Valid uses cases for Smart Contracts, Dapps, and DAOs?

[Zer0Sum]

There are few blockchain use cases (mostly revolving around finance or registries or anon).

EVERYTHING not anon is better centralized...
And the market for anon is tops 5% of the global economy (mostly grey markets).

But nobody cares about the specifics...
Just show me the next bubble... with a cool whitepaper... and excellent buzzwords.

The Bitcoin bull run is going to spawn a new orgy of ICO scams.

[jesuslovesyou]

There are few blockchain use cases (mostly revolving around finance or registries or anon).

EVERYTHING not anon is better centralized...
And the market for anon is tops 5% of the global economy (mostly grey markets).

But nobody cares about the specifics...
Just show me the next bubble... with a cool whitepaper... and excellent buzzwords.

The Bitcoin bull run is going to spawn a new orgy of ICO scams.

everyone seems to forget: btc would be worth nothing if it wasn't decentralised. I have no idea why a distributed network should have any value at all.
If it's not decentral it doesn't have any more value than a facebook-token.
People are stupid.

[iamnotback]

btc would be worth nothing if it wasn't decentralised. I have no idea why a distributed network should have any value at all.
If it's not decentral it doesn't have any more value than a facebook-token.

Bitcoin is not decentralized, as it is controlled by the Chinese mining cartel + Blockstream.

Yet Bitcoin has value.

Fiat money is not decentralized, yet it has value.

[iamnotback]

Women's lib:

https://steemit.com/active/girlsgonesteem-nsfw

Now, thanks to blockchain tech, women make more money on average than men!

We don't need a smart contract nor Dapp, to put up some content and get paid for it.

What Steemit is trying to do is collectivize our funds amongst the entire social network, then redistribute our funds based on who receives the most valid up voting.

Sorry but people don't want to join a social network to have their funds taken from them (for all those who are average) and redistributed to those who are above average.

Dan Larimer is a smart guy but in my opinion has always been (since I first debated him in BCT in 2013 about his plan to pay every token HODLer a dividend) a socialist/collectivist in a faux Libertarian skin. And that is why in my opinion all his designs have failed to achieve greatness.

The challenge is creating a system capable of identifying what contributions are needed and
their relative worth in a way that can scale to an unbounded number of people.

A proven system for evaluating and rewarding contributions is the free market. The free
market can be viewed as a single community where everyone trades with one another and
rewards are allocated by profit and loss. The market system rewards those who provide
value to others and punishes those who consume more value than they produce. The free
market supports many different currencies and money is simply a commodity that
everyone finds easy to exchange.

Since the free market is a proven system, it is tempting to try to create a free-market system
where content consumers directly pay content producers. However, direct payment is
inefficient and not really viable for content creation and curation. The value of most
content is so low relative to the cognitive, financial, and opportunity costs associated with
making a payment that few readers choose to tip. The abundance of free alternatives means
that enforcing a ‘paywall’ will drive readers elsewhere. There have been several attempts to
implement per-article micropayments from readers to authors, but none have become
widespread.

Steem is designed to enable effective micropayments for all kinds of contribution by
changing the economic equation. Readers no longer have to decide whether or not they
want to pay someone from their own pocket, instead they can vote content up or down and
Steem will use their votes to determine individual rewards. This means that people are given
a familiar and widely used interface and no longer face the cognitive, financial, and
opportunity costs associated traditional micropayment and tipping platforms.

Edit: someone has claimed that payouts from Steemit are a deception.

My post comparing Steemit and Synereo.

[jesuslovesyou]

btc would be worth nothing if it wasn't decentralised. I have no idea why a distributed network should have any value at all.
If it's not decentral it doesn't have any more value than a facebook-token.

Bitcoin is not decentralized, as it is controlled by the Chinese mining cartel + Blockstream.

Yet Bitcoin has value.

Fiat money is not decentralized, yet it has value.

