Being someone who has spent two years on smart contract technology (peer to peer insurance on Ethereum) I can say that this video is not bad. It really is a decent introduction to the topic. One specific quote that really hits the mark is: 2:52 "You are going to move away from ownership of data (service) to designing the best interface to that service, because the service is on the blockchain and can be viewed by anyone or used by anyone so the best service that performs the job will be used the most."
Intriguing, but there are problems to overcome before this can be put into practice. For example, having people act as escrow means that when the real world behaves in unexpected ways, you have a human arbiter that can mediate disputes, whereas with smart contracts if you didn't take every contingency into account in the contract you can have undesirable outcomes.
By simplifying the number of different states that will determine the outcome of the funds in an escrow you can solve this problem. Really good oracles are also needed.
I think there's another issue with this: user understandability. And I'm using user loosely here to refer to the businesses and independent business persons that would use this system. For something to become widespread, I would think that there needs to be a way to 'ease in,' for me blockchain and bitcoin are already confusing concepts that my brain doesn't want to easily accept, this usage sounds incredible, but it seems more confusing than bitcoin.
What I ultimately want to see from this technology is the complete replacement of the stock exchange.....and get rid of the requirement to go through institutions/brokers for trading. People place their orders in an open mesh, and the "miners" attempt to match orders together to complete the trades and lock them in the chain. This would allow more options with order legs.....like, maybe I want to buy 100 shares of WMT and short 130 shares of TGT but only if I pay less than $375 for the whole thing and only if SPY is above 235, or some other weird combination.
I recommend looking into the Ethereum application Gnosis, which will act as a platform for building decentralised exchanges such as the one you describe here.
Who verifies that the contract was satisfied ? Let's say you want to replace Uber, so I make a smart contract with a random driver to take me to the airport. With Uber they can see the GPS coordinates for both of our phones, but does Etherium support anything like this ?
Wow put it like that and it sounds wildly insecure and dangerous, although in that sense it is crucial information whereas a bit-mining hash is just a random hash
Blockchains need APIs to understand the state of objects in the real world. These APIs are called oracles. So an oracle which provides GPS locations to the smart contract would still be needed and this likely is not based on trust free transactions but require some level of trust between the oracle service and the users.
Seems nice, but how does it handle customer protection? Not that Uber has been doing very well with this, but at least when issues arise with them you have a company to sue so they have some incentive to prevent dangerous drivers from working for them. Without that, it would seem that you have no reason to trust that the person picking you up can be trusted with your safety. Do smart contracts have a way around that?
I'm at a complete loss as to what this is or what it's for. My best interpretation is that it is a computerized system for arbitrating that the terms of a contract have been met. But at either end are humans-fallible, inconsistent, and sometimes malevolent humans. So you get your phone out and hail a Smüber and the driver doesn't show up but takes your money, or you are delivered to a destination but refuse to acknowledge that took place. In either case, the fancy smart contract does nothing but keep honest people honest. It seems to put a lot of strength into the middle-man which just pushes the problems to the outside. Just as ATM networks are hard to crack, all it takes is a card skimmer, clever social engineering, or good old-fashined force to rob someone. Is the arbitrator really the problem? And all this computing power is not free (as in beer) so rather than a percentage going to some literal middle-man / middle-company, it goes to ... well ... it's drawn toward paying for that computing power.
I remember Etherium mining was the reason why AMD Gpus were in serious shortage. Its quite interesting how these new mining tech seems to work well on GPUs.
