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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This thing needs a use case that gets used. Try putting fantasy football betting on Ethereum. You need an oracle or oracles to get game results into the system, but those can use a voting scheme to prevent payouts based on phony results. Of course, it has to be packaged up as an app usable by the typical football fan.

Possible YC startup.

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If you can create user-friendly app for betting and it is legal, why would you use blockchain for that instead of just using traditional way? I would bet my ass off that the end-users (gamblers) don't give a crap whether it is on blockchain or not, they just want it to be easy, quick and possibly cheap. And of course trustable. And by latter I don't mean "mathematical proof" trustable, they want brand that they know to trust.

> they want brand that they know to trust.

like fulltilt or leehman brothers!

You have to take in account that for every failed banks there is something like 20 banks that have worked good enough. For full tilt, there has been many gambling services that haven't failed yet.

When using banking services, you have a risk of a bank run. How big that risk is? How much work are you willing to do, or how much money are you willing to spend to migitate that risk?

> If you can create user-friendly app for betting and it is legal, why would you use blockchain for that instead of just using traditional way?

Because it's not legal (in the US), obviously. But the feds won't be able to shut it down if it's on the blockchain. Look at bittorrent, still perfectly alive and well after so many years.

They actually discuss this in the article, including the concept of oracles, 'reputation', etc. See more at the referenced site[0] or the Youtube video[1].

[0] http://www.augur.net/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yegyih591Jo

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