I would say it's still decentral but there is a trend to less decentralisation, that is true. Sadly that's an issue not many seem to care about.
It was even suggested to raise the blocksize when it was clear that would lead to even faster centralisation.

But pointing at btc and saying "it is less and less decentral therefore it's ok when we're selling central tokens now" instead of saying "we need to find a solution to keep coins decentral" is just extremely dumb.
If it was like that i'd leave crypto immediately andmany others too when the word got around.

All you people seem to take this coins-game for granted. It is not. If you fuck up these very fundamental things people will stop putting money into it.

[iamnotback]

imnotback, what are you talking about?

Steemit is free to join, they give you free steem to join, and you can only make more money by posting and upvoting. oh, yeah, and they pay the girls we know, to go wild!

It is impossible to give away for free what isn't free.

It has to be a redistribution from some to others.

Yes you can offer it free as an incentive initially and take money from the speculators via debasement who are hoping some greater fools will buy the pump. But that isn't a model for anything sustainable that can sale up to millions of social networking users.

That same debasement is taking the money from the users of the system also, who use and thus hold the token.

Any more delusions?

[iamnotback]

btc would be worth nothing if it wasn't decentralised. I have no idea why a distributed network should have any value at all.
If it's not decentral it doesn't have any more value than a facebook-token.

Bitcoin is not decentralized, as it is controlled by the Chinese mining cartel + Blockstream.

Yet Bitcoin has value.

Fiat money is not decentralized, yet it has value.

I would say it's still decentral but there is a trend to less decentralisation, that is true. Sadly that's an issue not many seem to care about.
It was even suggested to raise the blocksize when it was clear that would lead to even faster centralisation.

My quoted link explains that it is just an illusion of decentralization. It is by now already centralized, as evident by China+Blockstream making the decision to kill XT and Classic (i.e. a form of 51% attack control).

[jesuslovesyou]

My quoted link explains that it is just an illusion of decentralization. It is by now already centralized, as evident by China+Blockstream making the decision to kill XT and Classic (i.e. a form of 51% attack control).

lol, you complain about centralization and in the same sentence complain about not getting bigger blocks. That's a contradiction because bigger blocks cause even more centralization.
Your views are invalid.

[iamnotback]

My quoted link explains that it is just an illusion of decentralization. It is by now already centralized, as evident by China+Blockstream making the decision to kill XT and Classic (i.e. a form of 51% attack control).

lol, you complain about centralization and in the same sentence complain about not getting bigger blocks. That's a contradiction because bigger blocks cause even more centralization.
Your views are invalid.

You are referring to my post at this link.

1. I didn't complain about not getting larger blocks. Someone else did and I was responding to their erroneous assertion that Blockstream is against larger blocks.

2. I am making the point that Bitcoin can't be scaled up for higher transaction rates without being centralized. Others have argued that Lightning Networks can scale up transaction rate off chain with smaller blocks, but they are mistaken.

3. Actually "larger" blocks do not force centralization if you have the correct design which I have devised, but Satohi's design can't achieve it.

A friendly warning to you. I am much more expert than you apparently realize.

[jesuslovesyou]

My quoted link explains that it is just an illusion of decentralization. It is by now already centralized, as evident by China+Blockstream making the decision to kill XT and Classic (i.e. a form of 51% attack control).

lol, you complain about centralization and in the same sentence complain about not getting bigger blocks. That's a contradiction because bigger blocks cause even more centralization.
Your views are invalid.

You are referring to my post at this link.

1. I didn't complain about not getting larger blocks. Someone else did and I was responding to their erroneous assertion that Blockstream is against larger blocks.

2. I am making the point that Bitcoin can't be scaled up for higher transaction rates without being centralized. Others have argued that Lightning Networks can scale up transaction rate off chain with smaller blocks, but they are mistaken.

3. Actually "larger" blocks do not force centralization if you have the correct design which I have devised, but Satohi's design can't achieve it.

