Stellar Smart Contracts • Hacker News Board

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#71

Post by pollen23 » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 1:49 PM UTC

danielvf wrote: post #62

If I'm reading the docs right, the Stellar smart contracts are extremely different from Ethereum smart contracts - in fact, it almost feels like a stretch to call them the same name. Like "animals" vs "plants". Ethereum smart contract are actual virtual machines. They are tiny computers that run whatever bytecode you want. You could calculate pi to a million decimal places in a smart contract, if you had the money fo…

I don't think there's anything in the definition of smart contracts that necessarily has it defined to be what they are in Ethereum.

They are very different, that's for sure.

Assets are first class objects though, so 95% of what Ethereum smart contracts do is built into the platform already.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#72

Post by ajcodez » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 1:59 PM UTC

leifg wrote: post #3

> As a reminder, smart contracts are created using code. Code can contain bugs or may not perform as intended. Be sure to analyze and agree upon all possible edge cases when coming up with the conditions and outcomes of the smart contract. Predicting all possible edge cases of a piece of software has been proven to be very hard in the past (there have been software bugs that literally killed people). Why would I ever…

Why would you ever agree to pay legal or transaction fees greater than $0.30? It makes a new class of agreements possible where settling in court is not practical. It also brings increased transparency.

If you could get insured for software agreements using off the shelf open source software that already worked for lots of other people why not go for it? How is that worse than custom agreement and settlement via chains of private 3rd parties with opaque fee structures.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#73

Post by yifanl » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 2:02 PM UTC

danielvf wrote: post #62

If I'm reading the docs right, the Stellar smart contracts are extremely different from Ethereum smart contracts - in fact, it almost feels like a stretch to call them the same name. Like "animals" vs "plants". Ethereum smart contract are actual virtual machines. They are tiny computers that run whatever bytecode you want. You could calculate pi to a million decimal places in a smart contract, if you had the money fo…

How smart should a contract really be though? It seems like a feature rather than a bug that there are limits.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#74

Post by keymone » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 2:04 PM UTC

novaleaf wrote: post #70

keymone wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't think you understand the technology at all.. > PoW is wasteful in that the vast majority of the product of it's algorithm (hashes) is discarded do you know what "PoW" means? it's 3 words: proof, of, work . what you consider "discarded" and "waste" is the Work in PoW. miners convert energy into blockchain security and every block signature is the proof that certain amount of energy was spent to find it. if the…

I think what @decentralised is arguing isn't that PoW is wasteful, but that there are certain by-design inefficiencies that outsiders consider a waste from an economics standpoint. (A high economic cost to perform PoW) Certainly you could argue that this economic cost is necessary and therefor not wasteful. Indeed I agree that it is central to the idea.

direct quote from him: "There are plenty of consensus protocols that don't waste energy"

i'm not entirely sure what do you consider inefficiencies in PoW, it is by design supposed to convert energy into a proof that similar amount of energy was spent producing the proof. the only inefficiency involved is how far we are from Landauer limit.

ultimately i don't think it matters which specific hashing algo is used - there will simply be more or fewer iterations per block, but for the same level of security as bitcoin provides, similar amount of electricity would be consumed.

saying that PoW has high economic cost is pretty much a truism. PoW produces very real economic value, so of course it will have a similar economic cost. if the value wasn't matching the cost - there would be more/less of PoW going on and that's exactly what the hashrate chart shows over the last 8 years of price discovery.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#75

Post by jillesvangurp » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 2:14 PM UTC

felipeccastro wrote: post #68

jillesvangurp wrote: post #53

I recently started moving our token from Ethereum to stellar for the simple reason that I came to the conclusion that Ethereum is too far from being production ready to be of use in an application that has actual users that generate any kind of sizable amount of transactions. Ethereum is cute until you have use cases and uses that require it to actually process transactions. The Ethereum ecosystem is a big mess right…

That was very informative, thanks! I was having the same impression about Ethereum, that the ecosystem was becoming wider and ever more complex, but still not very practical to actually use. How does Stellar compare to EOS? AFAIK EOS uses the same approach of federation / trusted nodes, and is also a platform for smart contracts, so it would be interesting to see a comparison.

I haven't got much experience with EOS. My feeling is that they are a bit newer to the scene than stellar in terms of adoption/traction. They only launched this summer and stellar has been gaining traction since late last year so they are a bit ahead on that front. Regardless of what you pick, you are taking a leap of faith in long term viability/stability of what you pick.