I found this really hard to follow. I think it was because it went right in at the deep end. Did I miss a previous video? There was a lot of talk about the details of smart contracts before I really understood the overview of what they were. I think that if some real-life examples had been presented at the start, then I would have grasped the rest of the information more easily. Then again, I've just worked a twelve-hour day, so maybe I'm tired! I'll probably visit Wikipedia tomorrow and see if there are diagrams :)
The interesting but it's more of an academic exercise because Uber isn't just the financial aspect of it, they also vet the drivers, and do all kinds of macro management as opposed to what you appear to be proposing which is just ad hoc peer-to-peer, that by definition is micro. As far as Amazon and eBay you still need that big Gathering site to establish the market. You could do away with them but then you would just be on Craigslist which again is macro sized Market, and typically bigger markets are better
Still needs a system (centralised) to set this up. So still needs a type of middleman. For example, unless we use barter, we use cash. Cash is centralized. So unless every contract is made individually, then we are using a central system, a middle man, to set each contract.
What i wanted to express is that the entire problematic could have been explained better. I have looked up the etherium channel and there are videos that explain it better. But thanks to computerphile i atleast know that something like this exists and it is indeed a very promising piece of technology.
Too bad Ethereum is not a blockchain anymore... just a very slow SQL run by a centralized group of people who may be (eventually) prosecuted because of the DAO scandal.
...without rehashing too much of that video...
cute pun
Being someone who has spent two years on smart contract technology (peer to peer insurance on Ethereum) I can say that this video is not bad. It really is a decent introduction to the topic. One specific quote that really hits the mark is:
2:52 "You are going to move away from ownership of data (service) to designing the best interface to that service, because the service is on the blockchain and can be viewed by anyone or used by anyone so the best service that performs the job will be used the most."
Intriguing, but there are problems to overcome before this can be put into practice.
For example, having people act as escrow means that when the real world behaves in unexpected ways, you have a human arbiter that can mediate disputes, whereas with smart contracts if you didn't take every contingency into account in the contract you can have undesirable outcomes.
anon8109
True, but it's entirely possible to write contract that uses third party arbiter for non standard outcomes
By simplifying the number of different states that will determine the outcome of the funds in an escrow you can solve this problem. Really good oracles are also needed.
I think there's another issue with this: user understandability. And I'm using user loosely here to refer to the businesses and independent business persons that would use this system. For something to become widespread, I would think that there needs to be a way to 'ease in,' for me blockchain and bitcoin are already confusing concepts that my brain doesn't want to easily accept, this usage sounds incredible, but it seems more confusing than bitcoin.
Ethereum!
What I ultimately want to see from this technology is the complete replacement of the stock exchange.....and get rid of the requirement to go through institutions/brokers for trading. People place their orders in an open mesh, and the "miners" attempt to match orders together to complete the trades and lock them in the chain. This would allow more options with order legs.....like, maybe I want to buy 100 shares of WMT and short 130 shares of TGT but only if I pay less than $375 for the whole thing and only if SPY is above 235, or some other weird combination.
I recommend looking into the Ethereum application Gnosis, which will act as a platform for building decentralised exchanges such as the one you describe here.
Who verifies that the contract was satisfied ? Let's say you want to replace Uber, so I make a smart contract with a random driver to take me to the airport. With Uber they can see the GPS coordinates for both of our phones, but does Etherium support anything like this ?
With something like Oraclize, possibly.
Wow put it like that and it sounds wildly insecure and dangerous, although in that sense it is crucial information whereas a bit-mining hash is just a random hash
Blockchains need APIs to understand the state of objects in the real world. These APIs are called oracles. So an oracle which provides GPS locations to the smart contract would still be needed and this likely is not based on trust free transactions but require some level of trust between the oracle service and the users.
Seems nice, but how does it handle customer protection? Not that Uber has been doing very well with this, but at least when issues arise with them you have a company to sue so they have some incentive to prevent dangerous drivers from working for them. Without that, it would seem that you have no reason to trust that the person picking you up can be trusted with your safety. Do smart contracts have a way around that?
I'm at a complete loss as to what this is or what it's for. My best interpretation is that it is a computerized system for arbitrating that the terms of a contract have been met. But at either end are humans-fallible, inconsistent, and sometimes malevolent humans. So you get your phone out and hail a Smüber and the driver doesn't show up but takes your money, or you are delivered to a destination but refuse to acknowledge that took place. In either case, the fancy smart contract does nothing but keep honest people honest.