A friendly warning to you. I am much more expert than you apparently realize.

You're talking out of your ass. Your coins' design doesn't change your bandwidth. Crypto does not scale no matter how much you wish it. We'll be using many different chains in the future and other workarounds. The only tokens being able to scale are the centralized ones, but that's not a crypto.
People won't be fooled.

[iamnotback]

You're talking out of your ass. Your coins' design doesn't change your bandwidth. Crypto does not scale no matter how much you wish it.

You will learn before the end of this year that you are incorrect.

Your conceptualization of the parameters is based on Satoshi's design. Some of your assumptions don't apply in a different design. Do note I put "larger" in quotes so that is why your assumption about bandwidth is inapplicable.

Note I added some links to my prior post.

[jesuslovesyou]

You're talking out of your ass. Your coins' design doesn't change your bandwidth. Crypto does not scale no matter how much you wish it.

You will learn before the end of this year that you are incorrect.

Note I added some links to my prior post.

By what coin?

There is no legit decentral coin that tries to scale currently. Because it can't be done to infinity. You can only scale so much.

ETH is not a decentral token, so spare me that one.

Which other token will scale?

None of them. The coins with bigger blocks are broken. There is just an upper limit in traffic a decental network can handle. Just deal with it.

If you say you got a decentral token scaling to infinity you're certainly a scammer. 

[iamnotback]

imnotback, what are you talking about?

Steemit is free to join, they give you free steem to join, and you can only make more money by posting and upvoting. oh, yeah, and they pay the girls we know, to go wild!

It is impossible to give away for free what isn't free.

It has to be a redistribution from some to others.

Yes you can offer it free as an incentive initially and take money from the speculators via debasement who are hoping some greater fools will buy the pump. But that isn't a model for anything sustainable that can sale up to millions of social networking users.

That same debasement is taking the money from the users of the system also, who use and thus hold the token.

Any more delusions?

I disagree with the claim that Steemit will be decentralized.

SP is a requirement for voting for or against content. This means that SP is an access token
that grants its holders exclusive powers within the Steem platform.

So you have the largest investors in control of censorship of content, etc.. This is just Facebook by another name.

My concept for JAMBOX is that every user maintains his own rules about which content he wants to see and the reputation of the other users trusted in terms of rating content, i.e. that aspect of Synereo's model I think is valid (although I find other significant flaws in Synereo's design).

[ttookk]

I would add Proof of Existence as a valid usecase.

Especially when we are talking about contracts already, providing proof that they haven't been tampered with is a useful tool.

Proof of ownership might be a usecase also. A possible usecase could be licensing of copyrighted content.

In gaming and gambling, there are usecases as well, although I admit that they are not as "serious" as others, due to their nature (being games) and due to the fact, that most people simply won't care if decentralization improves a game on the backend. Those are games, after all.
BUT, in defense of games as a usecase: It is a "safe" enviroment to develop proofs of concepts without breaking anything important. It is likely, that some mechanisms applied to games work on "more important" usecases as well*.

And then, there is the idea of a decentralized supercomputer, but I am not sure how you get the participants to play by your rules. This looks like it could be exploited too easily by just submitting anything that looks remotely like it could fit the criteria. The Elastic guys are working on it, let's see what they come up with.
However, a variety of this idea I like is the idea of using this decentralized supercomputer for evolutionary programming. I think in this case, it would be possible to reward good finds somehow.



*there are currently some game ideas on Lisk:
https://forum.lisk.io/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=459
https://forum.lisk.io/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=483
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ML_nI88q3c9N9oVJjyaLeBM4RoDA6LDtgxPskmTFgB8/edit?pref=2&pli=1

[iamnotback]

imnotback, what are you talking about?

Steemit is free to join, they give you free steem to join, and you can only make more money by posting and upvoting. oh, yeah, and they pay the girls we know, to go wild!