We went for stellar because we saw some traction there, kind of liked the notion of being in an ecosystem with a bit more serious players, and we liked what it did functionally.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#76

Post by michaelscott » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 2:14 PM UTC

danielvf wrote: post #62

If I'm reading the docs right, the Stellar smart contracts are extremely different from Ethereum smart contracts - in fact, it almost feels like a stretch to call them the same name. Like "animals" vs "plants". Ethereum smart contract are actual virtual machines. They are tiny computers that run whatever bytecode you want. You could calculate pi to a million decimal places in a smart contract, if you had the money fo…

The Stellar smart contracts seem to function like versions of Bitcoin Script transaction types with more features. For me this seems like a more appropriate direction for transaction abilities in comparison to Ethereum's approach, which has more capability but also massive room for implementation error.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#77

Post by simias » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 2:18 PM UTC

decentralised wrote: post #41

nindwen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stellar isn't decentralized. Just like Ripple, it uses Federated Byzantine Agreement, which means that nodes use a list of other nodes they trust. The fact that this scheme has nothing to do with the concept of a decentralized cryptocurrency There is no centralized authority, which means that the protocol in decentralized. It's just not decentralized in exactly the same way as something like Bitcoin. Some might cal…

There's only one development team behind the protocol and only one client implementation (afaik), which means that pressuring only two or three people is enough to guarantee that a backdoor is implemented or some form of transaction censorship happens. edit: implementation / implemented

That's moving the goalpost pretty far. In this context the discussion is whether the protocol is decentralized. Whether the development is or isn't decentralized is also potentially an issue but it's a completely different discussion. Even if bitcoin had only one development team and only one implementation the protocol would still be decentralized.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#78

Post by CPLX » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 2:23 PM UTC

ericdykstra wrote: post #46

CPLX wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It seems like reviewing complex software code to make sure it’s well understood and no edge cases exist is a costly endeavor.

There may be standardized contracts for certain things, I don't know. If I'm wrong and there are no good use cases for smart contracts, they won't be used. It seems reasonable that they will find a use case, though.

So why haven't they found a use case yet?

Crypto and smart contracts have been around for awhile, and have certainly had enough hype and money thrown at them. So why aren't there any serious uses of these things yet?

How long did it take online travel booking, or ordering books from Amazon, to have a clear and growing market once the basic concept had been developed? How long did it take Instagram to get users? How about Stripe?

Why do people keep talking about how in the future we "will" do this and that other thing with blockchain, but years go by and we're not doing it?

Is it possible that the use case comes first and building out the tech comes second?

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#79

Post by blotter_paper » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 2:24 PM UTC

michaelscott wrote: post #76

danielvf wrote: post #62

If I'm reading the docs right, the Stellar smart contracts are extremely different from Ethereum smart contracts - in fact, it almost feels like a stretch to call them the same name. Like "animals" vs "plants". Ethereum smart contract are actual virtual machines. They are tiny computers that run whatever bytecode you want. You could calculate pi to a million decimal places in a smart contract, if you had the money fo…

The Stellar smart contracts seem to function like versions of Bitcoin Script transaction types with more features. For me this seems like a more appropriate direction for transaction abilities in comparison to Ethereum's approach, which has more capability but also massive room for implementation error.

I see room for both, at least until Ethereum is more mature (and maybe longer).

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#80

Post by simias » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 2:29 PM UTC

Suncho wrote: post #38

koalala wrote: post #30

Stellar isn't decentralized. Just like Ripple, it uses Federated Byzantine Agreement, which means that nodes use a list of other nodes they trust. The fact that this scheme has nothing to do with the concept of a decentralized cryptocurrency, aside from the hype train, doesn't appear to have percolated into the collective mainstream or even geek consciousness yet.

This is why Stellar probably doesn't count as a real "blockchain." It's also why Stellar is potentially a lot more useful than blockchain. You don't have to do proof of work, which is wasteful of resources by design. Note that the cryptocurrency people use the word "decentralized" differently from the rest of the world. They use it specifically to mean that the mechanism for determining consensus is perfectly distrib…

I think cryptocurrency people use the word decentralized correctly, it's just that they often imply "decentralized and trustless". Seems like Stellar doesn's satisfy both conditions.

>This is why Stellar probably doesn't count as a real "blockchain." It's also why Stellar is potentially a lot more useful than blockchain.

It's always the same catch 22 though: if you're willing to do away with one of the attributes of blockchains/cryptocurrencis then you have a rather standard distributed ledger that any half competent engineer could come up with. It's not particularly novel or revolutionary.

Actually I'd even go further and posit than hardly anybody would be talking about Stellar or Ripple if they didn't use buzzwords "smart contract" and "blockchain". This is hype feeding speculation feeding hype feeding speculation...