[agandy]

Agreed on bitcoin not being the perfect solution for crypto. I think Ethereum has a ton of potential in this regard. Smart contracts have many applications and provided the developer community around Ethereum continues growing, I see no reason why it won't overtake Bitcoin within the next 10 years.

[repomies6991]

All this smart contract talk makes me somewhat sceptical. There have been a lot of talk about code replacing lawyers for years now, I still see very little of that actually happening. Can you name any cool smart contract use cases?

[darkFunction]

The problem with smart contracts is that of defining trustless "oracles", or, how do you get data in and out of the network without relying on vulnerable points of centralisation. As soon as you require information about something other than the internal state of the chain, you have a problem. I believe some companies are attempting to implement solutions at the moment but I'm not familiar with the technology.

Crowd-funding is an already popular use case for blockchain contracts, as well as the creation of tradable tokens built on top of the platform. Decentralised exchanges are a nice idea but to my knowledge they are outclassed by the speed of centralised servers. Decentralised, "fair" casinos (such as Edgeless) are also possible with smart contracts but I think they won't be able to compete with traditional casinos that have an edge but offer large and enticing welcome bonuses.

For a quick overview of some of Ethereum's Dapps you can look at: http://dapps.ethercasts.com/

[splintercell]

> There have been a lot of talk about code replacing lawyers for years now, I still see very little of that actually happening.

Replacing X, when X is a task performed by a human is not an easy task for any technology.

Take for instance Automobiles replaced Horse Cab drivers, but it created Automobile drivers. So have cars really replaced the drivers? In a way they have, and in a way they haven't.

Today Smart contracts are being used to performed mostly financial transactions. Our main problem remains the same what it was in front of the Internet in early days. They wanted their refrigerator to be able to automatically order milk once it runs out of it, but it turned out that IoT wasn't even a thing then.

On the other hand, replacing telegrams and faxes with email was a lot easier task. Doing things which have no pre-internet equivalence (for instance camming) were a lot more easily integrated.

Same here, the main and the easiest use of Smart Contracts would be in the fields where there is no current usage exists. Currently Smart contracts are being used for some lightweight usages for instance performing trades of cryptocurrencies. Today ENS is launched where they are using Smart Contracts to implement domain registry systems. Tomorrow maybe decentralized uber would be made possible. None of these tasks are really 'replace a lawyer' tasks.