Can you give an example of what this would be used for and how?
If you're familiar with bitcoin: bitcoin is a platform that coordinates global views of bitcoin balances and verifiable logic for transfer of bitcoin from one account to another.
In a similar way: ethereum is a platform that coordinates global views of state and verifiable logic for state transitions.
> Can you give an example of what this would be used for and how?
This would be used in any scenario where a global or otherwise undefined group of actors desires to coordinate action in a way that does not inherently require trust from a single party.
In human terms, it is used when you want to communicate or interact with some unknown others without relying on a company/single entity to provide the medium.
Oh yeah, the example. Lets build a small one.
Lets say the people at the tor project wants to publish some master public keys, etc. There is a core group of folks who should have write access, but they don't necessarily trust each other. Some of their 'important decisions', like changing their group membership, or changing a public key, should be put to a vote. (Oh and lets say they need to be able to cycle their individual keys, as well)
They could create an ethereum contract (or interacting contracts) that managed the operation. They wouldn't have to necessarily trust each other individually, and their progress would be visible/verifiable by all.
The contract(s) would handle their published data (allowed adding/removing content), maintain their group membership, and would presumably only be modifiable by the members of their group. Members could be modelled as ethereum addresses. Member needs to change keys? Include logic to swap a member for another address, iff the call came from the member to be swapped out. Important tasks need to be voted on? Include logic to initiate and track votes on certain operations.
Unless you're really into the nitty gritty of cryptocurrency technology, it won't really make sense until people manage to build some compelling apps for it, hopefully around the summer time.
Think like a marketing guy. I don't care about the specifics of the mechanism. Tell me what it will do for me, the user, that I'll care about.
At its heart, ethereum is a tool for minimizing counterparty risk and cost. You don't want Twitter to extinguish 3rd party twitter clients? You don't want Uber to take a 30% monopoly fee on every transaction? You don't want your stock broker to front-load your market orders? These are all forms of counterparty risk/cost.
So the compelling applications for ethereum are: A prediction market with minimal counterparty risk, a stock exchange minimal counterparty risk, a product market with minimal counterparty risk, a currency exchange with minimal counterparty risk, a poker site with minimal counterparty risk, a social network with minimal counterparty risk, a ride sharing site with minimal counterparty risk, etc.
I've still yet to come across a single person who can give me a compelling reason for Ethereum to exist other than "this is awesome because it will change the world" or other similar drivel. It's always impossible due to limits in Ethereum's design, limits of reality, or just stuff you can do in Bitcoin anyway and nobody has realized.
For example there's a fad of putting "ownership" of physical assets into bitcoin tokens for example, fine, that works until someone steals the token and not the physical asset. Now who owns the asset? Reality is out of sync with what the block chain says so, there's no support to help me get it back and no backdoor.
Privacy is even harder. With Bitcoin everyone knows what you spend, where you spend it, probably what you spend it too with some extrapolation. With "smart contracts" now everybody knows who your arbitrator is, who you play poker with, what brand of fridge you own. There's no getting around that if you want a public ledger.
If you're taking input from an oracle (you almost always are), you have the same level of trust in it anyway, you just moved computation into the stupidly expensive and massively redundant portion of the system. The 'solutions' for distributed oracles with ShellingCoin and related garbage is just hand wavy nonsense with so little basis in reality that it's not worth talking about.
There is this notion of a contract. In a democracy a valid contract is an agreement (say between 2 parties) which is enforceable by courts and executive. Enforceable means that there is a cost of cheating. Even the most simple purchase contains a purchase agreement. If Alice walks into Bob's store and takes something without paying, then this is what we call theft (although the precise details of theft can be argued about ad infinitum).
In the real world when we enter agreements, we usually know to some extent who we are dealing with (Alice knows Bob's store). What would an arbitrary agreement over a network look like? That's hard to say. An analogon of a court is some arbitrary human decision, which can serve as an input. In Bitcoin there is no notion of an agreement, only cash transactions (and some limited facilities for escrow).
I believe that the concept of an oracle, and several other crypto-terms like Zero-knowledge proofs are an academic dead end. For my purposes I'm assuming that most people who want to use crypto systems don't understand or care about these things. There will be a great need for mapping abstract concepts to useful tools, such as an GUI operating system maps very abstract physical calculations and processes and makes them usable. I suspect 99% of Bitcoin users don't understand public-key cryptography, much less Elliptic curves and distributed systems. "Key", "signature" and "coins" are useful metaphors.
What is already happening are the first beginnings of joint stock ownership developing (DAC's) with mixtures of online formal agreements and informal agreements. Voting is not a panacea, but it helps. That's the kind of contract that can be developed in the short term.
Are you saying you have citations that prove ShellingCoin won't work? Are you saying you have a citation from an ethereum developer that these ideas are 100% certain to work out on the first attempt?
If not, why are you complaining about people unconnected to you trying these new ideas out as an experiment? Nobody disagrees that these are new and untested ideas.
No, I take issue with them selling broken shit to people for tens of millions of dollars.
I agree that the core ethereum tech is 100% fair game for criticism, but that's not what's being discussed here.
- Decentralized, low-margin labor markets (e.g. Uber, Postmates, etc.) with lower prices for consumers and higher profits for workers
- Currencies based on local prices indexes, which can give even the smallest of countries stable money that they don't have today
And lots of other things people haven't thought of yet.
It'd be trustless (i.e., anyone can verify that they're not being cheated), and couldn't easily be taken down [1]
[1] https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/comment/2944/#Comment_...