It is impossible to give away for free what isn't free.

It has to be a redistribution from some to others.

Yes you can offer it free as an incentive initially and take money from the speculators via debasement who are hoping some greater fools will buy the pump. But that isn't a model for anything sustainable that can sale up to millions of social networking users.

That same debasement is taking the money from the users of the system also, who use and thus hold the token.

Any more delusions?

https://steem.io/roadmap/launch-and-sale/#steem-allocation
https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf#page=9

So Vested Steem are debased at ~10% a year to fund votes and posts.

Thus with a $36.5 million market cap, it could payout on average $1 per day to 10,000 users.

But obviously those who spend more time & effort on the site will earn more and the others will earn less. So let's say on average the typical user gets $0.25 cents per day in that scenario of 10,000 users and $36.5m mcap.

To be worthwhile to attract typical users, figure a minimum of $1 per day, so for a million typical users@ $1 per day we would need a $14.6 billion mcap.

That might just barely be realistic, but I actually think most mainstream users won't bother for $1 per day. At $3 per day, probably significant interest as it approaches $90 per month. But that would require a $44 billion mcap for just a million user base.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_communities_with_more_than_100_million_active_users

I seems enticing users with a financial incentive is dubious. Users join a social network to accomplish something of their interest. To incentivize usership by debasing the investors and hoping it generates enough buzz that the market cap paces with usership growth, seems to be pie-in-the-sky hope. More than likely is that very little interest will be generated because the investors are not allowed to sell Vested Steem at-will. They forced into long lockup period on a very risky token and speculative venture.

[Momimaus]

gustav, I wasn't limiting the use cases to the ETH block chain design. We already skewered Ethereum in the Ethereum Paradox thread.

Of course, I am assuming someone doing correct engineering, not Vitalik, Tual, et al wasting $millions on being technobullshit rock stars. When I was age 21, I coded WordUp in my bedroom for a year. When I launched a shipping product to the real market, my father invested $30,000. The company was profitable and helped 1000s of users with a real use case. I don't produce bullshit software.

https://www.google.com/search?q=neocept+wordup

Now I promised myself to not waste time attacking others, so let's just leave it at that. I hold Vitalik to the same standard as I what I was able to do at his age. I worked hard and quietly and produced real s/w. Not roam around talking and promoting pie-in-the-sky delusions to n00bs. Even the one Comdex show and another San Fernando valley usergroup I did, I was very frank with the audience about the capabilities and limitations of the s/w. I guess I have to thank Ethereum for creating so much hype in the market that investors are ready to hand over so much money. So perhaps I should be praising them for promoting crypto. So I guess I will take that perspective and HODL my engineering nose about the level of delusion and lack of frankness about the technological (game theory, economics, scaling, etc) bullshit. Everyone has their freewill and their own choice. They should be free to reap what they sow.

The DAO is really unreal. But it makes perfect sense why n00bs can be lead to that delusion. And the audacity of Tual to say he thinks it will be good for crypto even if all the money is wasted. Well in some sense, I have to admit he is correct, because everyone should be free to learn and experiment and waste $150 million. More power to them Lol.

So any way, back to OpenBazaar that seems to be potentially a valid use case if engineered correctly.

gustav, I am more Hero account than you. If I had stayed with one account, I'd be Legendary already. I don't think we are arguing, are we?

Stop comparing yourself with Vitalik
Homer Simpson doesn't compare himself with Albert Einstein either.

[iamnotback]

tokeweed, it is always about the marketing...

My talent is that I am am adept at technology, people motivation, and economic theory. I can often combine those three into new paradigm shifts. I am still trying to create my first big paradigm shift in the altcoin arena. I think I may have finally discovered it last night while I was sleeping. I awoke and realized I have figured out the killer app for smart block chains that millions of investors and entreprenuers really need which can not be serviced by a centralized solution such as Seedr or Kickstarter! The key insight came from studying my own insight into the key macro economic flaw of The DAO.

