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Stellar Smart Contracts

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Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#61

Post by atomical »

CPLX wrote: post #35
atomical wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same could be said for online banking and deposits. There are efficiency gains to be had by taking additional risk.

OK so what are those efficiency gains? Both scenarios require review by well trained specialist experts. You can also similarly “gain efficiency” by signing complex contracts without consulting attorneys. Many people do for smaller scale agreements. Where does the part happen where using computer code is cheaper than using a piece of paper?

> Where does the part happen where using computer code is cheaper than using a piece of paper?

That's the case for almost all internet technologies. In the case of smart contracts it allows instant settlement.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#62

Post by danielvf »

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 for gas.

Stellar smart contracts, on the other hand, are simpler. A transaction can only choose from 13 operations (Buy, make offer, change trust, etc). On top of the operations, you can add some restrictions to the transaction - Stellar has support for built-in multi-sig, built-in start and end time limits, and built in transaction grouping. By combining these restrictions, grouping transactions, presigning this, and handing out that, you can make something that's smarter than a single person doing a single transaction.

As an Ethereum blockchain developer, using Stellar smart contract feels very limiting, and outside the simple cases, very convoluted.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#63

Post by decentralised »

keymone wrote: post #56
decentralised wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understood what I wrote. PoW is wasteful in that the vast majority of the product of it's algorithm (hashes) is discarded. This means that block producers can be trusted because they wouldn't be spending energy / electric power to produce blocks for any reason other than gaining the block rewards, which they can only get if the block is valid. If PoW did some sort of useful work (gene folding, seti,…

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…

We might be arguing about the meaning of words here but the work in PoW is it's output and the hashimoto algorithm in PoW discards all computed hashes that fail to meet the difficulty requirement. I suppose you know how consensus algorithms work, but if you don't I'd suggest you start by reading this https://medium.com/@jpa_of_snc/consensus-casper-and-cryptoec.... If cryptoeconomics is interesting to you I can also recommend the best list of learning resources available, here: https://github.com/jpantunes/awesome-cryptoeconomics

The concept of a useful PoW algorithm has been debated a number of times and the consensus view is what I wrote earlier: If there are incentives to mining other than the block reward, the security assumption provided by hashrate majority is lost and blocks producers cannot be trusted.

I'm a blockchain developer for a couple of years now, and I often write about it as you can see by the links I shared above.

(edit: typos)

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#64

Post by keymone »

decentralised wrote: post #63
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…

We might be arguing about the meaning of words here but the work in PoW is it's output and the hashimoto algorithm in PoW discards all computed hashes that fail to meet the difficulty requirement. I suppose you know how consensus algorithms work, but if you don't I'd suggest you start by reading this https://medium.com/@jpa_of_snc/consensus-casper-and-cryptoec... . If cryptoeconomics is interesting to you I can also…

> 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 difficulty. if finding the signature didn't require going through lots of energy - it wouldn't have been proof of work.

> If there are incentives to mining other than the block reward, the security assumption provided by hashrate majority is lost and blocks producers cannot be trusted.

amazing, so you do understand this and yet you keep saying PoW is wasteful. if security is the product of PoW, then PoW is wasteful only if security is worthless.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#65

Post by vntok »

unmole wrote: post #33
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…

> funds exist and are locked before we meet What does locking funds entail?

The funds are essentially escrowed: no individual party can recoup them unless both agree to move them.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#66

Post by twic »

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 defined in an RFC. The original RFC is from 1995, at which time RFCs were fairly readable, although still very detailed, documents, so that's worth a look:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4506.html

The backstory to XDR is that it fell out of Sun's development of NFS. Sun engineers realised that rather than defining a protocol for NFS from scratch, they could define a generic remote procedure call mechanism (SunRPC, which became ONC RPC), and then define NFS as an application protocol on top of that. An RPC mechanism needs a serialisation format, and XDR is that format.

I get the impression that this was part of a project build a whole new world of IDL-specified RPC-based protocols that would replace the janky, ad-hoc, mostly-textual protocol suite that existed at the time - telnet, rlogin, FTP, SMTP, etc.DCE and CORBA were rival attempts at around the same time. It was an interesting time.

Of course, what actually happened was HTTP. gRPC/HTTP2 is this idea finally coming back into fashion.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#67

Post by chaosbolt »

Nursie wrote: post #7
onion-soup wrote: post #2

Great to see smart contract technology unfolding before our eyes.

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 has spoken in the San Francisco Blockchain Week and they presented 5 nodes on their test network I think.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#68

Post by felipeccastro »

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.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#69

Post by jonnydubowsky »

decentralised wrote: post #28
Nursie wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The oracle problem is not a problem Yes, it really is, where human motivations to pollute input data exist at all it's a huge problem. All of the above require external, trusted systems, or fuzzy, imprecise arguments based around the honest, enlightened economic self-interest of actors who, throughout history, have shown themselves to unenlightened, dishonest and not to act in economically rational ways.

It really isn't a problem. 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. Just in case you are not familiar with cryptoeconomics and game theory, here's an example of mechanism design I used at an interview I gave a fe…

Thanks for this clear example. With a combination of Token Curated Registries and a blend of bonded attestations (a la FOAM Point of Interest recording) and reputation bonds (a la Colony), you end up with economic incentives spread out across validators and other stakeholders where there is enough of a penalty for cheating to prevent it. The key is setting the bonds correctly for the use case. This is why a multipurpose smart contract ecosystem such as Stellar wins out in my book. Token Curated Registries can be used to iteratively experiment with getting the game theory and Token economics right before there's tons of money at stake.

Re: Stellar Smart Contracts

#70

Post by novaleaf »

keymone wrote: post #56
decentralised wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understood what I wrote. PoW is wasteful in that the vast majority of the product of it's algorithm (hashes) is discarded. This means that block producers can be trusted because they wouldn't be spending energy / electric power to produce blocks for any reason other than gaining the block rewards, which they can only get if the block is valid. If PoW did some sort of useful work (gene folding, seti,…

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.

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