that the only thing that matters is 100% safety then you are going to be very disappointed with computer security in general.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#135

Post by UncleMeat »

ascendantlogic wrote: post #109
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…

"Why would we use this new technology when the current stuff works just fine?" I feel like this song and dance precedes all major shifts in technology.

It does. But it also precedes the failure of most technologies.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#136

Post by state »

modeless wrote: post #124

Did anyone read the paper? I tried to, and it's a mess. There isn't nearly enough technical detail there to actually implement this system, and the incentives are so complex that game theory experts could be analyzing it for decades without finding all the potential issues. This is nothing like the Bitcoin white paper, which was very clear and complete. Vitalik has created Ethereum of course, and he's not asking for…

Yeah, I was struggling to understand the implementation details also.

Given: "Draft is in-progress and may be frequently updated in the next week(s)." I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, and just look forward to it getting more specific.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#137

Post by runeks »

chatmasta wrote: post #105
runeks wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have an intermediary node (you call it a hub), there is no requirement for it to close its channel with the merchant, once you close your channel with that intermediary node. As far as I can see, merchants receiving payments over payment channels is unrealistic, because it requires: 1) the merchant to predict what its revenue will be this week/month 2) the merchant (or someone else) to lock up this entire am…

Who says the merchant needs to do that work? Specialized companies run like exchanges (or payment networks) could run the nodes on behalf of the merchants, much like bitpay does today. Of course, then you're just back where you started, with a banking institution controlling payments. But perhaps it would be more decentralized than four big payment companies, and that could be a step in the right direction.

It’s not about work. Borrowing money isn’t time-consuming. It’s about the cost of capital, and the inefficiency of requiring a scarce resource to be locked up with no other purpose than lowering the risk of losing a week’s revenue from 0.1% to zero.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#138

Post by darawk »

contingencies wrote: post #129
darawk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 incre…

You could say very much the same thing about most supply-side innovations when they came out Maybe. If the input and output are the same, but the efficiency is larger, or the quality is greater or more controllable, then you have some value-add. If the input and output are artificially constricted and the business case is basically undefined then skepticism is expected and logical. I never denied there are use cases,…

> Maybe. If the input and output are the same, but the efficiency is larger, or the quality is greater or more controllable, then you have some value-add.

Ya, but if I may re-summarize that objection it's, 'except for all the things that it does improve'.

> If the input and output are artificially constricted and the business case is basically undefined then skepticism is expected and logical. > I never denied there are use cases, just stated they are very limited. I stand by that assessment.

I don't disagree per se. I think we may just disagree over how limited is 'very limited'. I think, even just interbank transaction settlement (e.g. Ripple) is an enormously valuable usecase for blockchains. Some smart contracts make sense as well, keeping in mind that you can always offload parts of a contract to human auditors and mediators. People sometimes equate there being any human involvement with trustless execution being worthless. However, that's not really fair. For instance, suppose you are in a country with a corrupt legal system. You can't enter into a normal contract safely, because justice there is disbursed to the highest bidder. So, what do you do instead? You enter into a smart contract that specifies a mutually agreed upon 3rd party outside of the country as the arbiter of disputes, and gives them a private key that they can use to enforce their judgments. Now, you've created a functioning judicial system (admittedly, only for finance) in a country that didn't previously have it. I'd say that's a pretty valuable use case for people in say, Venezuela, or Russia.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#139

Post by doktrin »

smokeyj wrote: post #127
doktrin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Crypto" isn't binary. There's a gold nugget in there somewhere buried under a literal mountain of (occasionally willful) disinformation, flimsy whitepapers and opportunistic ICOs that can best be described as Ponzi schemes. Spend any amount of time on bitcointalk or any of the altcoin subreddits to see what I'm talking about. That - IMO - is what "crypto skeptics" are actually skeptical of.

"The internet will never work because Pets.com is stupid" - would be a perfectly valid position to hold after the dot com bust. But those unable to separate HTTP from Pets.com are the real suckers. I guess that's why some people get rich and others sit on their hands and complain.

> "The internet will never work because Pets.com is stupid" - would be a perfectly valid position to hold after the dot com bust.

No it wouldn't

> I guess that's why some people get rich and others sit on their hands and complain.

I honestly don't know what your point is. There's a lot to criticize in the crypto space right now. There's also a lot of money to be made. Those aren't in any way mutually exclusive.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#140

Post by smokeyj »

doktrin wrote: post #139
smokeyj wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The internet will never work because Pets.com is stupid" - would be a perfectly valid position to hold after the dot com bust. But those unable to separate HTTP from Pets.com are the real suckers. I guess that's why some people get rich and others sit on their hands and complain.

> "The internet will never work because Pets.com is stupid" - would be a perfectly valid position to hold after the dot com bust. No it wouldn't > I guess that's why some people get rich and others sit on their hands and complain. I honestly don't know what your point is. There's a lot to criticize in the crypto space right now. There's also a lot of money to be made. Those aren't in any way mutually exclusive.

> I honestly don't know what your point is

I think you do. It was the sentence before the one you quoted

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