
A Current List of Use Cases for Ethereum - sethbannon
https://medium.com/@AroundTheBlock_/a-current-list-of-use-cases-for-ethereum-b8caa5807553#.cr70q67b2
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kefka
I'll say it bluntly, because I know some people here really like Ethereum.
Ethereum sucks. (Note: I don't want it to...)

1\. No checksums on user's accounts. BTC has had checksums from get-go.
Ethdevs think that 0xdeadbeef hex keys are just fine. Except that one-off you
did (or added a null/0 at the end) just dead-ended your transaction and lost
money in the 'chain. Gone for good. Forever, nada, zilch.

2\. Blockchain itself isn't checksummed. ?! When you download the chain to do
the proof of work calculations, there's no guarantee that a 1-off error didn't
creep in the chain you're working with. What's that do? It invalidates every
'work' you do. You're spinning cycles with 100% chance of NO payout.

3\. There's no way to auto-pay an account's own gas costs. If I'm a dApp
maker, I want to pay to submit the program. Cool. Now if User A wants to
execute my app, they have to pay gas (or percents of eth coin). That's a huge
suck. Massive suck. I want this cost taken care of so users aren't nickel and
dimed to use the damned thing. Right now, nickel-and-dime it is.

4\. Software is bad alpha quality. Search for "lost wallet ethereum", and
you'll see thousands of people with lost coin. Many errors are the above one-
off errors, others are code badly interpreted to lose coin, and others were
import errors on the Kickstarter coin purchase.

5\. The "Smart Contract" code is completely trapped within the Eth system. I
can't query a website and check data from there, nor can I generate random
numbers, nor can I do anything that isn't explicitly on the blockchain. That
directly implies that gambling apps and similar are completely deterministic
and knowable. Effectively, gambling on Eth isn't a random chance with an edge
to the house; it's a mathematical guarantee that the house wins, and you lose.

Until these flaws are fixed, this sstem isn't worth putting any more money in
than you're willing to lose. Because loss is a distinct possibility with the
sheer number of bugs and bad code there is.

~~~
sharemywin
Can some explain how a block-chain scales? If every transactions needs to be
stored on all market participants computers doesn't that blow up pretty
quickly?

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TylerE
It doesn't. That's why they're dumb and will never succeed. You can only hand
wave it away while raking in the VC money for so long...

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daoland
Where is the VC money coming from in a crazy we funded project?

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deftnerd
I'm rebuilding an old hackathon project, ChainProof, to use Ethereum. It's
basically a service that lets people submit facts about themselves and
automated or trusted notaries verify the information and vouch for it.

DAOs and smart contracts would be able to use the knowledge in really cool
ways. A DAO could requires participants to be KYC verified, limited to college
students, be accredited investors, pass a background check, etc.

Neat thing is that once those checks are done, it'll be attached to their
Ethereum identity so they don't have to redo the verification for every
compatible service or DAO.

Ethereum might have some weaknesses at the moment but it's a lot more exciting
than Bitcoin.

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jamespitts
Not to overhype the potential of Ethereum, but one can also go beyond the
obvious "next steps" and start to see entire new avenues that a technology
opens up.

I say "start to see" because it is very hard to predict how one particular
avenue of unforeseen capability might lead to success! In the early web, there
were many of these kinds of use cases talked about and a lot of effort was
made to bridge the technological gaps to get to the anticipated capabilities.
One use case that stands out in this regard is ecommerce (before secure web
connections existed).

But the real interesting advances are those that are not obvious from the get-
go! These stem from creative modifications, and of course the very long slog
of trying to realize the potential of those modifications. It takes confidence
in the people who do the work, and it takes many, many failures.

Social software stands out as an example of this long slog that ends in
success.

It took more than a decade of incremental advances -- from forums and chat
rooms in the early web to the blogging scene in the early 2000s -- to get to
where it stands today: a set of widely-implemented and widely-understood
capabilities.

So definitely consume that list of use cases, and understand the near-future
better.

But if you're interested in assessing and leveraging the full potential of
Ethereum, definitely learn about its basic capabilities, then open up your
imagination. You might see a glimmer of what could be, and perhaps be a part
of getting there.

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lucio
I am missing something?

1\. "Gold Investing"

>No brokers, no banks, no fractional reserve, near-zero fees, immediate, and
secure

You need a vault, and also you need that the entity controlling access to the
phisical stuff (i.e. gold) is willing to comply.

2\. "Crowdfunding"

The "smart contract" will need "gas" to run, so there's a "fee" to be payed,
not 0%.

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Animats
Digix: "Gold in tokenized form on the Ethereum blockchain..."

Digix: "[ANN] Gatecoin Hacked, only BTC and ETH is currently affected, all DGD
tokens are safe."[1]

OK, do we have a use case that works?

[1] [https://medium.com/@Digix](https://medium.com/@Digix)

~~~
nickpsecurity
That part caught me, too. First, I wonder how they were getting it backed by
gold and seemlessly. Second, they said the gold investments are safe if they
collapse. So... somehow the original source will know for sure that it's yours
and easily convert it back to cash? Have any idea what they're using on gold
side to do that?

It was harder a long time ago when I looked into gold investments as the
digital ones were shady enough that I was concerned with money laundering
investigation. Getting caught in theirs, that is.

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natrius
It's a lot easier to find prior art that new technology can improve on once
you've found a good metaphor for it. Here's the one I use:

Scribes once wrote the history that coordinated societies on scrolls. Ethereum
is a digital scroll in the cloud that any app can write permanent entries to.
Lots of social problems became much easier to solve once we had written
records with a trusted source of truth, and now we can have trusted records
for literally any interaction between people that we're willing to make
public. As a bonus, there are no scribes we have to trust because the
economics of blockchains allow us to hire arbitrary scribes off the street who
lose money if they attempt to manipulate records. All individuals can interact
as equals without an overseer.

The social problem I'm using Ethereum to solve is our drastic underinvestment
in public goods—goods that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable, so they're
hard to get people to pay for. My hypothesis is that we can put contributions
on a digital scroll to unite people in purpose, and perhaps we can build a
society that checks the scroll to reward people who have contributed to public
goods.

Developers who know how to wield these digital scrolls can have as much impact
on their society as those who controlled the physical scrolls, but since we
can't force people to acknowledge our scrolls, we can only have an impact if
we build interactions people actually want to adopt voluntarily. Digital
scrolls tie our hands—overt attempts to control users will be routed around.

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kaonashi
The most prevalent seem to be pyramid schemes and gambling apps.

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kang
Each of these use cases can be done with bitcoin too. Pick any and I'll tell
you how if you couldn't figure out.

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aftbit
How do you reach "off-chain" with ethereum? For example, if I invest in gold
with Digix, how do I know that I can actually get my gold if Digix decides not
to give it to me?

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rofflez
Btc is cool because it requires nothing but the network. The moment you
require counterparty (as is the case in the examples), you might as well let
the counterparty control the 'logic' of the case as well.

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kang
Each of these use cases can be done with bitcoin. Pick any and I'll tell you
how to do it if you couldn't figure it out.

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PhrosTT
Wow this is REALLY helpful thank you. I can just link to this now when people
ask me what the point of Ethereum is.