It seems to put a lot of strength into the middle-man which just pushes the problems to the outside. Just as ATM networks are hard to crack, all it takes is a card skimmer, clever social engineering, or good old-fashined force to rob someone. Is the arbitrator really the problem?
And all this computing power is not free (as in beer) so rather than a percentage going to some literal middle-man / middle-company, it goes to ... well ... it's drawn toward paying for that computing power.
I like this idea, please make it operational as fast as possible.
Most mature viewer comments of any video on youtube.
ShapeShift is a centralized service, not a decentralized app. Its website can be accessed without any issue from a regular web 2.0 browser.
I think he's just talking about using ShapeShift as the frontend, to access Ethereum, or whatever blockchain he's accessing.
I remember Etherium mining was the reason why AMD Gpus were in serious shortage. Its quite interesting how these new mining tech seems to work well on GPUs.
No mention of mastodon in this video? It's basically smart contract peer to peer twitter.
I found this really hard to follow. I think it was because it went right in at the deep end. Did I miss a previous video? There was a lot of talk about the details of smart contracts before I really understood the overview of what they were. I think that if some real-life examples had been presented at the start, then I would have grasped the rest of the information more easily. Then again, I've just worked a twelve-hour day, so maybe I'm tired! I'll probably visit Wikipedia tomorrow and see if there are diagrams :)
Interesting stuff! I'm curious what, if any attack vectors have been studies against block chains
very good series. I would add a chapter to talk about the "oracles" and their role in smart contracts. cheers
yeah remove the middle man
Everything we buy would be twice as cheap (or cheaper). Salesmen and cashiers would have to find a career that actually benefits society.
+judgeomega If the services salesmen and cashiers provide are not beneficial, why are you using them?
because there is no way around.. yet
because they are the best source of a resource, so therefore if we can eliminate them by creating it ourselves than we will/should
Complete Loser well said
The interesting but it's more of an academic exercise because Uber isn't just the financial aspect of it, they also vet the drivers, and do all kinds of macro management as opposed to what you appear to be proposing which is just ad hoc peer-to-peer, that by definition is micro. As far as Amazon and eBay you still need that big Gathering site to establish the market. You could do away with them but then you would just be on Craigslist which again is macro sized Market, and typically bigger markets are better
Shapeshift is not a Ethereum Dapp.
Checking in!
Still needs a system (centralised) to set this up. So still needs a type of middleman.
For example, unless we use barter, we use cash. Cash is centralized.
So unless every contract is made individually, then we are using a central system, a middle man, to set each contract.
I don't understand this. Do I need to watch some other related video before hand?
I have to admit i havent understood from this video...
You can't look into any crypto-system and understand it in 10 minutes.
What i wanted to express is that the entire problematic could have been explained better. I have looked up the etherium channel and there are videos that explain it better. But thanks to computerphile i atleast know that something like this exists and it is indeed a very promising piece of technology.
so etherium is a global scale parallel computer, and you pay to perform computations on it,
what's it computing right now? the billionth digit of pi?
WeAreGRID
It computes smart contracts described in the video
@obsessed with brady's channels
"nonce value" lmao
rehashing... oh puns
Creepy... I started some research for my PhD into this last week.
Ethereum will revolutionize the world. This is some really incredible technology
sounds freemakerty to me :)
Nice.
Get in on Ethereum while its cheap!
Its $50 now it was $8 in Jan
And bitcoin is $1200
10 views wooooo
Blockchain!
Hallo
They are smart until someone is smarter than the one that coded them.
Too bad Ethereum is not a blockchain anymore... just a very slow SQL run by a centralized group of people who may be (eventually) prosecuted because of the DAO scandal.
Gian Carlo Martinelli DAO?
hail what?
Ethereum ftw!