You could do even more interesting things trustlessly. For example say, you own a valuable domain. You could borrow money and use the domain as collateral. If you do pay back, or stop making monthly payments the domain is automatically and trustlessly transferred to the lender. Or it can be put up for a trustless public auction with the proceeds going to lender to repay the loan and the rest to you, the ex-owner of the domain who failed to pay back his loan.
registrar is a pointer to an instance of the domain registrar that keeps track of all names. Here's an actual implementation of the registrar: https://github.com/ethereum/ens/blob/master/contracts/HashRe...
The opposite is true: the problems people face is that the only contracts available to them, from rents to cell service, have onerous and unfair terms, favoring whichever side of the contract requires investment, and this unfairness goes up to a ridiculous extent.
The last thing we need is more thorough enforcement of them. Hell, I do believe even the owners themselves would demand the ability to "do business". For instance, to let someone hang on to a name and remain in business while they search for a way to repay their debts.
Let's say, for instance childpornhere.eth goes live, someone pays and receives mail with pictures of a kidnapped child. Havethisguykilled.eth. Sponsorkillingblacks.eth. tipISISnottoattackyourkids.eth. And so on and so forth.
The bitcoin "hostage" situations that we see now. Famously the encryption viruses, but the same is happening with cloud credentials (e.g. gmail or hotmail accounts used for businesses. Passwords get changed, last mail is "if you want them back pay $1k to <bitcoin address>")
Second, securities fraud. If anything was learned from bitcoin in finance, it's that we cannot live without exchange laws, which bitcoin exchanges did not have. Tradehill, Mt. Gox, Bitcoin central, Bitstake, BitSpark, all and many have gone bankrupt, stealing large investments in the process through outright fraud (TradeHill, incidentally the guy who committed that fraud has a new bitcoin exchange), or through incompetence and getting hacked (which of course could always be just straight up fraud, I mean does anyone buy the Mt. Gox story, for instance ?)
Second, addendum: outright general securities fraud. E.g. sudden changes in liquidity that I'm sure in most cases are mere accidents (well, 2 years ago in most cases, today, I'm not so sure), but cause short-term very quick value changes that even in the accidental cases most people find themselves victims to. More generally, the sale and trade of bitcoin derivatives and the practice of the issuers of said products to invest heavily for short term price changes. Or, causing an artificial and massive drop in liquidity through ddossing an exchange (hell, I've worked for actual financial exchanges and seen people pull this one off, but in bitcoin it's commonplace and unpunished)
Thirdly, tax evasion. People use bitcoin, and eth, to avoid paying 0.2% or so commission to banks. We are to trust that these same (very rich) people have no issues paying 30% or so in tax. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Do you really want to allow that ? This is (mostly) what is enabled here.
An Etheruem-based contract is a big improvement over a traditional contract enforceable only by a slow, corrupt court.
Pretty much all technology increases the surface area for fraud. However, the benefits usually outweigh that increase. Blockchains are no different. But the benefit is likely to accrue more to people in less developed countries.
We all know how tradehill, and mt. Gox, and ... ended, so can you explain to me how this works better without the option to go to a court ?
Using a regular old currency you could end up being ripped off by some fraudster, take them to court and lose the case. The non-cryptocurrency world isn't 100% safe and guaranteed to be protect you from fraud either.
It would be foolish to suggest that there will never be any fraud in the blockchain world. The risks are just different. For some people in some places the risks are probably a lot higher than the fiat currency status quo. But there are also plenty of people in places where enforcing a contract by code could be a lot less risky and a lot more appealing.
Also, I should add, just to clarify, I think we're watching the very early days of blockchains. Things are still pretty rough. I'm not especially optimistic about any one of the current crop of cryptocurrencies. But I am optimistic about the underlying ideas over the next, say, five to twenty years.
Neither TradeHill nor Mt. Gox were considered shady exchanges, at any point when they were used. But you do realize that the standards for this are somewhat low.
E.g. both the owner of bloomberg.com and the owner of businessinsider.com are convicted of securities fraud (in fact businessinsider.com was extremely likely started exactly because Henry Blodget was convicted of fraud). At the time, the owner of Tradehill was not convicted of fraud, and while he is now, and yet he's still running a bitcoin exchange.
However, the people defrauded by both of these individuals in "fiat-world" saw 80%+ (Blodget) or 100% (Bloomberg) of their money back. As far as I know, nobody saw their Tradehill money back.
