182 karma · joined July 15, 2014
Built the product but never moved forward with it.
Last year, we started playing around with smart contracts for Ethereum. We thought it was way too difficult to get started with all the different tools out there. That led us to make Pragma (www.withpragma.com). It's a tool where you can write, deploy, and interact with Ethereum smart contracts all in your browser. We'd love to hear your thoughts on the product, from what other features you would find useful, to picking holes in the product. I'm also curious to hear if/what you're building with smart contracts.
I'm actually interested if you can think of a reason too. This is an incredibly difficult brainstorming exercise. So many ICO's have failed to justify their use-cases, but tokens are so interesting that I have to believe there are good reasons to use them. Is there any case that you do find particularly helpful?
The cool think about tokens is that they can be programmed to behave different ways. Can you imagine a world where each currency is programmed differently? For example, maybe one currency gets deflated with each transaction (gets multipled by 0.9), and another currency can only be sent a certain number of times before it disappears, encourage people to hold it. Can you think of use cases where that changes the utility of a complementary currency? I'm asking because I can think of a few, but it's so hard to tell whether or not they're good ideas.
The second part, outside of that, is that tokens are on a blockchain. Again, none of this is specific to us, but there are a few properties that any token gets. Namely: They are provably scarce, they can interact with smart contracts, and they can be traded for other currencies if necessary.
Right now we have a single token contract that has been audited. We also have a few other smart contracts in the works, to be used with your token.
By private ledger, do you mean private blockchains? I’ve always been less interested in those. Part of the fun in blockchains is the public nature of them, and how they enable transparency and interaction between everyone. To me, private blockchains seem like they should just be databases in most cases. But I’m not an expert in that area by any means.