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by alexasmyths 3123 days ago
""smart", are only as good as they're written"

There are so many things that go into contracts that cannot be articulated in 'code' that this all hardly makes sense.

Employment contracts are long. Comp packages can be complex.

And we all live in countries with employment laws etc. that require these things anyhow.

I don't see any actual real-world cases for Eth contracts just yet.
2 comments
patrickk 3123 days ago
The earliest smart contracts will likely involve things that are relatively easy to verify, e.g. a bet that the price of ETH will be above X at Y date and time.

Ensuring that accurate, real-world data gets entered into the blockchain to enable broadly useful smart contracts is going to be an interesting area to monitor over the next few years.

Augur attempts to align people's incentives to accurately report on real world events, like political events (aka Oracles). Axa pays out on delayed flights with a new flight insurance product[1], from data gathered from public flight information, which triggers an automated payout.

[1] https://fizzy.axa/

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alexasmyths 3123 days ago
"a bet that the price of ETH will be above X at Y date and time"

Not so fast. Who says 'what the price of ETH' is? There is no such thing as 'the price of ETH' - there are simply buyers and sellers each willing to sell and buy at different amounts.

You'd have to agree on a mechanism to agree on what that price even is.

And what about odd fluxuations? Market cheaters - i.e. getting a hold of a vast quantity of ETH just to jolt markets for a few hundred milliseconds just to jigger some contract?

As far as 'paying out on delayed flights' - that's a very cool idea, but I can't imagine why on earth it would be in ETH on a distributed ledger.

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KallDrexx 3123 days ago
> There are so many things that go into contracts that cannot be articulated in 'code' that this all hardly makes sense.

I think this is actually something I've been trying to articulate for a while now anytime smart contracts come up.

Legal contracts only specify the criteria and conditions surrounding a contract. Smart contracts must describe that PLUS all the very specific instructions on how to validate those criteria/conditions which adds a massive amount of complexity into the contract (and more potential for loopholes).

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