Everyone I tell about BAY and smart contracts is asking me know why we need it if etherium has smart contracts?
The smart contracts we have work differently too don't they?
I told them the main feature is the pegging so people can use BAY as a stable currency so they don't have to worry about the huge swings and will know what returns they are getting for items sold. This is obviously very useful for business.
Etherium isn't any better. They are trying to store computer code on the blockchain which is too much bloat. I think Lisk has a better idea subcontracting that to side chains.
And lets say you are right, Etherium has fancy code. So how can that prevent me from lying to them or stealing from them?!
The smart contracts we do are double deposit escrow. Heres the example...
In Etherium Bob and Alice make a contract that Bob will pay 10 Eth for Alices guitar. And the contract says it will do it on the condition that they
get some special hash from a shipping website proving the item was shipped.
So wow! They can prove it was shipped and release the funds. But just because something is shipped doesn't make that what you ORDERED. What if Alice lies and sends a box filled with rocks??? Now Bob is forced to pay for something he didn't want and there is nothing he can do because Eth thinks its legitimate.
Computers are extremely easy to lie to. Even with prediction markets, they would have to pull from many different new feeds and broadcast that, this requires human intelligence. What if the news feed is taken out of context? They want to know if "John Smith" will die within 2 years. What if there is an article that says "John Smith died of laughter at the superbowl when he saw the half time show." Will Etherium think hes dead?
What if there are 1000s of people with the name John Smith?
The only way to prevent the shipping scam with the box of rocks is to use DEPOSITS. If Etherium wants to protect consumers, their smart contracts must be Halo contracts anyways.
What if Bob/Alice want to trade Gold for Silver? How will Etherium know about the real world deliverable?
What if Bob/Alice want to wire money from one country to another? How will Etherium know if the money was sent with the correct amount?
What if Bob wants to hire Alice to mow his lawn? How will Etherium know he did that and how will it know he did a good job?
It wont! The only way to do trustless contracting is with deposits even in Etherium!!
I'm not saying Etherium isnt good for some things. Perhaps they have certain derivative applications, it would be wonderful for a pyramid pay contract, it would be great for business accounts that pay dividends, for businesses that need voting and different classes of shares.
So sure, its useful for some things but the applications we have in Bitbay we are using the perfect contract and i highly doubt you can improve this protocol.
If anything Etherium is extremely bloated, Bitcoin was having 24 hour delays on confirmations and they only send normal transactions. Imagine how much Etherium will grind to a halt if they let people store complex computer code!!
And what about infinite loops or bugs in the contracts? They can't even be sure its secure code, the Frontier site warns that its experimental.
Also you should tell them Bay and Halo have had smart contracts tested and working for years and we have a user interface that they can use with decentralized markets and everything. Just because Etherium has a protocol where is the software that does what Halo does? Do they realize it will take a person years to code what we have done here? Trust me, there will not be smart contracting software like this for at least another 2-3 years.
Also, what you told them is right, they won't have to worry about price swings. There was a famous economist who said long before bitcoin that the future currency will be an electronic one with the
ability to control its own supply
