This explanation subtly forgets to explain which agent is responsible for executing the contract-programs. Obviously you don't want the contract to be processed (and the money spent) two or more times at its deadline. Who is doing the processing and ensuring the execution only occurs once?
What is Ethereum?
21–30 of 105 posts
Re: What is Ethereum?
#22Looks like someone is trying to bring about the Diamond Age.
Re: What is Ethereum?
#23It will be hard enough to get widespread social adoption of either blockchain currency or contracts written in programming languages without making them tied to each other.
A better choice for an initial compile target for EtherScript would simply be English.
Re: What is Ethereum?
#24This is a terrible description of Ethereum and trivializes what it is.
The interesting parts of a contract are not the deadline and the transfer of funds. Even an escrow service can provide those functions.
The interesting parts of the contract are the conditions of the transfer of funds, and how those are evaluated prior to effectuating the transfer, and how the obligations are enforced after the transfer.
What makes Ethereum interesting is that it creates a public, decentralized infrastructure for standardized outsourcing of third-party verifiers for each conditional precursor of a contract, and each subsequent obligation.
A contract can specify a set of payments and deadlines, as in OPs example, but it can also specify Boolean inputs from trusted third-party institutions that provide various named state inputs into the contract.
For example, you could have an input that is Boolean, which says, "Website transferred from Seller to Buyer: Verified by Verisign: True/False", etc. Those conditions can be part of the verification process. AND even more excitingly, small micro payments can be made part of the contract, to the third-party verifiers, as part of the contract itself.
I am kind of sick of people who don't understand what the value of smart contracts is, messing up other people's perception of what it is. I award OP zero points, and may god have mercy on his soul.
Re: What is Ethereum?
#25This is a terrible description of Ethereum and trivializes what it is. The interesting parts of a contract are not the deadline and the transfer of funds. Even an escrow service can provide those functions. The interesting parts of the contract are the conditions of the transfer of funds, and how those are evaluated prior to effectuating the transfer, and how the obligations are enforced after the transfer. What make…
Interesting additional context, thank you. If you know a better introduction to the topic, please link&submit it. From what I've seen in other discussions about Ethereum, people are kind of sick of not finding an understandable description about what it actually does except making the world a better place ;)
Re: What is Ethereum?
#26It's very cool that you know exactly what is going to happen. Or, at least, you could simulate exactly what should happen. And, if there was some repository of contracts, you could simulate the effects of the system. Such higher-order possibilities are so opaque most of the time.
But, I'm not sure ambiguity is a bad thing. Or, at least, there is a dose-specific effect. A lot of ambiguity is bad, but so is none. The flexible Goldilocks Zone is the least fragile -- to society that is, not to law.
Re: What is Ethereum?
#27So it's a currency, a contract system, a new form of law, a distributed computing system... I think I need to lie down.
These explainers I keep reading are not helping.
Can anyone tell me whether this is some giant boondoggle circlejerk, or something that is really going to be used widely and perhaps lead to things changing?
Re: What is Ethereum?
#28The example contract is very vague and seemingly pointless. The stated problem is 'if the buyer pays before 1st April, then they own the website'. Fair enough, but usually you'd just deal with this without any kind of contract in place. We don't need contracts for simple cases of 'buyer pays money, gets purchase.' A contract would only be interesting in the example if it was structured as an option: The buyer has pro…
Here is a framework that allows you to easily try this in practice: https://github.com/iurimatias/embark-framework
Re: What is Ethereum?
#29"You might even imagine a nation defined not by geography but by the rules and benefits of citizenship. Imagine that people of the future could opt-in to the virtual nation that suits them best." . I wonder if we will ever get there . But its eye opening just to think about it.
I am sure I have brought it up here before, but I will again. Here it goes.
My father is an intellectual property attorney. Among colorful clients was a very active entrepeneur/inventor.
One year he insisted the future was a digital nation. You see how people drool or get excited even with 1/4-of-the-way-there e-Estonia system? He was talking about this years ago, when I was finishing high school and starting college.
My father even drafted letters to the UN on his behalf pitching the notion of offciail recognition, and he was laughed off completely.
Mark my words, if govts still antagonize their people and an alternative of this form exists, a vocal minority will popularize the notion.
As an American, I cannot wait.
Re: What is Ethereum?
#30Presumably smart contracts would very often depend on input external to the system - for example, imagine a will that says if Person A dies, Person B inherits the millions of dollars worth of Ether at a particular address that Person A owns.
Somebody (or some other system) has to be in charge of the input to the Ethereum system to tell it that Person A has died. This seems like a huge single point of failure that doesn't exist with current contracts, if it gets hacked then the money gets transferred irreversibly and that's that.
Trying to build a smart contract with any kind of "real world" dependency like this seems equivalent to using a crypto system with an extra key that the government controls, there's a single point of failure that could compromise the whole system.