Is Smart Contracts a Failure?
Welcome to Bitcoinland. If you imagine me as a troglodyte from the Internet - you are probably right.
As you know, there's RootStock on Bitcoin, which is a smart contract compatible with Ethereum. Although the project is in a very preliminary phase, I started to think about the idea of smart contracts.
Personally I would divide (initially) Smart contracts into 4 groups
* Projects that support the Ethereum as a currency. Such as Zk-Snarks, Raiden etc. or by Ethereum as Bitcoin is a means of payment. Here, smart contracts make sense, but they're half-hearted. They support Ethereum, but probably not in the sense of the idea of Smart Contracts (unstoppable applications).
* ICO / DAO - projects that are created on a speculative bubble. Most of them die, most of them are created on the basis of the same code.
* Casino (and maybe games)
* Other applications like DeFi
Of course, I'll point out here, I don't follow projects at Ethereum. Maybe it is a great technology, and I omitted a lot of important things. I tried to find out from other colleagues who have Ethereum what is cool, but I guess they do not know exactly.
DEX. Personally, I am a fan of decentralised exchanges, systems that will allow to develop cryptocurrency technology by eliminating intermediaries who get hacked or steal money. I am a fan of e.g. Bisq, where I can (hypothetically at least) buy cryptocurrency with fiats or other crypto.
However, many ETH exchanges do not allow this. They allow ETHs to be exchanged for other tokens on ERC20 and vice versa. No wonder, because it is much easier to do (probably than creating contracts that verify transactions on other crypto). It seems to me that here Ethereum solves a problem that he created himself.
There's a lot about loans on Ethereum (or DAI) lately. At first I thought - Wow, this is very good news.
However, from what I understood, these are loans to speculate on money more (??). As an example of application I got such a thing:
- You want to borrow 1000 DAI (for example)
- You deposit 1050 DAI (You must deposit more than you borrow, because commissions + motivation to repay the loan).
- You exchange (for DEX?:P) DAI for Ethereum.
- Ethereum to the moon
- You sell Ethereum (part of it at least) and repay the loan by recovering e.g. 1040 DAI, and at the same time you are richer with Ethereum.
If you fail, the money goes to cover the debt.
I do not see a consumer application here. It's not worth buying a house or a computer if I need more money than I want to borrow. Here it is better to create a system of "social" loans, which are risky but cheaper at the same time?
My question is, are there any interesting solutions for which Smart contracts are suitable? Do they really compete with centralized solutions and solve big problems? I'd write that maybe it's technology overhype, but somebody could kill me.
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OhNoEthereum via https://ift.tt/2PblI7a @/u/lordfervi, @Khareem Sudlow