| > There is no such thing as a trustless app Reread my post, I said almost. Nothing in life is trustless [for instance, solar flares could effect my computer's state], but you can get close. So we agree there > Ethereum adds no value to Bitcoin because any useful apps you want to make NEED a centralize source to provide data to it. This is called the oracle problem --- it's a difficult problem, but not intractable. Augur doesn't use a centralized source to resolve its markets, it has groups of reporters who do that [with a whole set of incentive structures surrounding truth-as-schelling-point and relying upon bonds to cause monetary loss to people attempting to "cheat" the system. Your cost to cheat the system will almost always be more than potential profit [unless there's only 1 market in a system with a ton of volume and no other activity, which means it's basically dead anyway and there are 2 backstop mechanisms surrounding this as well]. Anyway given infinite money anything is attackable / not trustless. Second, you're missing _a lot_ of the benefits of Ethereum. It can control funds programmatically. To run a prediction market using bitcoin you have to hold customer funds, on Ethereum you don't [this is a huge opex]. On Bitcoin, you have to process the trades, on Ethereum you don't [hello more opex!]. On bitcoin you're forced to use a multisig 3rd party or have counterparty risk to trade prediction market assets, on Ethereum you don't. You have to resolve markets yourself [or with multisig of a handful of people, because bitcoin cannot support multisigs beyond 20]. People can't create their own markets and add liquidity to them on your platform if it's on bitcoin without trusting you either. Could go on and on, but _unless_ you're referring to a sidechain of bitcoin you can't do any of that. As far as the example here: "For example, if I want to make an app that sends coins to someone when bitcoin is at a certain price, I would inherently be relying on the trusted source, that provides the bitcoin price data." is wrong. On Etherex on ethereum I can get data for he btc-eth price and do a transaction based on the exchange rate without trusting anything in the outside world |