I can see currencies, and I can even see identity to some degree… but what are some really practical applications of smart contracts? I always get stuck on the question of how they’re useful beyond about the “multisig escrow” level. Is there some obvious “killer app” that existing institutions don’t solve well, and/or that would really be accessible and meaningfully useful to people who don’t have access to those institutions?
I’ve heard some handwaving about tracking titles in off-chain assets like land or whatever, but none that actually got down and addressed the off-chain practicalities or the many complications… and tracking titles in any way that does not bite off the complications doesn’t really seem to require programmable smart contracts at all. I know there’s gambling and CryptoKitties, but those don’t seem like very important uses. I’m skeptical about the real utility of prediction markets, and none of them seem to have done anything very earth-shaking so far.
On “social recovery”, it seems obvious to me that while people who don’t participate will get screwed by losing their keys, some people who do participate will get screwed by picking the wrong “trustworthy” recovery agents. I don’t think the problem of managing very powerful high-value keys has been solved at all for most users, and I’m not so sure it can be solved.
Kleros allows for a bunch of great applications. At the moment many people complain that Youtube bans a lot of people via bots without any human review. Youtube could have a system where if a bot locks down one of your videos you can easily get arbitration via Kleros for getting the post unlocked provided you put some money into escrow.
Having the ability to write rules that get neutrally arbitrated means that a startup has to spend less money on hiring people to enforce rules and can simply abstract that away in a similar way a startup currently abstracts away owning servers by using AWS.
Upwork.com/Freelancer.com currently have 20% fees. I would imagine that creating a similar market with 5% fees that does all the rules enforcement via Kleros would be a successful product.
You need a bank account to access Upwork but you don’t need it to access such a market. That means that it’s possible to bring markets to communities that currently have neither a functioning bank system nor a functioning legal system.
It’s unclear to me why Kleros currently has such a low valuation given that the general mechanism is a highly useful building block for many other applications.
Currently, prediction markets have much higher fees then financial markets for most transactions. With better designed prediction markets then the one’s we are currently having (and much lower transaction cost then currently exist on Ethereum) I expect them to provide a lot of economic value.
I’ve always thought that the killer app of smart contracts is creating institutions that are transparent, static and unstoppable. So for example uncensored media publishing, defi, identity, banking. It’s a way to enshrine in code a set of principles of how something will work that then cannot be eroded by corruption or interference.
Why would you need smart contracts for publishing? (rather than just file-sharing or a p2p web.) I can/have thought of mechanisms in that area, but I’m curious as to what you had in mind.
I agree with what you’re saying, but that’s still an abstract potential rather than a killer app.
You don’t need smart contracts for publishing but you do need some way to publish a list of documents or the hashes of the list of documents. A blockchain is an easy way to publish IPFS addresses of articles.
If you want something like verifying that articles are correct you could it’s very hard to do that without smart contracts and interfacing with a service like Kleros.
Social recovery is presumably going to be optional, I can’t really see a way they could make it non-optional. But I agree that it’s probably impossible to design a system that would work for the sorts of people who would be betrayed in the worst possible way by a quorum of their closest friends and family.
Good approximate solutions to recurring problems are generally quite useful to have.
I can see currencies, and I can even see identity to some degree… but what are some really practical applications of smart contracts? I always get stuck on the question of how they’re useful beyond about the “multisig escrow” level. Is there some obvious “killer app” that existing institutions don’t solve well, and/or that would really be accessible and meaningfully useful to people who don’t have access to those institutions?
I’ve heard some handwaving about tracking titles in off-chain assets like land or whatever, but none that actually got down and addressed the off-chain practicalities or the many complications… and tracking titles in any way that does not bite off the complications doesn’t really seem to require programmable smart contracts at all. I know there’s gambling and CryptoKitties, but those don’t seem like very important uses. I’m skeptical about the real utility of prediction markets, and none of them seem to have done anything very earth-shaking so far.
On “social recovery”, it seems obvious to me that while people who don’t participate will get screwed by losing their keys, some people who do participate will get screwed by picking the wrong “trustworthy” recovery agents. I don’t think the problem of managing very powerful high-value keys has been solved at all for most users, and I’m not so sure it can be solved.
As far as killer apps go I think there are multiple interesting roads.
Science funding via NFT’s in intruiging: https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c248420045cb7b5e/41443491289334730858714141368268395642829177615924976808738423867555824271361 Making scientific papers into intellectual work that can be owned like artwork is intruiging. Especially given that it’s possible that owning a highly cited paper makes you money.
Kleros allows for a bunch of great applications. At the moment many people complain that Youtube bans a lot of people via bots without any human review. Youtube could have a system where if a bot locks down one of your videos you can easily get arbitration via Kleros for getting the post unlocked provided you put some money into escrow.
Having the ability to write rules that get neutrally arbitrated means that a startup has to spend less money on hiring people to enforce rules and can simply abstract that away in a similar way a startup currently abstracts away owning servers by using AWS.
Upwork.com/Freelancer.com currently have 20% fees. I would imagine that creating a similar market with 5% fees that does all the rules enforcement via Kleros would be a successful product.
You need a bank account to access Upwork but you don’t need it to access such a market. That means that it’s possible to bring markets to communities that currently have neither a functioning bank system nor a functioning legal system.
It’s unclear to me why Kleros currently has such a low valuation given that the general mechanism is a highly useful building block for many other applications.
Currently, prediction markets have much higher fees then financial markets for most transactions. With better designed prediction markets then the one’s we are currently having (and much lower transaction cost then currently exist on Ethereum) I expect them to provide a lot of economic value.
I’ve always thought that the killer app of smart contracts is creating institutions that are transparent, static and unstoppable. So for example uncensored media publishing, defi, identity, banking. It’s a way to enshrine in code a set of principles of how something will work that then cannot be eroded by corruption or interference.
Why would you need smart contracts for publishing? (rather than just file-sharing or a p2p web.) I can/have thought of mechanisms in that area, but I’m curious as to what you had in mind.
I agree with what you’re saying, but that’s still an abstract potential rather than a killer app.
You don’t need smart contracts for publishing but you do need some way to publish a list of documents or the hashes of the list of documents. A blockchain is an easy way to publish IPFS addresses of articles.
If you want something like verifying that articles are correct you could it’s very hard to do that without smart contracts and interfacing with a service like Kleros.
Agreed. We might refer to them as ‘leaderless orgs’ or ‘staffless networks’.
Social recovery is presumably going to be optional, I can’t really see a way they could make it non-optional. But I agree that it’s probably impossible to design a system that would work for the sorts of people who would be betrayed in the worst possible way by a quorum of their closest friends and family.
Good approximate solutions to recurring problems are generally quite useful to have.