[iamnotback]

I am bookmarking this post and making sure I come back and read it frequently. So I continue to try to resist my inherent attributes (resist my age and solidified methodologies) which might cause me to "miss the train" on what the youth are up to.

gustav, I wasn't limiting the use cases to the ETH block chain design. We already skewered Ethereum in the Ethereum Paradox thread.

Of course, I am assuming someone doing correct engineering, not Vitalik, Tual, et al wasting $millions on being technobullshit rock stars. When I was age 21, I coded WordUp in my bedroom for a year. When I launched a shipping product to the real market, my father invested $30,000. The company was profitable and helped 1000s of users with a real use case. I don't produce bullshit software.

https://www.google.com/search?q=neocept+wordup

Now I promised myself to not waste time attacking others, so let's just leave it at that. I hold Vitalik to the same standard as I what I was able to do at his age. I worked hard and quietly and produced real s/w. Not roam around talking and promoting pie-in-the-sky delusions to n00bs. Even the one Comdex show and another San Fernando valley usergroup I did, I was very frank with the audience about the capabilities and limitations of the s/w. I guess I have to thank Ethereum for creating so much hype in the market that investors are ready to hand over so much money. So perhaps I should be praising them for promoting crypto. So I guess I will take that perspective and HODL my engineering nose about the level of delusion and lack of frankness about the technological (game theory, economics, scaling, etc) bullshit. Everyone has their freewill and their own choice. They should be free to reap what they sow.

The DAO is really unreal. But it makes perfect sense why n00bs can be lead to that delusion. And the audacity of Tual to say he thinks it will be good for crypto even if all the money is wasted. Well in some sense, I have to admit he is correct, because everyone should be free to learn and experiment and waste $150 million. More power to them Lol.

So any way, back to OpenBazaar that seems to be potentially a valid use case if engineered correctly.

gustav, I am more Hero account than you. If I had stayed with one account, I'd be Legendary already. I don't think we are arguing, are we?

Stop comparing yourself with Vitalik
Homer Simpson doesn't compare himself with Albert Einstein either.

In my opinion, everything I wrote above is valid (and that is not true of some other posts I've made recently because I am learning very fast right now about this phenomenon I described below). I am entitled to share my opinion. I am not attacking subjective ambiguous attributes such as his ethics (although I was perplexed as to whether they believe some of their unworkable fantasy designs). I am not berating anyone nor repeating over and over again trying to force it down your throat. You incite me to respond because of your attack with an implied assertion that I am only Homer Simpson and that I am nothing in comparison to Vitalik as Albert Einstein. The difference that you perceive has probably more to do with the difference that I describe below between an Xgen and a Zgen, in that I won't actually launch something until I am sure I have worked out the details and I am confident I have something that is workable. That doesn't necessarily mean my style of work is better.

I think Vitalik said it best himself where he has basically admitted he was (at least initially) playing this like a cartoon or game with a bimodal perspective on reality. The Millennials seem to have been raised to think life is like a game. Unlike when we were kids and there were no computers, no gadgets and we needed to go climb trees and play with insects, the youth starting about with Vitalik's generation (and I should know because I have a son his age who is addicted to gaming), grew up with a different idea of what reality is. Yeah I am old enough to be Vitalik's father.

So it is important to understand they will think of the world from much more virtual reality terms than actual reality.

I think that is a valid insight to share.

