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Stellar Smart Contracts

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Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#121

Post by crassblaster »

decentralised wrote: post #120
crassblaster wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to take the use case of the smart-contract / app and see what is the incentive to pollute input data. Then you can use mechanism design to motivates users to input high quality data and have trustless curated list of the best data sources. You have literally just described a very shit version of Chainlink. Let me elaborate. Chainlink will make any API feed availible to trigger a smart contract. The problem…

I'm familiar with Chainlink, it's really good! I think my description might failed to capture how interesting I find TCRs and cryptoeconomics in general but I obviously disagree with you here. Are you familiar with Town Crier? It offers a solution to the trusted data source problem you mention: http://www.town-crier.org/what-is-tc.html

Chainlink is offering Town Crier/SGX for offchain computation also. This means all the complicated smart contract code can now be ran off chain and save on ETH gas costs... and take computation load off ETH.

Checkout Sergey Talking about it a few days ago. https://youtu.be/G5TQzHIFV-A?t=930

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#122

Post by keymone »

tinco wrote: post #119
keymone wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is invalid exactly because you’re missing the fact that difficulty adjusts. Lightbulb produces light by consuming energy just like bitcoin miner produces hashes by consuming energy, but hashes aren’t the product we’re after, the valid block signature is. If difficulty was static we could be arguing that there is more efficient way to convert energy into valid blocks, but since difficulty adjusts - energ…

Lightbulbs produce light and waste. Bitcoin produces block security and waste. It varies the amount of waste it produces with the value that's being secured, and in practice that just means it produces more waste when there's more value. That the amount is adjusted according to market demand does not matter, because the market is not interested in minimizing waste, it is interested in maximizing value. My metaphor wa…

> Lightbulbs produce light and waste. Bitcoin produces block security and waste

all consumption of energy produces waste, the question with lightbulbs is whether we can get more light with less energy and certainly from 100 years ago there was lots of progress.

the same question simply doesn't apply to PoW currency, because energy expenditure is the goal since it directly converts into security. you can't ask for more security with less energy if security is defined in terms of energy. and that's exactly the case with bitcoin.

if you want your metaphor to work - imagine a lightbulb that has a dimmable enclosure and it automatically dims proportionally to how many lumen is emitted so that luminosity of the whole device is constant. no matter how much energy you throw at it or how efficient you make the lightbulb - the apparent outcome is the same, therefore there must be something else this process gives you to justify expending this or that amount of energy.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#123

Post by realsunnyg »

root_axis wrote: post #95
keymone wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> arguing about the meaning of words here isn't that the most important thing? > work in PoW is it's output and the hashimoto algorithm in PoW discards all computed hashes that fail to meet the difficulty requirement you've used few specific words in your comments: "work" and "product". i agree that work in PoW is hashing and most of hashes are discarded, but product of PoW is the signature that satisfies the difficu…

Waste is the security mechanism. Since the hash results are wasted it is risky to mount an attack on the network; if the hash results were not wasted then the cost of mounting an attack would be mitigated by the value inherent in useful work produced by the algorithm. Your rebuttal actually supports this conclusion because "useful work" would become the "common denominator" cost built into securing the network thus b…

Agreed. "Proof of Waste" seems to be a more accurate description of what's actually measured and involved in the algorithm, though it doesn't market as well.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#124

Post by decentralised »

crassblaster wrote: post #121
decentralised wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm familiar with Chainlink, it's really good! I think my description might failed to capture how interesting I find TCRs and cryptoeconomics in general but I obviously disagree with you here. Are you familiar with Town Crier? It offers a solution to the trusted data source problem you mention: http://www.town-crier.org/what-is-tc.html

Chainlink is offering Town Crier/SGX for offchain computation also. This means all the complicated smart contract code can now be ran off chain and save on ETH gas costs... and take computation load off ETH. Checkout Sergey Talking about it a few days ago. https://youtu.be/G5TQzHIFV-A?t=930

I didn't know that, thank you!

