If total ETH sent to contract address by date X > Amount Y then send the ETH to the fundraiser, else return the ETH.
A saying goes "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything". That's where this value of $500m comes in. It's in the brand reputation the company has built. In the traffic they generate by people browsing their site and discovering projects they might back. In the UI they've set up, and most of all, it's in the trust that they actually do some amount of quality checking. In the thought that projects on Kickstarter stand a better chance of executing than projects on competitor's sites.
You can get someone to write the necessary code for "if funded send to x, else return funds" on any freelance site for a four-digit amount, whether you want it in Solidity or PHP. That's the easy part. The hard part then is building a better platform, policing the projects on there, ensuring quality and attracting backers.
Can you do so in a way that I as a funder don't need to trust you the intermediary?
No, and you can't with smart contracts either (the intermediary being the creator of the contract), unless funders are restricted to people with the skill to analyze the contract code. As proven by the DAO.
And even if you could, you've replaced only a small-and-useless-in-isolation piece of Kickstarter by doing so.
I'm not saying it's the entirety of kickstarter but I think you're being overly dismissive of the concept. It could work well for things like bug or feature bounties, or other similar situations where having a company to sit in the middle and hold cash requires building up too much reputation than it is worth. Running costs become just the transaction & code running costs on whatever network you're using too.
For everyone who doesn't do it on their own, they either have to trust the originator or trust someone who has done it, so for most users you aren't eliminating the need for a trusted third party.
> I'm not saying it's the entirety of kickstarter
That was the upthread claim.
Which is a different trust model.
There are a few major things:
1. Not everyone has to trust the originator
2. It's possible for me to trust a third party which is different from the one asking for my money
3. It's possible for me to trust a combination of many third parties, given that any one reliable third party that cries foul would be enough
So there's a huge difference between "trust me and give me your money" and "trust that not all the third parties that checked the code are co-conspirators".
> That was the upthread claim.
Yes, but I'm not making that claim, and I think your statement saying this piece is "useless in isolation" is overly dismissive.
It blows my mind how so many people proliferate how useful blockchain companies can be yet despite all of the different blockchains, ICO's..., practically none [1] have taken off because they are technologically and economically worse than current market products and services.
[1]: Illegal markets are the only market I have seen that do like it because companies/governments have specifically made it harder for illegal transactions to take place over traditional currencies.
All blockchains rely on re-computing the same transaction across many different entities due to mistrust. However, despite the common sentiment that computers are cheap; at scale, the are definitely not. Every additional computation to validate something increases the cost of business and 99% of businesses are cutthroat when it comes to cost.
Add in the other downsides/costs of crypto.* (my insights on the downsides of blockchain specifically: hard to use, one way transactions, high transfer costs due to low block size, super easy to get hacked and lose all your money...) and it's no wonder they are all failing.
99.999% of the time, the costs outway the benefits.
I have.
How you take funds for your campaign is configurable. The projects which took USD raised millions more than the projects which took various cryptocurrencies at the time of funding. The upside of having a smart contract 'guarantee' your funds was outweighed by the downside of drop-off in getting your potential customers to acquire and pay you using an obscure financial instrument.
This looks to be changing.
http://www.sgsme.sg/news/startups/singapore-startup-launchin...
User acquisition is critical in the success of marketplaces. Usability is often ignored too.
Even today, if you create an eBay (granted, a much stickier marketplace than Kickstarter) with no fees, it's not as simple as throwing the doors open and expecting everyone to switch.
You can read more here, in a different example I dig into (Slack vs IRC): https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html
If you ever want, I'm happy to have the debate with you (email in profile). If you really want to compete, you're going to need to be aware of what it'll really take to win, not just decentralized/blockchain and no fees.
(And as a nit, I can also build a website in a week that takes 2% credit card vig without blockchain - sure I know you'll argue that I can raise the price later, but I'm still not going to win against Kickstarter without something more than just a cheaper price)
I'm sceptical about the use-case. Collecting money for the projects is so much about other things as well, not just the money collection phase - you need a services around it, it is not just the payment collection. That said, I think it would be quite useful for kickstarter to accept btc/eth.
No, it can't.
> If total ETH sent to contract address by date X > Amount Y then send the ETH to the fundraiser, else return the ETH.
Somehow missing the tracking of backers and rewards, the mutual identification of the parties, and the enforceable obligations with regard to rewards. Kinda key features of Kickstarter.
But how?
How can you replace kickstarter with a few lines of code? Through your wonderful imagination that can bend reality? Or through your convincing argument that kickerstarter volunteered to turn itself into a few lines of code.
Or what?
But there is a reason people don't do that, something to do with the value centralized platforms provide.
Plus I'm not entirely sure anyone should trust smart contracts to actually perform such a function, next thing you know someone other than the project created takes all the funds pursuant to the smart contract, but hey that's the beauty of a smart contract it's infallible, so what ever it does it was intended to do, be damned with what people thought and understood it would do.
It wasn't very popular or very user friendly, I think the development stopped one year ago