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Smart contracts on Bitcoin

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Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#171

Post by TheDong »

stocknoob wrote: post #113
TheDong wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now contracts are enforced by lawyers who can interpret code that is not fully specified. I would guess that hiring a contract developer to create a water-tight contract the computer is capable of understanding would be much more expensive than a lawyer. This is in a similar vein to the fact that it's more expensive to have programmers create a perfect NLP app to translate something than it is to just hire a tr…

I'm sure creating the first spreadsheet application was more expensive than hiring an accountant. But not doing it 1 million times. Someone will make "contracts as a service" and competition will drive down the cost, until it's nearly free (as spreadsheets are today).

I think there may be a difference. Accountants are humans that are trying to be computers.

Smart-contracts are computers trying to be human. Most contracts are flawed and only really matter when things go wrong. I'd rather that a human be there when things go wrong to understand the human intent behind the contract than have a computer which does not know the human intent, but is able to enforce the (likely flawed) computational representation of that intent.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#172

Post by dperfect »

stocknoob wrote: post #115
dperfect wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that just make those few oracles an increasingly valuable target for manipulation/corruption?

Do you trust Amazon, Google and Microsoft or millions of sysadmins in podunk companies to secure their infrastructure?

> Do you trust Amazon, Google and Microsoft or millions of sysadmins in podunk companies to secure their infrastructure?

Of course not, and when they screw up, we lean on a robust (yet imperfect) legal system to intervene.

One of the advertised features of smart contracts is a reduced dependency on trust, so if they don't actually have that advantage (at least in relation to real-life interactions), then it's hard to say they're any better than traditional legal contracts for those use cases.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#173

Post by postcynical »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #153
jtsiskin wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure of the argument - so it results in rich get richer In PoW, the same 'rich get richer' applies - miners can buy more mining rigs and thus it compounds the same? miners invest heavily in constantly innovating and investing back into the network In PoS, is this not exactly the same, if not even more true? Stakers are by definition highly invested into the network The whole system could collapse overnight li…

> so it results in rich get richer In PoW, the same 'rich get richer' applies - miners can buy more mining rigs and thus it compounds the same? In theory, if and when proof of mining actually becomes the mainstream vehicle for global financial transactions, simply buying more mining rigs won't be enough. They will need to institutionalize and reinvest heavily into their infra. The mining rig that could find ten block…

> With proof of stake, you can literally throw around money to gain influence over a network.

But can't you do the same with PoW. You just throw money at minners and buy their rigs or rent them for a good premium.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#174

Post by wmf »

dchuk wrote: post #167
muneeb wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Muneeb here, Stacks co-founder. So it does not use Bitcoin as oracle. It uses Bitcoin as a settlement layer. (Oracles like Chainlink can be, and are being, built using Clarity lang for Stacks blockchain itself.) For using Bitcoin state on Ethereum, you'll need to implement Bitcoin SPV proofs. It's entirely possible but fairly complicated to do that given (a) Ethereum is a separate network that can fork independently…

(No disrespect to your project) I’m a technical person, built lots of software myself over the years, run a large product team now...and I have absolutely no idea how to parse almost anything you said here. May as well be in Greek, the density of buzzwords is wild. Everything in cryptocurrency is so obtuse and unapproachable for even otherwise-technical people, it’s pretty incredible given it’s been around over a dec…

I sort of understand what's being said in this thread and I wouldn't say it's deliberately obtuse. A lot of ideas have been invented over the last decade and it's good that precise terminology exists to describe it. If you want to get into the minutiae of blockchain there's no shortcut.

And isn't it a two-way pegged sidechain?

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#175

Post by Kranar »

dchuk wrote: post #167
muneeb wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Muneeb here, Stacks co-founder. So it does not use Bitcoin as oracle. It uses Bitcoin as a settlement layer. (Oracles like Chainlink can be, and are being, built using Clarity lang for Stacks blockchain itself.) For using Bitcoin state on Ethereum, you'll need to implement Bitcoin SPV proofs. It's entirely possible but fairly complicated to do that given (a) Ethereum is a separate network that can fork independently…

(No disrespect to your project) I’m a technical person, built lots of software myself over the years, run a large product team now...and I have absolutely no idea how to parse almost anything you said here. May as well be in Greek, the density of buzzwords is wild. Everything in cryptocurrency is so obtuse and unapproachable for even otherwise-technical people, it’s pretty incredible given it’s been around over a dec…

I mean if you spent decades running a large product team that develops accounting web apps, would you expect to be able to read and interpret a description of product related to bio-informatics, or neurotechnology?