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#125

Post by merklerooting »

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…

I certainly agree with your comments regarding long term scalability- growing pains of ethereum if you will, now the great token hype of the last years seems to have tapered down (recent dair report makes sobering reading) it has to start offering something more tangible and cohesive than an easy liquidity vehicle for dubious whitepapers and teams of advisors to raise hundreds of millions for 5% stakes in proposed innovations like prediction markets armed with nothing more than a flashy site and a roadmap.

For now ERC standard is still entrenched as a dominant liqudity pair and has a certain amount of incumbency but I think there's plenty of room for challengers in the coming years; with stellar being just one of the 'competitors' on some overlapping verticals

By the way, you said Bitcoin is useless for custom tokens. I disagree, The CounterParty protocol has existed for almost 5 years as a meta-layer on top of the Bitcoin blockchain proper and works well to this day with more than a million yes relayed. (Not that you ever hear anyone mentioning it)

Not only was it the platform that defined the early token landscape It also launched the first decentralized exhange-- without ever raising a single cent of funding! --It was the main source of inspiration for early incarnations of ethereum (which was originally due to be built on bitcoin, then primecoin)

Counterparty enables fairly intuitive token issuance, distribution and trustless p2p trading with the protocol escrowing native tokens; (issuance can be done with only vanilla BTC, no sub token or gas fee for numeric assets) and much like Stellar the platform offers certain hard coded VM functions embedded within for smart contracts that go beyond Bitcoins script capabilities (CounterParty ported the EVM in it's entirety in 2014 but decided not to implement it on mainnet due to security concerns, this was pre theDAO and later debacles). It's natively interoperable with Bitcoin (BIP39, multisig, LN, segwit etc) and counterparty transactions are present in roughly 65% of Bitcoin transactions since it's launch.

It does seems to get universally glossed over in favour of more monied, much more hyped alternatives, I'm not even sure if many developers even in the blockchain space are aware of it.

Back to stellar though, StellarX seems great-- I am wholeheartedly supportive of anything than challenges these incumbent centralized exchanges business model of shaking down big ico's for listing fees, for starters. Also appreciative of their smart contract architectural design choices for leaner, minimal and more performant use cases where scalability is paramount and perhaps the perception of the lack of total decentralization vs "just" distributed consensus isn't a deal breaker.

Actually more keen on stellars proposal at the moment than ripples codius, currently evaluating a single contract across the board for comparison.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#126

Post by keymone »

realsunnyg wrote: post #123
root_axis wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waste is the security mechanism. Since the hash results are wasted it is risky to mount an attack on the network; if the hash results were not wasted then the cost of mounting an attack would be mitigated by the value inherent in useful work produced by the algorithm. Your rebuttal actually supports this conclusion because "useful work" would become the "common denominator" cost built into securing the network thus b…

Agreed. "Proof of Waste" seems to be a more accurate description of what's actually measured and involved in the algorithm, though it doesn't market as well.

sure, if your goal is to denigrate the project. but if you go by definition of waste - it doesn't apply to bitcoin at all.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#127

Post by jillesvangurp »

carleverett wrote: post #92
jillesvangurp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tra…

What do you define as traction? CoinMarketCap shows EOS trading at significantly higher daily volumes than Stellar.

I tend to look at developer traction: people converting money into code as a good signal that smart people are deciding to give it a shot. Logically, since it has been only about 3 months since they launched, there cannot be a lot happening yet in terms of companies launching products based on EOS, running EOS related infrastructure, etc. I did not look at Stellar for the first half of this year for the same reason. That changed when I started hearing about people using stellar or switching to it from Ethereum around the same time I started having serious doubts about being able to run our product on top of Ethereum any time soon. I wanted to understand why stellar was suddenly a thing and found that there was a pretty mature ecosystem of companies and developers using it already. I'm not getting that kind of vibe with EOS yet.

In any case, a lot of blockchain related trading is speculative and most of that is not based on technical merit but the investors irrational perception on the chance of exchange rates going up or down. Speculators make lousy CTOs, so I tend to ignore them for technical decision making.

