Hey everyone!
This is my first post. I've been a lurker, but I plan to contribute as much as I can. I've helped a lot of people in other industries,
and I'm slowly getting into blockchain. I've been around since 2011.
I'm investigating more into ethereum based smart contracts, and I have a team that can help me build out what I need.
Smart contracts are a great way to automatically enforce agreements. Unfortunately, they are hard for the layman to build as you need an engineer.
We are looking to build out smart contract templates that anyone can deploy and use.
An idea we had is allowing smart contract to accept data from external sources. This will allow people to speculate on crypto prices, sports outcome, and enforce marketing performance (SEO, ad spend) contracts.
We want to get your thoughts on smart contract use cases on the above and other ideas.
What do you want to see built out?
What kind of needs do you have?
Any competitors you're currently using?
Everyone who helps contribute, we will take special note of it. We may give out early access and/or tokens in the future.
[To any mods - if this thread is not okay - please just notify me/close the thread! I'm not advertising anything, and simply just getting feedback]
can you explain shortly the legal meaning of smart contracts? there was a law professor today who said there a neither smart, nor are they contracts, they can't even be enforced and only run on kangoroo courts that radomly fork,
https://www.ccn.com/ethereum-smart-contracts-only-good-in-kangaroo-courts-nyu-prof-nouriel-roubini/Roubini has a bearish view on cryptocurrency and blockchain as a whole. His thesis that smart contracts are unenforceable due to bug faults is unjustifiable.
We see two trends that will occur:
1) Smart contracts will become more secure, reliable, and resilient
2) Oracle data feed providers will become more reliable due to enforcement of penalties of bad data
Right now the industry is still premature but smart contracts are the next natural technology evolution for how agreements will be made since they're the most reliable, and have the best, reliable storage capabilities. In each progression of technology we are seeing better safe keeping mechanisms, better verifiability, and better enforcement.
1) 17th Century - Handshake agreements for Christopher Columbus and the Spain Queen that he will give goods back to the queen upon his arrival back to shores (no record of verbal agremeent or storage at all).
2) 19th Century - Paper contract & legal agreements made agreements enforceable in court (Papers can be burned or lost).
3) 21st Century - E-sign act enables digital signatures to indicate consideration & agreement (Centralized server like Docusign can go down)
4) TBD - Smart contracts are the next natural technology progression to enable agreements to be made (stored on the blockchain with the terms, verified by identity protocols that signs it with a private key).
Over time, courts will recognize the validity of smart contracts.
Smart contracts satisfies the five conditions of a legally binding contract:
(1) offer; (2) acceptance; (3) consideration; (4) mutuality of obligation; (5) competency and capacity; and, in certain circumstances, (6) a written instrument.
We are speaking with an ex Paypal lawyer who has considered joining our advisory board to help ascertain that these contracts are valid but we are still looking for the right team fit and not rushing. We have many lawyers in our pipeline that we plan to talk to. And we plan to speak with various groups to build awareness and help make smart contracts valid in court.
Even transfer of real estate assets will be tokenized one day and you'll be able to only sell it through a smart contract.
E-signatures currently can still suffer from forgery. Documents on the cloud can still be lost if a centralized server goes down, though it is safer than paper documents.
At each advance in technology, contracts can be stored in more reliable forms that can be retrievable, and will have better intrinsic properties.
In the future, all agreements will be done with blockchain & smart contracts, and e-signatures will be an outdated, unsafe, obsolete way to do agreements.
