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Stellar Smart Contracts

stellar.org

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Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#81

Post by dboreham »

djb_hackernews wrote: post #45
vntok wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, yes. Most transactions that occur daily across the whole world involve trivial amounts of money. If I want to sell you a 300€ dishwasher, for example, I can either require cash, ask for a check/bank transfer and pray it doesnt bounce, or involve a 3rd party whom i trust in which case I will have to forego a % fee for their escrow service, maybe 30€. With a smart contract, I can now be sure the buyer's funds ex…

> and we both release the funds before parting way. Doesn't that require you to trust that they release the funds? Do smart contracts have a way to dispute an outcome?

>Do smart contracts have a way to dispute an outcome?

Yes, but you have to write code to implement dispute resolution, which in turn implies you have to devise a form of "proof" to be presented to the contract. This can be tricky (or impossible).

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#83

Post by decentralised »

simias wrote: post #77
decentralised wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understand your comment but to me and others working on web3 projects, decentralisation is always measured in 3 categories, political, architectural and logical so from my perspective this isn't shifting goalposts, it's being accurate.

I think I've already shared Vitalik Buterin's article elsewhere but in any case, https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali...

I saw a twitter thread today that covered the arguments against EOS (as an example) by judging them exactly on how their architecture, logical and political systems doesn't fulfil the requirements to be considered "decentralised" that might be interesting. Here: https://twitter.com/jamesspediacci/status/104981160787686195...

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#84

Post by mbrock »

beaconstudios wrote: post #20
mbrock wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do a symbolic execution of the code and prove that your intended behavior holds. A multisig contract is an utterly trivial program. It is easy to prove correct.

> Just do a symbolic execution of the code and prove that your intended behavior holds. So... Introduce a human to the process? This is the exact issue we're talking about. > A multisig contract is an utterly trivial program. It is easy to prove correct. Even if it is, we're not just talking about multisigs. This process should scale up to more advanced smart contracts or this whole "innovation" is just replacing esc…

How complex smart contracts are needed? I think we should keep them simple.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#85

Post by mbrock »

CPLX wrote: post #78
ericdykstra wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

What about MakerDAO?

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#86

Post by Nursie »

chaosbolt wrote: post #67
Nursie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? Really? As far as I'm aware the oracle problem still exists, the problems of having to get data onto the blockchain from external, trusted sources. In real-world contracts the problems don't arise over the simple execution of contract, they arise when intent is muddied or missed by words, when terms are unfair, overly onerous or legally unenforceable. Given this, there are very, very few situations in which sm…

Well have you checked Chainlink (they've been working with SWIFT and possibly Microsoft)? they've been working on a decentralized oracle for a year now, most of 4chan's /biz think this is the next Bitcoin/Ethereum, and I learned not to underestimate them, they called many right shots and anonymity helps create a kind of natural selection for ideas. They've been talking about it non stop for 1 year now, and the CEO ha…

No thanks.

A recommendation from 4-chan and a PoC and a talk at a blockchain hype-conference? Think I'll steer clear.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#87

Post by twic »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #42
midhir wrote: post #8

One thing I've found impenetrable about Stellar is the use of the XDR data format. I've never encountered this before and it's been a painful step in starting to build on their platform. Are their any simple, introductory texts on it? A lot of stuff is from Stellar themselves. I'm sure there are good reasons for using it, the rest of the platform looks simple to understand and well designed.

It's a simple binary format similar to e.g. protocol buffers. You write an idl and then generate code for different languages. The reason they went for this is that is compact. This kind of matters because this stuff is actually stored in stellar in large quantities. It's a pretty old ietf standard actually. I recently had a discussion on this on their slack channel making the point that the choice for this was a bit…

Any idea why they picked XDR rather than something that is more widely used in the present day, like Thrift? That is efficient on the wire, and pretty widely supported:

https://thrift.apache.org/docs/Languages

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#88

Post by dustingetz »

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…

Turing completeness has a lot of costs which are not acknowledged in this post. For example they are more complicated, more can go wrong, more vulnerable to hacking.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#89

Post by csorrell »

atomical wrote: post #60
carbocation wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FDIC insures deposits up to a limit, whether or not one uses online banking.

And eventually there will be smart contracts that are insured.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. I think this is a very reasonable projection. The technology isn't just going to stagnate, it's going to continue to evolve until it finds a useful place in the world. Having insured financial intermediaries executing smart contracts isn't a far fetched idea to me.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#90

Post by jillesvangurp »

twic wrote: post #87
jillesvangurp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a simple binary format similar to e.g. protocol buffers. You write an idl and then generate code for different languages. The reason they went for this is that is compact. This kind of matters because this stuff is actually stored in stellar in large quantities. It's a pretty old ietf standard actually. I recently had a discussion on this on their slack channel making the point that the choice for this was a bit…

Any idea why they picked XDR rather than something that is more widely used in the present day, like Thrift? That is efficient on the wire, and pretty widely supported: https://thrift.apache.org/docs/Languages

they wanted something standard and I guess did not realize that the IETF standard for XDR is not that widely used. I agree it would have been nicer if they went for something like thrift instead. However, it's done and I don't think they can fix this without breaking compatibility.

I do wonder why XDR sort of failed to get used and why people went ahead and created protocol bufs and thrift as alternatives.

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