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Comment by 0x8D3A | Hacker News Reader

It boils down the point that you don't actually want to be doing computation at that level anyway. There's a very good reason that Bitcoin Script should be simplistic, why the hell would you want to be doing any sort of detailed computation at that level? With n nodes on the network you amplify the load n times, why not do it on an oracle where it's practically free? There's already comments by the Ethereum developers that it will be incredibly hard for a client to ever bootstrap from genesis once they launch, just due to the insane amount of script execution time.

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.

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I agree that there is a lot drivel, but I'd extend that to Bitcoin discussions also, where rarely economic underpinnings get discussed.

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.

If you're doing stock ownership "in contracts", why not just have the company manage it? Obviously you trust them if you're investing in them, what's to gain by doing it "autonomously"? A centralized version is faster, cheaper, and private, you're going to need a hell of a good reason to actually go down this route rather than "it's the future".

Joint accounts are very useful. What one can do is issue stock at zero cost, have onchain accounting, be worldwide distributed etc., without the involvement of a lawyer or accountant. These things already exist in primitive form. For example there are already online communities with trusted members who provide escrow functions to manage the funds (basically an onchain Bitcoin foundation). Most of these things are being developed with Proof-of-stake systems, since they are already inherently based on explicit voting. Blocks get produced by vote of stake. While in Proof-of-work the computer doing the voting can change very frequently in PoS it's more constant. A good (old) paper in this respect is b-money: http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt

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