If you spent decades working on video game graphics, would it surprise you that someone describing algorithms for sophisticated quantitative finance or high frequency trading use terminology you're not familiar with, including an abundance of words literally borrowed from the Greek language?

Information technology is an absolutely massive field that is finding more and more use cases every year, it shouldn't be a surprise that there are areas of it that you're not familiar with and would need to devote a substantial amount of time to become well versed.

As someone who has spent a decent amount of time understanding cryptocurrencies, it's not really all that much different from learning any other field. You can start with some Youtube videos, read a few blog posts, heck you can even spend a couple of weekends writing your first smart contract and deploy it to Ethereum to see how it works. My first side project on Ethereum was writing a decentralized poker game, I wrote a series of smart contracts based on the theory of Mental Poker [1] and deployed it to the test net, and then wrote a web front end for it that waited for a new block to get published, parsed it and displayed it. It was pretty cool, once you deploy your smart contract to the blockchain, it's kind of magical seeing a completely decentralized system of computers bring that code to life. Like once you deploy your code, that's it, it's entirely out of your hands from that point forward and there's this engine that takes it and keeps it chugging literally for as long as there are miners willing to operate the Ethereum network.

Everything is a mystery until you take the time to learn it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#177

Post by zionic »

grubles wrote: post #159
PhantomPhreak wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Creator of Counterparty here. It's funny to think that if the Core devs hadn't be so incredibly resistant to people using the Bitcoin blockchain in unexpected ways, Ethereum wouldn't exist in its current form. See https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/929804867568373760

Vitalik's claim is a lie. No "OP_RETURN wars" happened. It's a complete fabrication. See https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1187470076833697794

Lol are you honestly linking your own twitter as a source

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#178

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

postcynical wrote: post #173
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so it results in rich get richer In PoW, the same 'rich get richer' applies - miners can buy more mining rigs and thus it compounds the same? In theory, if and when proof of mining actually becomes the mainstream vehicle for global financial transactions, simply buying more mining rigs won't be enough. They will need to institutionalize and reinvest heavily into their infra. The mining rig that could find ten block…

> With proof of stake, you can literally throw around money to gain influence over a network. But can't you do the same with PoW. You just throw money at minners and buy their rigs or rent them for a good premium.

A Bitcoin miner that can 51% attack the network will need a huge factory full of mining rigs. A proof of stake miner who wants to 51% attack doesn't need that.

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#179

Post by tomc1985 »

Kranar wrote: post #175
dchuk wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(No disrespect to your project) I’m a technical person, built lots of software myself over the years, run a large product team now...and I have absolutely no idea how to parse almost anything you said here. May as well be in Greek, the density of buzzwords is wild. Everything in cryptocurrency is so obtuse and unapproachable for even otherwise-technical people, it’s pretty incredible given it’s been around over a dec…

I mean if you spent decades running a large product team that develops accounting web apps, would you expect to be able to read and interpret a description of product related to bio-informatics, or neurotechnology? If you spent decades working on video game graphics, would it surprise you that someone describing algorithms for sophisticated quantitative finance or high frequency trading use terminology you're not fam…

I don't know if that argument works for finance on a moral level, where vocabulary has historically been abused to confuse and bamboozle

Re: Smart contracts on Bitcoin

#180

Post by opreturn »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #178
postcynical wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With proof of stake, you can literally throw around money to gain influence over a network. But can't you do the same with PoW. You just throw money at minners and buy their rigs or rent them for a good premium.

A Bitcoin miner that can 51% attack the network will need a huge factory full of mining rigs. A proof of stake miner who wants to 51% attack doesn't need that.

.. that factory full of rigs and a power plant with the capacity of Arkansas Nuclear One
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