I just accepted a generous blockchain job offer with a fortune 500 company. But they are not interested in building a new blockchain implementation, but rather exploring smart contracts and their possible relevance to their business.
More likely, they want to be able to show their investors that they're exploring blockchains so that they aren't seen as dinosaurs missing out on the hottest new tech
I think the term "smart contract" is a misnomer. Sure, you could write a code similar to one I use:
Store money and confirm that I am alive every year (by means of me sending a transaction to the contract). If I don't send this transaction, all money is released to my daughters account. This looks like a standard contract.
Now, dApps (distrubuted applications) also use "smart contracts" as the backend, but they do so much more than act as "contracts". For example, Golem is a computation market, Augur is a prediction market, etc. There is a whole universe of applications that can be written on Ethereum that do not quite fit under a simple "contract that you can write using a lawyer and some pen and paper" umbrella.
How much money does the contract have? If it has enough money, it's an interesting target for a cyberattack.
Let's hope we have to wait a long time until you die. Can one of you daughter change her receiving address meanwhile? Can you change it? (Perhaps someone stole her laptop with the wallet.)
Did you (1) write the code, or (2) copied it from ethereum.stackexchange or (3) use a webpage that writes the smartcontract for you?
Are you sure the contract has no bugs??? Can someone else change the her receiving address?
(1) If you write the code, probably nobody else review it. Let's hope it has no bugs or it's small enough to be unnoticed.
(3) If many people are using the same code, and someone finds a bug it can be used to steal the money from all the contracts. So you get hopefully more code review from the creator and users, but also more unwanted code review.
(2) If you just copied the code from a forum or something, you can have the best or the worst case of the previous scenarios, I'm not sure.
One "feature" of Bitcoin is that the programming language is so horrible that nobody tries to write code in it. So you have a few types of standard transactions (send money, post a message burning a small amount of bitcoins, ¿multisignature wallets?, ¿¿escrow service??) but all (most) of them are extremely straightforward and extremely carefully reviewed.
You are about to make an ether purchase. Please keep the attached wallet file safe. It will serve as a cryptographic receipt of your purchase, along with your password.
The password you created and entered on the sale site is the key to your ether so please do not forget it. And please note: there are no mechanisms in place that will enable the Ethereum team to help you recover a lost password. Once it is lost, your purchased ether will be permanently inaccessible.
Please ensure that a main copy and one or more backup copies of this wallet file are stored separately and securely. If you lose access to all copies of your wallet, you will not be able to access your purchased ether and it is not possible for the Ethereum team to reconstruct a lost wallet.
Once you have saved the wallet file from this email to your computer and securely stored multiple copies of it in different locations, you should expunge this email (and any copies of it) from your email system to further ensure that no unauthorized person gains access to your wallet and attempts to crack the password that locks it.
Once the official client is launched with the blockchain going operational (projected to be Winter 2014-2015) you will be able to import the private key stored in the wallet file and start using your ether on the network. And please note that Ether purchased in this sale is not usable on our proof of concept series clients. They use test-ether.
Prediction market tokens seem to be really popular. I am sure they will rise in value with the rising tide, but I am not extremely interested in them personally. I am not sure they can deliver on the utopia-like vision they claim to be able to deliver. If I were to buy something right now, I would purchase tezos, ether, and 1-2 of my favorite ether contract tokens. I am very weary though that this is a big bubble.
Are those just prediction markets or is there something else to them? I remember there was a site called TradeSports everyone was excited about in the early 2000s. It's problem was that there was very little liquidity for any bet other than presidential elections and the Super Bowl.
I bet 50 cents to your dollar that the S&P 500 will be above 2,500 on Jan. 1, 2018. Would I have bet 51 cents if offered? 55 cents? 75 cents? Without a bunch of participants, we'll never know.
Markets with low liquidity are terrible at price discovery. Price in a prediction market is (if we believe in the concept) directly tied to how likely a prediction is to be true.
Augur had been in development for quite a while and it seems to be going pretty slowly. I bought some REP in the crowd sale (which has gone up in value, with the rising tide), have been following along on the subreddit, and I'm not sure it'll ever have any use.
The rules can be as complex as the code you can write. It effectively sends a webhook on which you can respond "decline" to stop the tx from succeeding. (RootCode also packages this concept to make it quicker to prototype)
Is there a timeout for approving/declining transactions? I'd be interested in setting up a sort of 2FA for large/over budget transactions where I'd have to manually approve it before it goes through.
e.g. "You've already spent over your monthly Amazon budget by X amount, are you sure you want to make this $200 purchase?"
