I want to get into ID projects, in particular one killer app is proving to a website that you're over the age of 18, without giving away any personal details.
Eth Global hackathon starts today and there are quite a few teams interested in working on identity - soulbound tokens, zksnarks and homographic encryption seem the most popular.
What about the people not in "online communities", but in real industries, outside of the crypto hellnerd circle jerk? They're not using DAOs. They have no choice except to operate within the legal frameworks of the nation-states and economic unions within which they operate. If I'm a company making widgets in territory A to be sold in territory B, then I have legal and financial obligations that cannot be swerved by fucking off into the electronic ether.
If you are Widget Ltd, you could indeed be sued if you breached a legal agreement whether you used a smart contract or not.
If your legal contract with Acme Ltd say that you pay them 10 USDC for every widget, if you use a smart contract that says "pay Acme 1 USDC for every widget" you have problems....because you broke a nation-state regulated legal agreement while being registered in that territory.
This is where DAOs come in. You would write a smart contract with Acme DAO that says as soon as a widget comes in, pay ACME DAO 10 USDC, no registration, no legal agreement, no lawyers required. Acme DAO would then look carefully at that contract to make sure that the terms were clear.
Like how are they registering receipt? Say a set of scales that has an API feed. If those scales show the weight of one widget, then pay Acme 10 USDC. Suppose someone tricks it by putting a lump of rock of the exact same weight there, well then you need an oracle that will determine the truth in dubious cases (there are lots of designs for Oracles btw)
Nothing requires banks or lawyers.
You’re mistaking “coercively enforceable” with “legally enforceable”. All kinds of things can be coerced. My Big Rob clause coercively enforces the contract. The point, however, is to ask whether that enforcement is legal? If it isn’t then the party claiming on the contract is answerable to the law for their illegal activity. The fact that a smart contract automatically enforces all clauses with no intervention point is therefore a weakness, not a strength. If the court decides a clause is not legally enforceable, the party taking advantage of the clause cannot prevent its illegal enforcement from taking place.
In my Joe Bloggs example, the court might decide that the smart contract owed Joe Bloggs 1% of what was in the contract. How are the court going to make that happen, when they eventually realise that its fruitless, Joe might hire Big Rob to enforce like he does in other tricky situations, but whats he going to do - beat up some code?
Yes, this bit puzzles me. If I lend you one bitcoin and you set up a smart contract to pay me one bitcoin in one year's time, the only way the smart contract can guarantee that it can fulfil its job is by ensuring that at least one bitcoin remains in your wallet for the whole year.
That's rather pointless.
the idea that it might not be pointless appears to rest on a fundamental misunderstanding of the function of money, which is to circulate.
The simplest way to do it would be a basic escrow contract, Alice puts in 1btc on 1.1.22 and it sends it to Bob on 1.1.23.
But these contracts are
smart. Say Alice only has 0.5 btc, but she is due a paymentof 0.5btc from Cathy on 31.12.23. You could write a contract that would hold Alice's 0.5btc in escrow AND call Cathy's debt in at the appropriate time, meaning that there was 1btc in the contract at the time that Bob was due his payout. And contracts can be endlessly chained together with no concerns about any of them disappearing because once deployed, they are there forever.
Criminal law is irrelevant. If a contract is poorly worded or obviously unfair or coercive or for any number of other reasons it may be unenforceable under contract law. Contract lawyers are among the best paid lawyers there are, in part because contract law is eye-wateringly complex. Your hand waving doesn't change a thing.
See the Joe Bloggs example. A court might well decide that it was unfair or coersive and that it is unenforceable under contract law but that doesnt matter, because whatever the court decides that contract is just going to keep on doing its thang, totally oblivious to the men in fancy wigs.
If i set up a standing order with my bank to pay someone else £X on a future date, i can cancel it before the date if i change my mind. Even if I set up a direct debit (where the other party sends the instruction to the bank to debit my account) i can cancel the DD mandate.
Can you cancel a "smart contract"?
Depends, you can kill a smart contract by calling selfdestruct but only if you have that function enabled. If its important to you that you might want to cancel in the future, you need to write that into the contract, default is to run for eternity.
being serious for a moment, no.
It's an escrow service. In order to enter into the smart contract I've set out, Kabbes would need to put £1 into the contract, which would then payout to stakerone as soon as the conditions of the contract are met, in this case that the calendar oracle has told us that it's tomorrow.
I don't think you could setup something like a standing order/direct debit using trustless unbreakable smart contracts because (a) you can't setup something indefinite with no way to break or end it unilaterally and (b) it's not trustless if you can leave it with a wallet with no funds to draw on, which could be the case with anything that you setup on an ongoing basis that has to draw out of your wallet automatically. Any money being transferred by a smart contract must treat the smart contract as an escrow service and place that money into the contract at the time of inception.
So it would mean a new contract every month and a whole lot more admin. You might as well be making manual transfers.
See example above. I think Superfluid (streaming money platform) are working on a subscriptions model at the moment.
Yeah, it's clearly no good for simple loans.
I could see how a SC might work where you contract someone to do a piece of work for you and have some mechanism agreed between the two of you whereby once the work has been completed correctly, some button is pressed and payment is made by the SC.
But you have a similar problem even there. It means you need to have all your financing of the work sorted at the point of making the contract. With long-term projects, that isn't the case in the real world. And in any case, if I've got 10 grand that I need to pay you in six months' time, I'd be sensible putting it into a savings account and getting a bit of interest, but you can't do that and guarantee the SC will be fulfilled - cos the money can't be circulating during the SC period.
I'm struggling to identify a scenario in which this is a good idea.
Again, no you dont, you just need to ensure that there is a chain of smart contracts in place that will ensure that the funds are there at the time of dispersal.
Yes but i don't think this is the only type of thing you can do with a smart contract, although ultimately they must all involved moving tokens on a blockchain because what else is there for them to do? The question then becomes what else you can do by moving tokens on a blockchain.
Ensure that you always have milk for your tea in the morning?
People are thinking about this very much in "human" terms, but smart contracts arent really designed to be used by humans.
Suppose I decide that I always want my fridge to have milk. Fridge has a sensor on the milk bit which can judge how much milk I have, when I get down to my last 100ml, a smart contract trigger is actioned to send 1 USDC to a MilkDAO contract, that says whenever 1 USDC is received from a wallet, send a drone to the address associated with that wallet on KYC DAO.
I go to the fridge to make a cup of tea, use up the last of the milk, then go to my doorstep where a litre of fresh milk is waiting for me.
Smart contracts + oracles + internet of things = endless possibilities.