> It would be foolish to suggest that there will never be any fraud in the blockchain world.
Are you seriously naive or misinformed enough to believe this ? Fraud, law breaking and tax evasion are the main, almost the only, reason bitcoin is being used at all. You have heard of Silk Road, right ?
I've seen numbers suggesting that Silk Road was responsible for 70%+ of all bitcoin transaction at one time, and this isn't even counting the many other kinds of fraud and crime, like data ransoms, actual ransoms, money laundering (esp. out of China, in fact most miners are money laundering operations according to many sources)
It sounds like you're talking about a hypothetical future in which eth is just as useful as USD, meaning that the risk in holding eth and converting it to USD is negligible, and that the contract writer doesn't have to worry about the exchange rate changing much. If so, then it seems like you're sort of solving the easy part and skipping over the hard part.
Update fixed formatting
Are there projects to build native cocoa apps on top of eth/btc much like aquamacs for emacs
See the og tao here: http://chriseth.github.io/browser-solidity/?gist=192371538cf...
and read about the $50 million tao debacle on wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)
more about ricardian contracts on ethereum here: http://iang.org/papers/intersection_ricardian_smart.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...
The idea is still good, right? A bug shouldn't end the whole project.
The original DAO was just a preview and it was too early when the whole Ethereum ecosystem was young (and still is, it's less than 2 years old).
Someone someone found contract terms (relating to starting a new sub-entity to the DAO) that favored them, started transferring the eth to themselves using this method (they "probably" gained the ability to dictate how the eth would be spent after an initial period, which plenty of people are desperate to point out isn't the same as owning it). And then ...
Humans intervened to have the terms enforced "correctly" (this was regarded as a hack). They even rolled back quite a few normal transactions that had nothing to do with the attack (because just like all other central banks, the ethereum company cannot risk/be bothered to figure out what transactions are about and come up with a solution that affected just the hack and nothing else)
I imagine this will happen again, and again, and again. This is very clear to anyone who's done the least bit of law : humans cannot be trusted (not even by themselves) to write rules and then uphold them "under any circumstances". We must have governments and a legal system to prevent disaster. The easy tricks I see work is that humans can loan eth from others, then have multiple accounts, only one of which is subject to confiscation. Double collateralizing (pledging the same asset for multiple loans, then disappearing with the loans, recently popular in China).
This would be akin to solving a bank heist by simply rolling back all transactions involving that bank, including 2nd and 3rd degree transactions to before the heist.
So if some person sold a house to a buyer with a mortgage from the bank close enough to the bank heist, and then went out and bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate with the buyer, the bartender would wake up the next day to find the payment for the bottle missing, and the house would be unsold, just so the investors in the bank would be guaranteed the money they invested to be loaned out.
I mean I understand. This simple and automatically enforced contracts is every loaner and landlord's wet dream. They get that the rules are stacked against the tenants. They can rob tenants blind using this game. They don't realize that they cannot play this game against the banks, the millionaires and/or billionaires of our little planet, and they don't know any other game to make money.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_ledger
[1] http://news.sap.com/sapphire-now-sap-cloud-platform-blockcha...
[2] http://www-935.ibm.com/industries/retail/supply-chain/
The Linux Foundation's related project:
Turn your brain's marketing parser on before attempting to read any of this stuff.
If tickets get passed on from the buyer you pay a extra fee ( which increases with each hop ). On ticket return, a pool will be created where you can bid on -> sold tickets above the original price are going to be splitpaid to the venue and the artist / ...
- Cloud commodity (storage, computing - think of decentralized AWS)
- Identity & reputation systems (think of global credit rating & KYC)
- One to one services cutting the middleman (consultation, tutoring, renting)
- Autonomous agents self negotiating contracts (common example is your car paying for its parking)
This means it can be used to turn digital assets which are normally considered infinite in that it can be copied and pasted, into scarce resources.
One example could be a 2nd hand ebook market where books could actually increase in value because it's been owned by this and this person.
From there you can click on any coin and get a link back to each project's website. Exploring those should cover a good chunk of the use-cases that are popular right now.
That's a good start.
Open alternative to Uber, lyft and Airbnb
Edit: There does seem to be a bootstrapping issue though. Right now the centralized entity is basically vouching for new people until their individual reputation builds.