So, EOS doing brisk trading beause ETH holders are panicking and acting like lemmings, or because Vitalik farted in a particularly interesting way, or whatever madness of the day drives the market does not constitute meaningful developer traction in my view. It just means EOS core development is likely well funded for the next few years. Good for them.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#128

Post by jillesvangurp »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #107
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…

The liquidity you get from using the Ethereum-based ERC20 standard for your token is vastly greater than using a runner-up like Stellar. ERC20 is used in something like 95 of the top 100 tokens by market cap, while Stellar doesn't even have 1 token in the top 100. That means it's much easier to get your token listed on an exchange if it's ERC20, and there are dozens of wallets, with combined millions of installations…

We (we is inbot.io if you are interested) are not doing an ICO, which is what well over 95$ of the Ethereum tokens are. Most of those are little more than a whitepaper and a pretty website. Most of those will never translate into anything tangible with actual economic value. Ethereum is great for that and not much else. It's a funding vehicle and most of the real liquidity at this point comes from equity investors taking chunks of your shares in exchange for token purchases. This changed over the last year. Most early ICO investors got ripped off. People are a lot more careful now and want something more tangible than a token that will depreciate 99% on the first day. ICOs as a crowdfunding type vehicle are completely dead at this point.

We're actually building a business based on our customers paying us cash for services we deliver to them. Not even future tense; we have been doing that for some time and we have actual paying customers. We want to pay our users to help us deliver value to our customers using our utility token. So, they earn tokens for stuff they do. They can then trade on stellar. A pump and dump would alienate both our customers and user base. This makes it easy for us to let our international customer base and international user base help each other without getting bogged down in admin work, invoices, payroll, etc. You'd be surprised how hard this stuff is to do in the traditional financial ecosystem (we tried).

The volume at which we do these things requires a side chain in any case: it's not technically feasible to run this on a platform that has global throughput of only 4-5 transactions per second (on a good day), high and variable transaction cost, and high degrees of uncertainty around transactions actually clearing in a few minutes (or worse). IMHO Ethereum is years away from being of practical use for anything other than acting as an investment vehicle for speculators. It only makes sense for very low volume and relatively high value transactions.

We picked stellar as our side chain and then concluded we don't need another chain on top of it. It does what we need it to do and we get trading for free through stellarx. Transactions are close enough to free that we don't care about the cost.

I'll look at Ethereum again after miners go away, proof of stake has happened, and Sharding is the norm.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#129

Post by CryptoPunk »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #128
CryptoPunk wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The liquidity you get from using the Ethereum-based ERC20 standard for your token is vastly greater than using a runner-up like Stellar. ERC20 is used in something like 95 of the top 100 tokens by market cap, while Stellar doesn't even have 1 token in the top 100. That means it's much easier to get your token listed on an exchange if it's ERC20, and there are dozens of wallets, with combined millions of installations…

We (we is inbot.io if you are interested) are not doing an ICO, which is what well over 95$ of the Ethereum tokens are. Most of those are little more than a whitepaper and a pretty website. Most of those will never translate into anything tangible with actual economic value. Ethereum is great for that and not much else. It's a funding vehicle and most of the real liquidity at this point comes from equity investors ta…

Thanks for the answer. Your reasoning makes sense.

Still, I think allowing your token to be traded more widely through ERC20 compatibility may have benefits that are hard to foresee right now. It's a truism that liquidity is beneficial. In any case it's probably not urgent given the embryonic stage of tokenomics, and quite possible not worth the additional engineering costs of adding another blockchain to the architecture.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#130

Post by carleverett »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #127
carleverett wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you define as traction? CoinMarketCap shows EOS trading at significantly higher daily volumes than Stellar.

I tend to look at developer traction: people converting money into code as a good signal that smart people are deciding to give it a shot. Logically, since it has been only about 3 months since they launched, there cannot be a lot happening yet in terms of companies launching products based on EOS, running EOS related infrastructure, etc. I did not look at Stellar for the first half of this year for the same reason.…

So are you considering developer traction to be platform age and what people you know are working with?

I'm not trying to be argumentative. I personally like Stellar over EOS as well, but I haven't seen the same developer traction advantage that you're seeing. At least on Stack Exchange, EOS is more active despite being half the age.

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