Vitalik is math smart. He also knows how to inspire the dreams about a utopian virtual reality. But when it comes down to producing scalable technology and common sense business objectives, it seems that is not his forte so far. He may improve on his weaknesses as he matures. And I may improve on emulating what he does best, as I learn from studying him, his generation, and the phenomenon they initiated (which is the purpose of this thread). I understand very well that the youth drive the future, and so I damn well better understand what they are up to. It is has been difficult for me to make the transition from my upbringing which is to have solid engineering and total design before embarking, to this new way of just having a nebulous idea and raising $millions without really knowing how the idea will end up being scaled and workable. I am realizing this has a lot to do with the generational difference in attitudes and upbringing. With games, you start playing and figure it out as you go along. For example, I noticed my son was much less interested in getting all the engineering of something worked out in his head like I do, and instead he was more interested in detailed discoveries while playing. He wanted the work to be part of the game, not something separated. You can see this in Vitalik's Ethereum blogs. He was working as part of the game. For him, the burnrate was okay because it was all part of the game of him being able to work with as many like-minded dreamers. Tual reiterated this recently when he stated that it is okay that even if The DAO fails, then it still would have been good for the crypto-currency ecosystem. For them, the ecosystem is the game.

It's all about the game.

I think that is a good result for all of us, for such insight, learning, and progress to be achieved.

...

P.S. I originally underestimated either how ignorant or insouciant CC investors are. They either really believe in nonsense, and/or they really only care about trying to form as much pump excitement as possible regardless of any realities about actual user value created. It also appears to be a difference of perspective on what constitutes value with many here I guess thinking that enabling more investment vehicles of any form is an advance of value. I haven't yet determined the mix between naivete, insouciance, and different valid perspectives. I am still trying to determine if I missed some key factor about value being created. And I am not trying to tell them to change. I am trying to understand this altcoin investing market and where it will lead.

Lots of hate on this thread

I am not hating these guys. More power to them to have created so much investor interest in altcoins.

I am just sharing my analysis of the possible outcome. I am bit perturbed when people idolize this stuff so much. But I am learning to realize it is necessary. I am okay with every person having their own free will.

[iamnotback]

Exactly, and what is the value to the business (market cap) when there are 9x more "Preferred" holders than "common"

And your first statement is incorrect, the common shares are debased and the preferred shares (vested) collect interest but only enough to offset the inflation of the common

Please explain the way this is accomplished, because what I see is that 10% new Vested STEEM tokens are created every year. How is that not debasement?

I think you are being fooled by the fact that they debase the common STEEM tokens 100% per annum, thus you think they Vested STEEM rises in value 9X more than the common STEEM. But the common STEEM is debased by 100% and 10% of that is for the Vested STEEM, so although the Vested STEEM rises in relative value, it also falls 10% in value relative to exchange value to fiat (that is not factoring in investment flows in and out).

Thus since you've missed the key math of the economic reality, I think that might be one reason you haven't been able to evaluate properly that this can't be a good investment. My math in my prior post to which replied showed that they need to debase by much more than 10% if they hope to fund a large quantity of social networking membership motivated by leeching money off the system.

Fundamentally I think paying people to participate in social networking is not very astute marketing. It will gain some interest now while payouts are high but as more people compete and payouts drop, then there really isn't any other compelling reason to use the service so far. The marketing plan so far is too one dimensional and doesn't appear to create synergies of use.

What are you going to do, it's BitShares at heart, they come from the western corporate structure paradigm. So if you want more control, then buy more stake, while the business carries on with or
without your involvement.  The decision is yours.

Or copy them and try to do it better.  But you know how cool and buzzworthy everything is the second third fourth time around.

Oh I don't think they are any where close to having the correct formula or marketing. I am staying away, except I might try to extract some payouts for content as others are doing. A few quick $1000s is nice.

It is an unfortunate reality that their system appears to encourages users to leech off of it instead of building it up  because of some synergy.

Perhaps I can think of some suggestions of how to improve the plan for it.

Even if I do think of some good suggestions for them, I think the 2 year lockup for Vested STEEM just depresses their relative value. Of course a trading market for those will form, and the price will be discounted by the long duration lockup risk.

[immangrace]

I advise you to never enter something you don't understand. If smart contracts are confusing for you (and me too, don't see the use) then don't enter the game unless you are prpared to lose the amount you enter with.